BlogNomic on BoardGameArena

BlogNomic players take part in occasional boardgame tournaments on BoardGameArena.

On Discord, in the #online-board-games channel, you can react to the message at this link to opt-in to the @bga-ping-group group that will be pinged when new tournaments become are available or are put up for a vote.

Games are played on the "turn based" setting, with players submitting their turns whenever they can, with the maximum 15 days of total "thinking time" allowed per player. In practice, these games often end up being played out in real time, when a player responds quickly to being notified that it's their turn and the other player is still around to respond to that. (It can be worth enabling browser notifications for BGA so that you get an immediate ping whenever it's your turn in a game, without having to keep the site open in a tab.)

Tournaments are generally two-player - we can do 3+ player ones, but should be wary about those with a lot of short turns, as they'll take a while when spread across timezones.

Regular tournaments

For a while we posted this group-curated list to the Discord so that people could emoji-vote on what to play:

🤠 3000 Scoundrels / 6️⃣ 6 Nimmt / 🗿 7 Wonders Architects / ⚔️ 7 Wonders Duel / 📜 Ancient Knowledge / 🍎 Applejack / 🟥 Azul / 🔙 Backgammon / 🐻 Bärenpark / 🐱 Boop / 🐰 Bunny Kingdom / 🧑‍🌾 Carcassonne / 🌐 Cartographers / 🏡 Castles of Burgundy / 🖼️ Caper: Europe / 🥣 Century: Spice Road / ☯️ Chakra / 🗺️ Colorado / 🔱 Conspiracy / 🕵️ District Noir / 🧛 Dracula vs Van Helsing / 🦕 Evolution / 🧚 Fairy Trails / 🛣️ Faraway / 🌳 Forest Shuffle / 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 Haggis / 🌸 Hanamikoji / 🏎️ Heat: Pedal to the Metal / *️⃣ Hex / 🐝 Hive / 💡 Innovation (no expansions) / 🔊 Innovation (Echoes expansion) / 🏺 Innovation (Artifacts expansion) / 🌇 Innovation (Cities expansion) / 🏰 Kingdom Builder / 👑 Kingdomino / 🪓 Knarr / Ⓜ️ Machiavelli / ⏳ Mandala / 🌒 Nova Luna / 🪡 Patchwork / 💰 Pax Renaissance / 🪐 Planet: Unknown /⚡ Quirky Quarks / 🧙 Res Arcana / 🏗️ Santorini / 🪙 Scopa / 🧂 Sea Salt & Paper / 🐕 Spots / 💎 Splendor / 💍 Splendor Duel / 🎲 Super Mega Lucky Box / 🍣 Sushi Go Party / 🚩 Tapestry / 🧌 Tash-Kalar / 🎷 Uptown / 🐦 Wingspan / 🔖 Wizards of the Grimoire

If at least four people vote for a particular game, we started a tournament for it.

This system was put on hold in September 2024 when we were struggling to get four votes for anything. We're currently trying a system of people just pitching games to play (maximum one per player per week) and any that get 3+ interested reactions get a tournament.

BlogNomic Random tournaments

From August 2023 to July 2024, BlogNomic ran ten tournaments of randomly selected two-player games from the BGA collection.

Ground rules for those tournaments were:

• Each tournament is a random game from this list (derived from https://boardgamearena.com/gamelist?specificTag=30), selecting from games that nobody has flagged as being a game they have already played.
• Players can only join a BN Random tournament if they have never played the game before.
• Players unfamiliar with a game are only allowed to read the game's rules: they cannot read up on strategy tips, or play any practice games.
• Tournaments will run in the Swiss format, with three matches.

BN Tourney tournaments

A series of tournaments where players agree to play a series of games chosen by others in the group, without knowing in advance what will be picked.

Quoting Clucky:

1. Everyone signs up ahead of time. Might limit it to 8 signups just to keep the numbers working right.
2. Randomize the list of 8 players. In order, each one adds a game to the tournament. (If people are concerned with getting stuck playing a game they hate we could do a system that allows vetoes but I don't wanna over complicate things). Game must be playable with 2 people.
3. Tournaments are swiss style, 3 games, played over the course of 2 weeks each. (Note that with 8 players swiss, in order to win you have to go 3-0 but you can still lose the first round and finish 2-1)
4. After all 8 games have been played, see who has won the most tournaments and most games overall to be the Grand Champion

Invalid games

Solved or easily cheatable games like chess, Hardback and Buyword are all currently banned by BGA from being run as tournaments, even privately.

Coup is unable to be played turn-based due to the amount of at-any-time challenges required. And it can't be played turn-based with just two players, where this wouldn't matter, because it's not possible to limit turn-based play to certain player counts.

Note also that games which are still in Beta can't be run as tournaments.