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Should we edit titles so they are questions?
I've been looking at some of the questions on the front page and in the archives and I'm noticing that a lot of the titles aren't questions. For example, on the front page right now:

Will using Nephalia Smuggler save a creature targeted by a destruction spell?
How can I elegantly increase the difficulty of Elder Sign?
If there are two Lighthouse Chronologist with three players, will one player be pereptually skipped?
How can I minimize Black Market set up and clean up time?

These are at varying levels of "not-a-question"ness. The first two are statements that could easily be turned into questions. The third just needs some words added to turn it into a question. The fourth is a statement masquerading as a question because of the mark at the end.
This is annoying to me, but that isn't a great reason to edit them. Is it worthwhile to edit titles to be questions?
The pros I see:

it adds consistency to the look of the site
if all questions were titles, it would help reinforce that this is a Q&A site
this would also help users have a better idea of what question they were about to look at, whereas sometimes statements can be a little deceiving

What are other user's thoughts?

I should have said to keep the editing to a maximum of 5 or so a day. Flooding the front page with old questions has a way of killing traffic to the site.

Got it. I'll keep it down.

@user1873 I don't think we should bump old question just to edit the title. But if we are going to do it, it's better to edit them all as fast as possible. It's less disruptive than bumping five questions each day.

This raises a philosophical problem. Is the title of a question itself a question (in which case it should certainly be edited into a normal English question form), or merely an identifier, in which case it should plainly be left alone? I incline to the latter.

I should have offered this reply sooner, but to offer an opposite view: no, we should not.
I think if a subject line leaves it unclear what the core question of the post is, then that subject should be edited for clarity's sake so that visitors to the site can see the core question, and I wouldn't object to gentle suggestions to users that they edit their title to be in the form of a question.  But I don't think every question can easily be asked as a question, and we're not playing Jeopardy: I don't think that 'phrase in the form of a question' is such an essential element of the question-asking process to be worth either changing out a user's post from under them (while it's true that users should be prepared to 'lose control' of their questions when they post them up here, that doesn't mean that it should be a matter of course) or of sweeping through the site's entire history revising everything.  This site isn't generating a ton of fresh content, and it's very easy for 'actually' (relatively) new questions to get lost in the swath of edited items; by my tally almost 2/3rds of the 'front page' of the site right now is auto-bumps, either from editing to the form of a question or from Community bumping up unanswered items.

You might be right. Maybe the answer isn't 5 per day, but 5 per front page

Absolutely. This is a Q&A site, so every OP should be in the form of a question.
I am, not a huge editor myself, but during the last site evaluation I fixed questions that were not clear. Feel free to edit any question so that it is more consistent, readable, or clear.
As clarified by Steve though, it might be best to limit the edits to 5 per front page.

I meant to respond to this on Friday, but it slipped through my day -- while I agree with this answer in principle it's important to note: the title should still reflect the specific question being asked. If there's no good way to "questionify" the title without losing meaning, don't alter the title. Remember: Google searches only look at the first 60-75 characters in the title, as well.

I'm thinking about this from a new user's perspective.
Let's say a new user finds this site through Google by searching for something specific and decides to check out the front page. Before my little editing spree (which was probably a result of too much coffee), they would have been presented with a mishmash of questions, statements, and somewhere in between. Assuming they don't immediately read the FAQ (since most people who stumble here probably don't), they may see this organization as indicative of a forum rather than a Q&A site.
The initial thought when seeing "Elegantly increasing the difficulty of Elder Sign" isn't going to be

this is a question about how to do that with some potential answers supported by facts

but probably more along the lines of

this is going to be where we can talk about how to do that.

Editing titles into questions would help make this more clear.
It probably isn't pertinent to go back and edit old titles into questions. However, if something shows up on the front page that isn't a question, my feeling is that it wouldn't be too much trouble to edit. With all threads being titled as questions, new users may have a better understanding of what they're looking at before getting to the point of reading the FAQ.
Also, in contrast to Steven, I think all posts on B&CG should be able to be boiled down to a single question. If they can't, there's a pretty good chance that the question is too broad or out of scope. Some examples:
Current: Does Epic Experiment let me pull creatures out of the graveyard that were exiled during its casting?
Change: Can spells cast from Epic Experiment target creatures put into the graveyard from Epic Experiment?
Current: Land ratio vs mana curve
Change: How does a deck's mana curve determine how much land to use?
Current: Dominion: When to use Platinum and Colony
Change: Should Platinum and Colony always be used in a game of Dominion?
Current: General advice for maximizing fun playing multiple games of Dominion
Change: How can we maximize our fun when playing multiple games of Dominion?


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What's with all of the close votes for non-rules questions?
I'm starting to notice a pattern of closes on questions that can't be answered with rules quotes. Some examples:

Board Games development online course: This was voted to close as off-topic because it was not about a specific game. In the help center, it clearly states that questions about board game development are on-topic. After @PatLudwig reopened the question, there were close votes as primarily opinion-based. However, this still falls within the purview of the site because it is a good subjective question.
Dungeon Petz strategy: This is generating close votes as primarily opinion-based. Once again, the help center specifies that strategy questions are on-topic, and this question also appears to be a good subjective question that can have objective answers (as noted by @PatLudwig). This does not fall to the level of "What's your favorite board game?", which would certainly be closed as primarily opinion-based.

I've been noticing this for longer than what's on the front page, but it looks like questions are being closed if they can't have a strictly objective answer based on a rulebook. If you look through some questions from when the site first started, there are quite a few that deal with strategy and game development/design.
Do we have a scope problem? In other words, has the site evolved to the point where the current users with close privileges do not want questions that don't have a clear-cut answer?

To quickly tie this into other conversations on meta, part of the reason we probably have low answer ratios is because good subjective questions are not being let through the process. It's easy to answer a rules question, and we generally only need one answer for that. But good subjective questions can frequently have multiple good answers. This is certainly true on Parenting and Workplace.
Also, it's fairly easy for anyone to find a rulebook and point out what the rules show. Part of B&CG.SE is having experts available to answer questions that you might not know or be able to find the answer to. This is where strategy questions come into play. It allows experience to be a guide for disseminating useful information to other users.

Thanks for writing this meta question!  I'd resolved to do the same but didn't have enough time last night.

I added a comment for why I voted to close the Dungeon Petz question.  I voted as Too Broad, not Opinion Based.

This is a great meta question -- no matter what should be done with those particular questions.

If you can find some additional examples, you might be able to avoid answers that focus on the broadness and subjectivity of those specific question, rather than the attitude toward non-objective questions in general.

Another useful direction to take this is attempting to save questions. If we (or some of us) think that a question is subjective and isn't clear enough that it wants answers with explanation and support, we should just fix the question.

Examples of recent questions closed as opinion-based or too broad, skipping over really obviously bad ones: http://boardgames.stackexchange.com/q/28982/409 http://boardgames.stackexchange.com/q/28865/409 http://boardgames.stackexchange.com/q/28755/409 http://boardgames.stackexchange.com/q/28528/409 (people mostly ask rules questions so there really aren't that many...)

@bwarner On the Dungeon Petz question you linked to some sources about making sure the scope of strategy question was limited enough that it wouldn't require explaining the whole game. Then a question came up about Dominion strategy as it relates to the mine. This question seems to have a very specific scope: what is the strategy if I only have the Mine as an Action Card. However, this is receiving close votes for primarily opinion-based. While I admit that this is an unlikely situation without...

some crazy house rules, do you view this as out of scope for the site?

@Socio I don't agree with those close votes.  I think they could be justified as downvotes for a not useful question, but close votes seem wrong to me.

@bwarner I guess that gets more at the heart of my question. If we have people closing non-rules questions from both sides (too broad or too narrow, frequently with just saying it's primarily opinion-based or off-topic), is there a scope problem that needs to be addressed for the site?

The author of the Dungeon Petz question asked for key strategy points. Does that inspire answers that explain why and how? Does it inspire long answers? Does the question insist that opinions be backed up with facts and expertise? I don't think so. I would vote to close it if I had the chance.
The author of the "Give me links to a bunch of material." question... well... I just voted to close it again using a more appropriate reason (Too Broad). It may not look bad now, but that question is going to require maintenance over the years. Answers containing only links are prone to link rot, and I don't see how any answer to that question could be anything other than a collection of links. You couldn't possibly fit an entire course into one answer, or summarize it without leaving out too much important information.
Here is an awesome question that I noticed yesterday that can't be strictly answered by throwing the rulebook at it. This kind of question can be answered in multiple ways: by an expert who has been playing the game for a long time and could tell you what might happen if the premise in the question were realized, or by researching old articles from around 1997.

@Jefromi I went ahead and removed the last paragraph.

Cool. I do think being careful as you were to use "too broad" instead of "primarily opinion-based" is pretty important. If the fundamental problem is that someone's asking for a giant list of resources, saying it's opinion-based comes off as a bit aggressive - like we're saying it's not okay to ask for resources in any way.

@Jefromi: It's worth noting that many SE sites have specific canned close reasons for "recommendation questions" or "requests for external resources" like this one. We do have such a canned close reason for game recommendations, but not for other types of recommendation requests, so – assuming that we believe the question should be closed – we're left with either "too broad" or a custom write-in reason (e.g. something like "Questions asking for links to external resources often attract spammy and easily outdated answers.").

I do agree that the attitude toward subjective questions can be unnecessarily harsh here. It's hard to come up with examples, though, because people mostly don't ask them. (Of course, sometimes that harsh attitude is justified - but not always!)
I went through past closed questions, excluding duplicates. I found plenty that I agreed with closing. We're not really doing that badly; most of the closed questions really are pretty bad. I think the examples in the question also might not be all that great (borderline, at least), and I'd rather not debate about them for now.
But I also found some that I think are worth considering:

Are solved games worth playing? -- seems pretty solidly "good subjective" to me. Sure, we could tweak the title, but it's asking what people actually get out of playing these games, something pretty concrete. It's fine that there are probably several reasons; the question doesn't ask for a judgment about which reasons are good or bad, just what the reasons might be.
Optimal Dominion strategy with only the Mine action card -- this quickly collected three primarily opinion-based votes, and yet people managed to provide serious evidence-based answers.
Are there any house rules for combining Munchkin and Fluxx? -- this is more borderline, and I don't know how good a question is, but it does seem answerable. If someone can come up with a decent method of combining the games, that's a real answer.
In go, is it possible to guess the opponent's strength? -- I don't really know go, but I'm not sure this is all that broad. The OP doesn't seem to be expecting precision, just ways to get a rough impression. Answers could discuss what kinds of decisions or mistakes might indicate something about skill, or even just explain why it's not possible to discern much. They certainly don't have to delve into excessive detail, categorizing thousands of possible moves and what you'd deduce.
https://boardgames.stackexchange.com/q/28959/409 -- as asked, I agree that this doesn't seem great. But at the same time, I feel we should be able to edit questions like that into a form which allows someone to get a rough answer - roughly how difficult is this game to learn, given some benchmarks. (For example, surely we could manage to agree that Uno is really fast to learn, Dominion takes more time but isn't insane, and Race for the Galaxy takes a while to understand all the fiddly bits.) Not one of my favorite questions, but worth considering.

I think one of the common patterns here is that since we're used to questions having One True Answer, we tend to read them as the OP asking for that. So if a question leaves some room for possibilities, then that must mean that the OP is asking for judgment about what's best among those possibilities. But it doesn't have to be that way; just look at https://rpg.stackexchange.com/ for some great gaming-related examples of slightly more open-ended questions.
And of course, it's quite possible that we'd get more good subjective questions if the site weren't so clearly focused on rules, and were a little less eager to close questions when there's subjectivity involved.

The last paragraph is on point!

source: Stack Exchange

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

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Are questions about Playmation on-topic?
Last year, Disney released the Marvel Playmation system, described below.

Playmation is the next step in the evolution of play, where digital gets physical and imagination becomes real. The groundbreaking system of toys and wearables uses smart technology..

As far as I can tell, this objectively meets the first four criteria of on-topic for the site, with the last one being questionable.

Be playable on or around a table
Have objective rules of play and win conditions
Offer dynamic challenges, either through other players, randomization, or both
Be playable by hand, by human players implementing all of the rules

However, this seems to be clearly off-topic on Arqad because is it not a videogame. It doesn't even work well with the first line of on-topic for Arqade: "Arqade is for passionate videogamers from all platforms, including consoles, computers, handhelds, and mobile devices."
I've gone through everything on Meta that seems relevant, including the main on-topic post. There seem to be conflicting opinions on whether games with AI opponents fit on B&CG.SE. This game is played against a (randomized) AI and players choose what scenario they want to play, and it's cooperatively if they want. Are questions about Playmation on-topic here or do they belong elsewhere (or nowhere) on the Stack Exchange network?

After writing the question, it occurs to me that this might be analogous to the question "Are store-purchased Laser Tag sets on-topic here?" The noticeable difference on Laser Tag is that you're playing with or against other human opponents, while Playmation only allows cooperative play against AI.

By "games with AI opponents", do you mean "games whose only opponent is AI"? Chess, Checkers, and Go have AI opponents, and all three are definitely on topic here.

From the video on that site, this appears to be a toy with some interactivity and software. It's unclear that it's a "game" as we would define it, with rules that are possible to implement by humans sitting around a table playing with inanimate objects.

This is not a board or card game as we would define it, and is not on topic here. The video on the site shows that this Playmation system is a set of toys with some software and communications capabilities for interacting with each other, and possibly some storage systems for recording state. So, if we consider the four on-topic criteria:

It is playable on or around a table, but only for a very broad interpretation of the phrase. The game encourages players to move around within the space where they are playing, so it may be more accurate to say that it can be played near a table.
On the linked site, I can find no description of the rules of the game. The "rules" that it demonstrates appear to be limited to "do what the toy/app tells you to do" and "point one toy at another and press the button".
The game does appear to present some form of dynamic challenge.
By my reading, the intention of the "playable by hand criteria" is that the game must be at least theoretically possible to play without the interactive functionality of any game-specific piece. For example, some versions of Monopoly have credit cards and a simple computer for tracking players' money, but the game could also be played with numbers written on pieces of paper. This game appears to require the toys and their software functionality to be playable.

By my interpretation, this fails 3 of our 4 criteria for being a board game, so it is absolutely not on topic.
For the sake of completeness, I would come to exactly the same conclusion about a Laser Tag game, for the same reasons.

For point 1, I've always interpreted this more loosely in order to be more inclusive of edge cases. For point 2, there must be objective rules since the game is programmed. There are board games where the rules aren't known at the start. I think your point 4 is probably the most salient; implementation without the technology makes perfect sense as to why it's off-topic. I was fairly certain this was off-topic, but I wanted to see what others thought.

The interesting part for me is where (or if) this actually fits anywhere on the SE network. It has a set of rules where there is the possibility for objective questions (e.g.: "Is it easier to defeat villain X with move Y or Z?"). However, this doesn't seem to fit into the scope of any current sites.

In that game you linked, the rules are clearly listed on the page; they are simply not a complete description of how everything in the game works. And even if you don't count that, there is a major difference between "the rules are not known in their entirety to any player at the beginning of the game" and "the rules cannot be known in their entirety without reverse engineering closed-source software in an embedded device and server software that an app connects to."

Regarding point 1, this is far past an edge case. Nobody would look at a group of kids running around a house pointing light-up toys at things and say "that's a nice board game those kids are playing".

Here's a quote from a Forbes.com article on Playmation:

[...] what results is a game-like experience that requires players to run jump, shoot, hide, stand still and even leave the room at some points.

You don't typically run, jump, shoot, and hide around a table, so Playmation doesn't meet the site's definition of a board game.

all_licenses: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/


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Should game-adjacent questions be on-topic?
The following question popped up and I moved quickly to close as being off-topic.
In the Pokemon Card Game what is a group of Pokemon called?
However, as @diego points out, under the current site scope this question could seen as on-topic because there is a Pokémon card game that could benefit from an answer.
If this question were considered on-topic, it seems like it would open up similar questions, like:

What are a group of uruk hai called? (Lord of the Rings card game)
Do wormholes have enough gravity to pull in starships? (Gravwell: Escape from the 9th Dimension)
How many gears does an Indy car have? (Formula D)

Should questions like these be migrated or kept on the site?

The fact that a board game exists about a topic doesn't mean that a question about that topic is the same as a question about the game. When I think of Pokemon; I think of a series of video games that also spawned an anime (which then itself spawned more video games). And then I remember that, yes, there's also a card game about Pokemon.
I think that it's fine to have questions that aren't specifically related to game mechanics, as long as a "board or card game" is where the topic at hand comes from. We see this a lot in questions about Magic lore and theme. Magic: The Gathering, is a card game; the fact that it spawned a video game doesn't change this.
Pokemon, however, was first a pair of video games, then a TV Series, THEN they made a card game about it. A question about pokemon theme or lore that doesn't specifically relate to the card game sounds to me like it is asking about a video game or a TV series.
In other words, I agree with the concerns in the OP. If this type of question is ok based only on "a pokemon card game exists", then almost any question imaginable could be on-topic, because there's likely a board or card game about most TV shows or video games.

The person asking may not know the TV show(s) and/or video game(s) exist.. or they may not know the order in which they came to be. It's possible the board/card game is the only thing they know and play... if they play the Pokemon card game, for example, and are wondering how to properly converse with their friends about the game, shouldn't we answer it? Personally, I voted to migrate the question to the English stack exchange, but upon further thought.. I'm not so sure any more.

@Othya While that is a fair point; I think the same point can be applied to any of the other examples. What if a person didn't know that LOTR were books and movies before being a card game, or that Firefly was a TV show before being a board game, etc.

@Gendolkari Good point.

@Othya If some came here asking about say the LotR story we should be leaving a comment along the lines of "Since the LotR was originally a book questions about its story are off-topic here, you should try asking on SF&F". Not just closing it as off-topic with no explanation.


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How to tag unlisted games
I looked around but wasn't able to find anything. I have questions about rules for unlisted games.
What tags should I use for games that are not listed under the existing tags? I found this untagged tag, but according to the definition, it doesn't fit the requirement.
I also didn't find any tags referring to rules and regulations.
Could you point me in the correct direction?

By 'unlisted games', do you mean you want to ask a question about a game for which no tag currently exists?
If so, the short answer is: please do ask, and don't worry about it! Another site user will come and tag it for you, if you don't have the reputation to create the new tag yourself. If you are really concerned, you can flag for moderator attention and we'll do it. See this related discussion for more.
We prefer to avoid tags like 'rules' as these are highly generic metatags which could be applied to many questions, but aren't really searchable and don't add any real value. See e.g. this discussion.

Beat me by 56 seconds!

@shujaa - Great, now I can reap all that awesome meta rep! Oh wait... ;)

Thanks for you question, it makes me feel justified in my answer to this old meta question!
The accepted answer there, and probably the best solution as most new users of the site aren't a scrupulous as you, is to pick any old tag and either comment or mention at the end of the question that you need re-tagging.
RE: rules, we worked to eliminate it when, after much discussion, we decided it was a "meta-tag" that wasn't adding much. Most of the questions on the site are about rules, but no one can be an expert on "rules" in general, and no one has come up with a question that should exclusively get the "rules" tag, thus it has been purged.

+1. For what it's worth, I don't actually have a problem with creating a [tag:retag] tag. I just think it's hard to publicise and almost no one will use it (evidently this user was an exception, although how he would learn of its existence is still unclear to me).

@ire_and_curses I agree. Any solution I can think of will either be well-publicized and abused by lazy new users, or will be out-of-the-way and hard to find by even diligent new users like the OP here. I'm just happy to find evidence careful new users.

I've just come across this problem myself, and duly scoured through all the existing tags.  I ended up picking an arbitrary one and leaving a comment/apology in the question.  I would certainly have found it useful for there to have been something explicit like no-current-tag-fits-please-retag.  I feel that just retag is liable to be overlooked by anyone scanning the list, whereas a long one is big and clunky enough to be spotted, and quickly changed on a question.


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Re-tag for Warhammer 40K Questions
A new edition of Warhammer 40K came out over the weekend.  We should probably re-tag most of the old questions as 5th edition to distinguish them from newer 6th edition questions.
Thoughts?
Edit:
I'd like to add that edition changes in games like 40K are non-trivial.  Many questions would be greatly superseded by a new edition.  For example this question is valid in 5th edition, but not 6th.
While we don't currently have many 40K questions, questions that specifically apply to the older editions need to be marked as such to avoid confusion.
The RPG SE uses edition specific tagging, because of the great differences you find in between things like 2nd, 3rd and 4th edition D&D.  This is a similar situation.  Most miniature game edition changes follow similar patterns of large scale changes.

I'll refer you to the most relevant general meta question I was able to find:
How to use version-specific tags?
Jeff Atwood's answer there is unambiguous:

In general, you should strongly avoid creating version tags.
I would only use version tags when the question content is irrevocably
  tied to a specific version of something and can never be relevant to
  earlier versions or later versions.

Whatever you think of that particular edict, I will note that on StackOverflow, the Java tag has 265,172 questions. The highest versioned Java tag, Java-ee-6, "for questions relating specifically to Java Enterprise Edition 6", has 834. That's 0.3% of the total. A single tag would seem to be working fine over there.
Given that we currently have 21 warhammer-40k questions total, I think retagging would be an over-engineered solution, even if it were encouraged (which it's not). Assuming 6th edition is a reasonable default; the questioner is free to clarify in text if he is referring to something older.

I won't argue the point too much, but the edition changes in games like 40K are non-trivial.  Very similar to changes in D&D editions.  The rpg SE does break tags down into editions for games like that.

@CaulynDarr - I'm a long-time 40K player myself, and I'm well aware of how radically the rules change between editions. Interesting point about the versions on the RPG site. It may be that we are eventually forced to go down this route. Understand though that opening up versioned tags adds its own problems, and also adds significant extra complexity to everything. It certainly doesn't come free. I've been discussing this and other tagging issues with Shog9. I believe his intention is to write something up clarifying some of the tradeoffs.

Many 40k questions will still be appropriate to multiple editions; the ideal solution in general is surely for the answer to be edited to cover both cases.  In the many questions where this is impossible, my instinct is to retag as and when we see enough questions that edition-confusion becomes a problem, not before.  (RPG.SE uses the different version tags because D&D questions are very common and the different versions are extremely different, much more so than Wargammer 40k.)

I thought it might be worth mentioning that on stack overflow developers will frequently update their answers to reflect changes in functionality between versions of frameworks. So this might be a situation where edits could be suggested for questions just to add details specific to a new edition.


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Better Supporting Miniature Gaming
There's currently a proposal to start a miniature gaming only stack exchange.  A lot of the topics that could potentially be discussed there are on topic here, but there are some that wouldn't be. Rules, mechanics, and strategy would all fit in really well here.
This discussion makes it seam that hobby related questions may or may not be off topic for the site.
But, you can't really have a Q&A devoted to miniature gaming without allowing basic hobby related questions.  For instance:

How do I fix casting defects with green stuff?
What's the historically accurate color to paint my British Late War Sherman tanks?
Whats's a good material to use to base my models for a winter effect?

Obviously you would need to constrain it to the realm of miniature gaming. These kind of questions would probably be out of bounds, and would be better served by a more art and hobby focused SE site

How can I get more use out my brushes?
How do you sculpt a complete model with green stuff?
What's better acrylic or oil based paints?

This site also doesn't have tags for many of the popular miniature games like Flames of War, Infinity, or Dystopian Wars.
I'm afraid that we won't be able to get an independent miniature gaming site going any time soon. While in the mean time those people waiting for a site, could be over here asking and answering questions.  Miniature gaming has a very large online presence, and drawing in those number would help get this site out of beta and well established.
Would it be a good idea to allow the full range of mini-gaming topics on this site and abandon the independent proposal?

I think it's totally reasonable to include questions about prepping minis on this site. We've had a few questions about the collecting of CCGs (Why is this worth so much? How do I identify which edition of a thing this is? &c.), for instance, and there's generally been no problem with those.

Regarding missing tags: tags for miniature games like Flames of War are only missing because no one's asked any questions about them! It's not reasonable or correct to conclude that the absence of a tag means it is not a welcome topic.

@ire_and_curese True, but it requires 150 rep to create a tag.  It's hard for a group of Flames or War players to come into boardgames as new users and start asking questions without a tag.

@CaulynDarr Given the way the tag system works, tags without at least 2 questions on them end up getting auto-deleted anyway, so creating them "just in case" wouldn't really work. [Gaming.SE] has a meta post about that particular topic. Pretty much it's a one-time problem that the community can quickly solve after the first question is asked by creating the tag for the new post.

@CaulynDarr - somehow we've solved that problem for every game asked so far, one more won't hurt.  There is no requirement that every question be tagged with a game.

@CaulynDarr: Just comment on the post or flag it saying that a certain tag should be added and someone will add the tag right away :)

All questions about miniature games are welcome here.
From our FAQ

Minature wargames (including the preparation of miniatures/terrain/etc)

are all on topic.

It may be beneficial to mark off how far down the rabbit hole you can go.  There are advanced hobby concepts that can be used for miniature prep, but the link to the hobby may be tenuous enough to call them off topic.

I'm with CaulynDarr here. Seems to be Miniature crafting questions would get kinda borderline.

@CaulynDarr - haven't seen the bottom yet.  Trying to set a line on meta that hasn't been crossed on the main site yet is futile IMHO.

@Circeus - Are you saying this as an avid user of B&CG who doesn't want to see questions that don't appeal to you or as a person interested in starting a separate miniatures site?

@Pat Ludwig Mostly the former, plus exaggeratedly hobbyish questions (e.g. those of Caulyn's second list of exemples) would probably not find much answers.

@Circeus - there are always going to be questions/games that may not appeal to you personally.  I'm willing to wager that it wouldn't take many hardcore mini's players to have quite a discussion on brushes and painting techniques.  So far my questions on [tag:empires-in-arms] have gone unanswered, but I have hope!  I prefer not to give up on subjects that people haven't answered yet.  Those are just more questions waiting for the right person to come along

Could this be the same problem, as asking for a separate site for each language in SO? they are all related, questions that comes to one can goes to another (hey, if you teach one how to build a figure with green stuff, why no use it for replace my own game figures on a common board game?), so besides Pat answer, I think it's related

How about non-gaming related miniature questions? There are plenty of miniatures that are only built, painted, and collecting. One may say that by trying to keep miniature building here, we preclude the development of a community that better serves hobbyists in general, including miniature gamers.

all_licenses: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/


text:
Are miniature game army tactics question on topic
This is in response to this question.

I just picked up a 40K Necron codex today and I am rather astonished. They appear quite overpowered to me. Then again, I play Orks and Imperial Guard, so maybe that's why they appear so.
My question is for the experienced Necron players: what are the disadvantages in playing Necrons? There's the low initiative (offset by being reasonably tough and numerous), most of the armor values are relatively low (offset by vehicle abilities) and the weapon ranges seem to cluster around 24" (not so bad). So what do you have to watch out for or compensate for when playing your Necrons?

The user is soliciting fairly general discussion about an army in a miniature game.  To me these seem to be out of scope for a the Q/A format.
From the FAQ:

You should only ask practical, answerable questions based on actual problems that you face. Chatty, open-ended questions diminish the usefulness of our site and push other questions off the front page.
Your questions should be reasonably scoped. If you can imagine an entire book that answers your question, you’re asking too much.

The 40K blog community and forums have hundreds of pages of posts and discussion on how to play a Necron army.  And consensus on these types of things is hard to find within the 40K community.  Maybe my problem as an active 40K blogger is that I really can imagine it taking a book to answer this question.
On other SE sites I've been on, this question would probably be closed.  Then again a site like roleplaying would probably allow something similar.
So, how broad is too broad when asking about army strategy in a miniature game?

I think a strong parallel could be made with how Gaming.SE handles questions on Starcraft (and its ilk).  For example, http://gaming.stackexchange.com/questions/359 and http://gaming.stackexchange.com/questions/4016 seem to be scoped similarly to the referenced question.

I agree that broad tactical discussion is out of scope.  However, my impression is that this question is actually very narrow.  It's possible to give clear, short, objective answers to this, as the question asks only for the general drawbacks of all Necron armies - which should be a short and simple list.
In particular, the question does not ask what tactics to use to compensate for (or take advantage of) those Necron disadvantages - I agree that question would be unanswerably broad, worthy of a book to itself.  The questioner presumably intends to solve that problem himself, and just wants to know what to address.
(I tried substituting my own favoured 'Eldar' for Necrons in the question, and realised I could write a short, clear, two paragraph answer, without actually having to discuss Eldar tactics.)

Fair enough.  I think I read too much into this question when I first saw it.


text:
How can we be inviting to new users who leave other questions as answers or comments?
I did find this other question that is similar, but this is a followup to that. I have noticed many times where a new user posts an answer that should be a comment or a new question. In these cases, myself or someone else will respond with something like

Welcome to the site! Please use the "Ask Question" button to ask this as a new question. Answers are only used for responses to the question being asked.

However, I believe that I have never seen the user then post something as a new question; rather he's just never heard from again. Is there a way that we can better encourage a new user to stay and ask his question in the correct way?
A couple possibilities:

Allow brand new users to leave comments. Many of the invalid answers are things that would work as comments to an answer, rather than a new question, but new users can't leave comments.
Allow moderators to automatically convert answers to questions. I know they can convert answers to comments, but as far as I know they can't convert them to questions. I believe a new user would be more likely to stay if he actually had a question listed. Though I don't know if this is possible within the framework.

Any other ideas? Is there better wording we can use when responding to these answers?

Could someone clean up the title of this question?  I was about to, then I realized I couldn't quite understand what it was trying to say.

@Joe, woah, I'm not sure how I missed that. Must have changed thoughts part of the way though. Thanks, fixed.

Yes, please give (♦)moderators an easy way to turn answers into questions!
This fixes the actual problem: the new user has a question, but, treating the site like a forum, they try to get more eyeballs by sticking their question into an existing "thread" rather than starting their own.
It's easy, it's clean. The only possible downside is that a user doesn't learn the right way to do it right away, but I think seeing your question painlessly converted into a question and then answered effectively might actually teach you more about the site than just having someone tell you to go do that yourself while they delete your thing.
Yes, this is hand-holding, but Stack Exchange is already committed to teaching newbies instead of punishing them, and this moderate bit of hand-holding could make the site much more hospitable to people who have an honest interest but don't quite understand the format the first time they post.

New users don't need comment access (outside their own posts)
Letting new users write comments doesn't address the problem of new users putting questions in the wrong place. The point of comments is to improve existing content, not to ask or answer additional questions. So you don't want new users leaving questions as comments just like you don't want them leaving questions as answers.

I've tried a bit to get the answer -> question thing (I'm a mod on cooking) but the response I've gotten is mostly "eh, people want to be able to do every single kind of conversion, and it's too much work to do all of them, convince us it's a real problem." I've tried to collect evidence when I have time, but it's a lot of work - see http://meta.cooking.stackexchange.com/q/1799/1672 for what I've managed on cooking. Y'all might want to try to do something similar here to build some more evidence!

This does add a larger-than-average load onto the moderators: writing a question (with tags, title, and body assembled properly) is significantly more work than the usual mod requirements of writing comments or handling flags. I'm all for it, but we'd definitely need to keep the extra work in mind when deciding how many mods we need.

@PaulMarshall Well, if the body's not already well-formed, then there's very little left to salvage.


text:
What's the best way to handle an old question where the correct answer has changed?
A long time ago I asked this question. With a recent Magic rules update, the correct answer has changed. Sometimes when this happens, the person who answered in the first place will update their answer to include the new information. In this case, someone else made a new answer that's the correct one. Should I change which answer is accepted to the new one?

According to a few Meta.SE questions it is up to you (obviously), but it is considered acceptable to change the accepted answer if another one is more correct, or helps you more.
Some other things they mention doing include keeping the currently accepted answer and adding a bounty for the now correct answer, or adding a comment to the answer asking if they want to update their answer so that it is correct.


text:
How should "Chupacabra: Survive the Night" be tagged?
We just got this question about the game Chupacabra: Survive the Night. The obvious tag for the game (chupacabra-survive-the-night) is just a bit too long (28 characters). Should we just remove the "the" (chupacabra-survive-night), or shorten the whole subtitle (chupacabra-stn), or remove the subtitle entirely (chupacabra) or something else? Do we even have a standard for this?

On SciFi they use [tag:star-trek-tos] etc to solve this problem. It seems to work well.

Arqade uses [tag:sonic-black-knight] (which removes connecting words), [tag:ac-revelations] (which abbreviates the main title and not the subtitle), [tag:bad-company-2] (which removes the main title entirely), [tag:plants-vs-zombies-2] (which removes the subtitle), and [tag:swtor] (which abbreviates the entire name), so there isn't really any consistency. That's not to say that your solution is bad, but whether it's better than just removing the subtitle entirely probably depends on whether there are other games with the same title.

Until and unless we discover a specific need to distinguish Chupacabra: Survive the Night from some other game named "Chupacabra", I'd say we should just drop the subtitle and call it chupacabra.  That's the simplest and most obvious solution, and seems to work fine here.
If we do find ourselves needing to disambiguate the tag (as has happened with the star-trek tag on scifi.SE, for example), something like chupacabra-stn could work.  But if no such need exists, there's little point in making the tag longer than it needs to be.

The question is now tagged with "Chupacabra".


text:
Do we have any chance of graduating any time soon?
This site has existed for over 5 years. Now that Design-Independent Graduation is implemented, we don't need to wait on a design to have a partial graduation. Our Area51 stats are not perfect, but they're better in almost every category than what Home Improvement, Christianity, Role-playing Games, and Photography had when they graduated, even in our worst score. Can we expect to get at least partial graduation any time soon? If not, what do we still have to do to make that possible?

Do you have a source for "they're almost universally better than what Home Improvement, Christianity, Role-playing Games, and Photography had when they graduated, even in our worst score", or is that just from memory?

The source is the same as for our stats. So the Home Improvement stats are on this page. Note that for any graduated site, Area51 reports the "At the end of beta" values for those statistics.

Thanks, that's exactly what I was looking for! Now, according to the link you provided, Home Improvement launched (graduated) four years ago. I'm willing to bet that the bar for graduation has risen in the last four years. This post from last year seems to indicate that something changed, but I'm not really sure what exactly because I can't find any earlier standards.

I think the the general standards have been basically unchanged over time, and they were just always applied inconsistently. For example, two years ago we got this answer indicating that our question rate at 3.8 questions per day was the primary concern. At around the same time (within a year), Christianity launched with 3.9 questions per day.

A big problem area for the site is self moderation where we seem to have items sit in the queue longer then any other site (last time I saw the stats) and if we move to a graduated status then we lose a lot of people who can help on the self moderation side of things.

That's surprising to me. Most of the time when I look at the review queue, it's empty or it has only a couple of items. And according to the Area51 stats, we currently have 56 users with at least 3k rep, out of a recommended 5. That should be more than enough to handle a few queue items a day.

I frequently see the indicator saying that there are multiple items that need to be reviewed even when it shows empty for me.

Indeed, you do have to look at the number in the top bar (which can be nonzero if there are things that you've reviewed but still need other reviews), but I haven't seen things staying here unusually long either.

I can't find the question on meta stack exchange where I saw the information so I have asked a new question asking about it.

As we announced last year:

When a site starts to consistently receive 10 questions/day, we’ll consider it for graduation.

As the numbers you point to show, you're still a bit off the mark there. We also don't see any compelling reason to consider Board & Card Games an exception to that.
I'd recommend you read through the post linked to above, since — as its title suggests — it provides "a clearer outlook on the health of SE sites" ;)

Is there any chance that we might be able to at least get the "Beta" label removed? That would be progress if nothing else.

So to clarify, the point here is that in some cases sites previously launched with <10 questions/day, but it's no longer going to happen - i.e. it's in some cases harder to graduate now?

Or is the idea that you might sometimes make exceptions to the 10/day rule, and you did that in the past as well, for these sites? (It does look like it was generally justified: Home Improvement, Photography, and RPG are all above 10/day now.)

I'm surprised that questions per day is so important to graduating this site. The majority of questions we see here are rules questions, and there are a finite number of these questions per game. 4.8 questions about the rules across popular board games doesn't seem that low. And the fact that we're under 2.5 answers per questions fits this, too; if there is a rules clarification, we don't need 2.5 responses to answer it. But we clearly have an active community, given how many high rep users we have. It seems like not all stats should be treated equally for all sites.

I understand where this answer is coming from. I tried to go for the Fanatic badge last year, and found the amount of new content I got each day to be a bit disappointing. I think it would be worthwhile to investigate a way to broaden our scope a bit.

I was able to get a query to show the stats of the review queue from meta stack exchange. From what it looks like it seems that some of the review queues can take a day or more to be dealt with and that will only get slower if the privileges to deal with them increase.
select rtt.name
     , sum( case
            when rt.reviewtaskstateid = 1 then 1
            else 0
            end ) as [Active]
     , sum( case
            when rt.reviewtaskstateid = 2 then 1
            else 0
            end ) as [Completed]
     , sum( case
            when rt.reviewtaskstateid = 3 then 1
            else 0
            end ) as [Invalidated]
     , min(datediff(hh, creationdate, deletiondate)) as [Minhours]
     , Max(datediff(hh, creationdate, deletiondate)) as [Maxhours]
     , avg(datediff(hh, creationdate, deletiondate)) as [Avghours]
from reviewtasks rt
inner join reviewtasktypes rtt on rtt.id = rt.reviewtasktypeid
group by rtt.name

I hope you realize that every site potentially faces this issue when looking to graduate, and that we have an order of magnitude more users with the right privileges than recommended.

@murgatroid99 I understand that but my point was that clearing items from the review queue is already slow on this site compared to other sites and reducing the number of people who can do it will only slow it down further.

And my point is that the queue never has more than a few items anyway. Reducing the number of eligible reviewers to fifty-six is unlikely to have a significant effect on our ability to process six items in a timely manner.

@murgatroid99 Maybe, Maybe not, but that information is something that needs to be considered in the graduation process since it will have an impact on quality of the site.

We have no idea how graduation will affect the review queues. Maybe reducing the reviewer pool to only ten times the average number of queue items will increase the time it takes for queue items to resolve. Maybe having more active mods will reduce the time. And this probably should have been mentioned earlier, but if you read the post I linked to in the question, you'll see that the first phase of graduation actually doesn't involve increasing privilege requirements, so this entire discussion is actually irrelevant to the question I was asking.

@murgatroid99 We still need to think about what changes will happen so that when the requirements are raised there are still enough users able to keep the site properly moderated. One key fact we don't know currently is how active the 56 users you mention are currently in the review queues and how active they will be after graduation. I am not saying we shouldn't graduate because of the review queue numbers but we should take them into account.

It's likely that the 56 users with at least 3000 rep are among the most active out of all the users with at least 350 rep, because they've been on the site, earning rep.

I am slow to review items because the little number that shows how many items need review lies. I've developed a tolerance for that indicator.


text:
Why was my answer deleted?
I posted this answer (2K only) yesterday, along with this answer. It's not a great answer; the community does not even seem to think it's a very good answer, but it is a valid answer to the question.
The moderator who deleted the question said

@murgatroid99 - SE is not a platform for polls. Please pick the answer you believe in and are willing to support. Let other folks who are willing to support them create other answers. Thank you!

However, the top voted answer on this meta.stackexchange question, along with this one, this one, this one, this one, and this one all agree that posting multiple answers to a single question is acceptable, as long as they are completely distinct answers (which mine are).
When I commented with that information, the moderator seemed to delete the answer out of exasperation, saying

After several requests, you keep questioning my moderation here instead of Board & Card Games Meta, so I'm just moving on. Peace.

I believe that this was an incorrect deletion and an improper use of moderator powers.
For reference, here is a screenshot of the current state of the answer and comments:

Update: My other answer on that question was just deleted. This is ridiculous.

Side note: I think it's unfortunate that we're basing so much on a 6-year old main meta question mostly in the context of SO only. I was about to post a new question here but quickly found this: http://meta.boardgames.stackexchange.com/q/647/409 - seems that without being aware of that precedent from then-meta.SO, people favored single answers when possible. (Of course in your case, the two seem to be mutually exclusive, so it's a pretty different situation.)

Can you post the text or a screen shot for the people who can't see it?

@Jefromi I did not realize how old that question was. However, the other questions I linked to back up my statement are mostly from 2013 and 2014.

@murgatroid99 Yeah, I know, the reason I'm still uneasy is that meta has this habit of closing questions as duplicates when the questions are the same, even if the ideal answers might've changed since then, so even if popular opinion has shifted, they tend to stick with past decisions. Note that on a couple of the newer ones, the top answers (before closure) were "It is something you should rarely do, but there are a few valid use cases." and "You should not use multiple answers when they are two parts to one solution." and I've seen disagreement elsewhere as well.

In any case, maybe it's worth us posting a new not-to-be-duped "When should I post multiple answers?" question here just to try to sort it out - sure, we'll present a lot of the same arguments but we could see what people actually think here. (My best guess would be same conclusion with more nuance, but I'm not too sure.)

@Jefromi I know that those answers aren't entirely consistent, but they all agree that posting completely different answers as different answer posts is acceptable.

Yup, agreed - I thought we might want to try to reduce the gray area a little bit, but perhaps better to wait for an example that's actually in the gray area!

I'll be honest: I don't really care that much about this particular answer. It has a net score of -1, and I already admitted that it's not very good. Rather, it's the principle: it feels like I followed all the rules that I could find, but my answer was deleted anyway because a moderator got fed up with me. And that seems inappropriate to me.

You know, last night I started to wonder how Pat decided which answer to delete. When I got back today, I see that he must also have been having the same thoughts, because now he has deleted the other one. Haha.

I think there are a few separate issues here.
Meta discussion should be on meta.
I pretty much agree with Pat here. I wish things hadn't escalated quite as much, though.
If I understand right, posting a question here instead of continuing in the comments there might have resulted in a completely different outcome. In this case, it seems there's a conflict between then-meta.SO, meta.B&CG, and the general once-answer-per-user precedent here, which played out as a conflict between Pat (and some others) and you (and some others).
In any case, as the disagreement in the comments showed, we have something to discuss, and I can understand a moderator being exasperated when we refuse to use the tools given us for having that discussion. So unfortunately, I think we pretty much backed Pat into a corner. By discussing only in comments, we were basically declining to have a real discussion, at which point I think he was within his rights to act based on his own views.
In any case, I do think this would've all been simpler if we'd come to meta sooner like Pat asked.
Should you have had two separate answers to this question?
tl;dr: meh, I don't really think so, but if you want to, it's acceptable, no rule against it.
A sentiment I've seen a few times: if the question needs multiple answers, it might not be a good question. There's certainly some truth to that here: the question aimed for a yes or no answer, but it's not really a yes or no question. Slow play is always going to have gray areas.
In that spirit, I think it would've been possible to avoid the whole issue by writing an "it depends, sometimes yes sometimes no" answer. You'd still be able to make the same points, and I think it would be a better, more complete answer than either one of them on its own. You'd convey something more fully thought out, rather than the split answers which have trouble coming to any real conclusion. You'd avoid people rebutting one answer with things you said in the other. Bottom line, you could make your point about the question not having a single clear answer directly! Seems win-win to me.
On the other hand, that's all stuff about how I think you could best write your answer, and that's not really up to me. There's a way in which you can write answers to the question such that they become mutually exclusive and thus should be separate answers. If you want to present it that way, I suppose it's okay.
Is it worth moderator enforcement (answer deletion)?
I do think it would have been better to write just a single answer. But is it a big enough deal for a moderator to step in? I waffled a lot about this. My first preference would of course be to come to consensus and avoid the whole issue (via a meta discussion on meta).
Failing that, I think I lean toward no. If you want to provide two answers even though it might be less helpful, that's your choice, and I can always downvote if I think they're unhelpful. As mentioned above, there's no actual rule against it.
That said, if this kind of thing became a pattern, I would lean more toward enforcement; if we have people systematically presenting their answers in less helpful ways, trying to artificially chop them up into distinct pieces, that's probably not great for the site.

I mostly agree with your point about meta discussion. However, in this particular case, he made a comment on the answer, but did not allow me to respond to that comment directly.

@murgatroid99 Isn't that fair at some point? If the discussion shouldn't be there, a mod can simply stop it from being there, and let it continue here (as it now has). The system doesn't really provide a way to keep things continuous and let you reply directly in a situation like that.

What I mean is that if he really wanted to take the discussion to meta, he should have deleted his comment too and moved the entire conversation to meta.

@murgatroid99 Ah... you might be right, it probably could've been done more cleanly. I don't remember all the now-deleted comments, though, I know it was a mess, these things are hard.

If the answer is spam, offensive, or not an answer, delete it.
Otherwise, if the answer is not causing problems, then there is no need for heavy handed moderation. The community should be allowed to vote on it. The bad ones get downvoted, and the good ones get upvoted. That's how Stack Exchange works.

Thanks for posting on meta.  It is the proper forum for questioning moderation.
Oddly, the question you chose to post contains a quick answer within the text of your question.  I'll give the better answer below.

@murgatroid99 - SE is not a platform for polls.

You admitted you set up a poll in a comment.  You also stated that you probably covered all possible answers.

The question reads as subjective to me. I thought it had the potential to be good subjective, which is why I did not downvote it or vote to close. Instead, I presented the two answers that I expect this question to get (approximately), with the expectation that votes would indicate consensus about which answer is correct.

Posting multiple answers can be valid, but should be rare. Attempting to cover the whole answer space by posting diametrically opposed answers does not help.  You cannot believe that both answers are true.  I didn't read everything in all threads you linked to but I didn't see any indication of support for answers that the poster does not believe in.
The difference between multiple answers and "a poll" is where we might differ.  To me, someone posting different answers is proposing two different answers to a problem.  They believe in each one, but do not know which is best so they offer both to the community.
I would like to see the answerer willing to own both answers, curating them as new information flows in.
This you did not do.  (From another comment)

I don't have an answer to that. I was trying to present the argument as I understood it. I don't know enough to improve this answer.

Intent is everything.  I believe your intent was to set up a poll and not provide different yet simultaneously correct answers.
I think your actual thoughts on the question were contained with a comment on the main question.  (Don't put your answers in comments!)

Since it's not explicitly mentioned in the tournament rules, it most likely varies from one judge to another. The situations you mention support that hypothesis: some judges say that the would rule it as slow play, while others clearly don't. I'm not really sure what you're expecting here besides one answer with "yes, it is slow play" and explanation, and another with "no, it is not slow play" and explanation. And you already seem to have provided both of those explanations.

Now that I've received a chance to put my thoughts down on this it seems that I did make a mistake.  You haven't stated clearly what the answer you most believe in is.  You've given three answers (including the comment).  I only deleted two and could lead to confusion or possibly signal which answer I prefer.  I've rectified that.  I encourage you to re-answer that question if you are able to clarify your own thoughts about what the correct answer should be.
Why are polls bad?
I'm sure most are aware of this, but for completeness I wanted to answer this briefly.
SE works because it connects people with questions to people with answers.  People are incented to answer in part because of reputation.  At the time I deleted the second answer there were a total of 5 upvotes and 6 downvotes to the two questions.  Prior to the deletion that resulted in +38 reputation.  This leads to a higher rep and the user being slightly more trusted.
Repeat this a few dozen times and you begin to see the issue.  How many questions do we get that can be boiled down to "Yes" or "No" ?  How much reputation could be gained just by answering quickly and first regardless of the correctness of the answer?
The race to be first is already strong enough.  The rewards are evident. But lets encourage each person to lead with their best answer and be rewarded thusly. Attempting to monopolize the whole answer space should not be rewarded.
tl;dr
I believed what I did was in the best interests of the site and/or community.

Incidentally, an answerer believing in their answer is...a rather specious argument.  Belief is immaterial; what matters is the content.  If these had been posted by two different users, would you have deleted them?  Unless answers have been posted in bad faith (which does not seem to have happened here), then this is what voting is for.  Not deletion.

More to the point, though, diametrically opposed answers do not create a poll.  The question creates the poll, and if you think the answers are doing so, then you need to judge the question's premise, not the answers.  As there are no close votes on the question, then it seems the community agrees with it being good subjective.  Which means the answers you deleted are valid answers.

Nothing here justifies deleting my answer(s). As fbueckert pointed out, questions are polls; not answers. It's true that I did not intend to improve my answer, but that is not exactly unique to this situation: it is no worse than a drive-by user posting a single answer and never returning, and there is no policy saying that those should be deleted. The comment you pointed to was not intended to be an answer, but rather an explanation of why I disliked the question. And I don't understand how you can argue that I was "monoplizing the answer space" when there was a third answer on the question.

@fbueckert Not necessarily saying I agree with deletion (see my answer), but I think part of Pat's argument is that posting mutually exclusive answers means they are in bad faith - the author must expect one to fail? It's also possible to post two opposite answers to any question, one right and one wrong, whether or not the question invites polling; the difference here is that none of us are sure which is right (or maybe the right answer is somewhere in between).

@Jefromi I think that is an unfair characterization. I read the question as a good subjective question, and I posted both answers because I believed that they were both valid answers to the question. Basically, I expected that eventually, some approximation of each of those answers would be posted, so I decided to skip waiting for them and just post them myself. If anyone had posted either of those cases in the hour+ between when the question was asked and when I answered, I only would have posted one of them.

@murgatroid99 Acknowledged - was just trying to point out that Pat seemed to have that impression. (I see the question more as underspecified than subjective, but either way, reasonable to point out there's more than one valid answer, whether you do it as one answer or two.)


text:
How to correctly link to Gatherer?
When I create or click on a Magic card link to Gatherer, if the card name has a space, it doesn't resolve (on french context and what ever the browser). For example for Walking Ballista, it results to the following search:

DOES contain Walking+Ballista
Your search returned zero results.

The problem seems to come from the Gatherer site. Does anyone know how to contact them to fix this issue?

There's no problem for me to link to english pages but since it doesn't work with the search URL for non english browsers, could we instead link with multiverseid URL like Walking Ballista. It would not display the popup for the moment but an update could be developed.
Until this issue is solved, it would be greatly appreciated to allow links to other sites like MTG Search Engine and not replace them systematically.

The link you gave goes right to the card for me (OS X, safari).  What OS/Browser are you using?

I'm using Internet Explorer or Firefox. I think the problem is linked to the french localization.

The problem is related to language and there is a feature request to switch to a different engine for linking cards.
https://boardgames.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1652/switch-magic-autocard-over-to-a-different-search-engine-scryfall

Your issue is caused by your Gatherer being configured to a language other than English — you mentioned in comments it's configured to French.
Our links to Gatherer aren't super high tech: they just say "hey, Gatherer, look for a card by this name." Gatherer then looks for that name exclusively in the language you have configured for Gatherer. We're an English site using English names; Gatherer would be searching the French list of names for an English name and be unlikely to find anything. What you get is that message about "Walking+Ballista" having 0 results, which you'd also get for any other nonexistent card (e.g. Squirming Ballista which doesn't exist.)
This means Walking Ballista would work for someone with English configuration but not other configurations. Baliste ambulante would work for French, Ходячая Баллиста for Russian, 이동식 노포 for Korean, etc, but not other languages.
For some reason, Gatherer happily adapts language for one-name card names. Disallow happily converts to the equivalent for any other language. However the Gatherer search interface is tricky and arcane... I should ask their support how we should be using it, since we've historically had problems getting it linked to all kinds of cards.

I would suggest contacting Wizards of the Coast Customer Support.

Done, waiting for an answer

Instead of linking a search to the card name, which is locale dependant, one could link the card itself, for example Ulamog, the Ceaseless Hunger

One issue with this suggestion is that if Gatherer changes how their URLs work any direct link could break, however if you use the autocard syntax we would just have to update the parser for that to fix everything that uses it. (The biggest issue with this plan is SE hasn't appeared to have interest in fixing existing bugs we have found in the current implementation, but not working at all might get them todo something about it)

This also doesn't have the nice popup feature that the auto linking does.

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/


text:
Where to ask questions about puzzles?
Where can I ask questions about puzzles? The FAQ has no link :\
https://boardgames.stackexchange.com/faq#what-are-some-examples-of-boardgames-that-are-on-topic-here

We're not the right place to ask questions about:

Computer games, try gaming.stackexchange.com
Role Playing games, try rpg.stackexchange.com
Puzzles

After countless months of building and at least one re-proposal, the Puzzling Stack Exchange is now live and ready for questions:

Puzzling Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for those who study the creation and solving of puzzles.

That's because there isn't a StackExchange site for puzzles yet. If you're interested though, there is one in the commitment phase at Area 51. Go and add your name there, and the site is one step closer to launching!
http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/16410/puzzling


text:
Why was my "Not an Answer" flag declined?
Yesterday I flagged this answer as "Not an Answer". The full text is

Curious then what if you have Grand Abolisher on the battlefield and initiate the effects of Sanguine Bond and Exquisite Blood. Grand Abolisher effectively shuts down your opponents ability to respond.

This is clearly a followup question; it expresses curiosity about adding an additional constraint to the scenario in question, and it makes not attempt to answer the question. So, why was my flag declined?

Looks like a text book "not an answer" to me. I'll let Pat reply, but I'm guessing he was short on time and just made a mistake.

I have also flagged this post as "Not an Answer" and it was also declined.

I suppose this: http://meta.boardgames.stackexchange.com/a/1372/14416
answers the question.

@tsuma534 I hope not. Unlike the answers discussed in that question, the "Not an Answer" flag does actually apply here.

@murgatroid99 I won't agree with the "unlike" part. Q: How do I use deck randomizers? A: Don't use deck randomizers. Kinda looks like "doesn't attempt to answer" to me.

The point there was not to reopen that argument. All of the existing answers there explain why NAA does not apply in that case.

@ire_and_curses Note that Pat in that answer said that he routinely does not actually look at the question, so he may be more prone to making this kind of mistake whether or not he's short on time.


text:
Is this question about the same card a duplicate?
Should we consider this question (1) Does the Thorncaster Sliver's ability damage have to be assigned before or after blockers are declared? a duplicate of this one (2) Do Thorncaster Sliver's triggered abilities go on the stack?.
It's true that question (2) has the answer to question (1) if we read the answers, but it seems to me that the questions are different, and question (2) answering also question (1) is just incidental.

With five questions about it currently on the front page, Thorncaster Sliver is apparently the most confusing Magic card in history.

@sitnaltax Just wait til the Illusionary Mask reprint in M15!

These two questions aren't duplicates. Even going by the rule of thumb of "if two questions have the same answer, they're duplicates", they're not duplicates. It only appears that way at first glance because of the lengthy citation which explains both situations.
In reality, though, the answers are more like this:

Yes, you use the stack. Here's the lengthy process involved if it makes things clearer.
You resolve that ability before blockers. Here's the lengthy process involved from another answer.

The answers are more than the citation of that process. The answers to one are not appropriate for the other. The process itself, appearing in both answers, is not in itself a decent answer to the question - clearly both answerers felt that way, since they both added explanation and a direct response to the question at the beginning of their posts.
Just because the answer to one question can be found somewhere in the answer to a completely different question does not mean the questions are duplicates.

Looking at both questions (although I am hardly fluent in M:tG-ese) I would say that no, they are not duplicates.
The questions themselves don't necessarily need to be asking the exact same thing to be duplicates, but unless you can be reasonably sure that every answer to the original question (be they extant answers or future posts) would also answer the duplicate, closing is not the appropriate course of action.  Otherwise, the basic problem of link-only answers would apply: The user still needs to actually search for the answer amidst all the information that is not the answer to his question.
Note that closing as duplicate can only link to a question, not an answer.  Even if the linked question has an answer that fully and completely answers the question, anyone following the link would still need to read through and figure out which answers are (and are not) relevant and/or useful.  Voting — the Stack Exchange system designed explicitly for filtering such things — couldn't even be relied on as votes would be based on relevance to the original question, not the duplicate.
A better solution would be to post a new answer summarizing and linking directly to the relevant answer on the original question.

I agree it is not a duplicate (of that question), they ask different things. One asks if something uses the stack, and the other is about stack resolution during combat.
My original comment on the question caused the question's author to mark it as a duplicate himself which I assume caused the 'close vote frenzy'.

This is likely a duplicate or can be gleaned from the other questions that have been asked/answered recently relating to Thorncaster Sliver

I should have been more clear in my comment on the question. I did not mean that this question was a duplicate of another question about Thorncaster Sliver, but that there is probably a question that specifically addresses 'priority/stack resolution during combat' either generically or using a different card.


text:
Is this answer really spam?
In this question Destroying a Planewalker before its ability is used, this answer https://boardgames.stackexchange.com/a/14618/2474 was deleted as spam. The answer has been replaced with:

This answer was marked as spam or offensive and is therefore not shown - you can see the revision history for details.

I could understand to delete it because of very low quality (though I personally don't agree), but I don't get why it is spam.

Related: http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/204033/spam-masking-is-over-greedy-please-do-it-only-if-post-received-at-least-3-spam?lq=1

Also related, on behalf of mods: http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/221105/can-we-indicate-spam-masking-to-mods

I'm the mod that deleted that answer. I've never noticed this spam text behaviour before, because as Jefromi's test shows, mods don't see the replacement text.
I completely agree that this answer is not spam. In fact, I didn't act on the spam flag. The post triggered a deluge of flags - 4x 'not an answer', 2x 'very low quality', 1x 'spam', and 1x 'invalid flags'. From a moderator point of view, all of these are bundled together, and appear as a single "flagged post" that needs attention.
When a post has multiple flags, I go and look at the full context of the page to decide what to do. Although not spam, I agreed that this was so useless that it could be deleted. A side-effect of taking action by hitting 'delete' is that all the flags are automatically marked as 'helpful', and, presumably because of the presence of the spam flag, the spam-hiding text was introduced.
In other words:

This was not deleted because it was spam.
I wasn't aware that spam flags changed the view of deleted answers for high-rep users.
The auto-marking of flags, while normally a very handy automatic step, in this case did more than was intended.

Just a supportive note: I totally understand handling the flags this way, and I've done it too. It's way easier to just let all the flags be marked as helpful, and sometimes even if I do notice that there's a spam/offensive flag mixed in that's not quite right, I'll overlook it because I'm glad that they flagged it.

Actually, I don't know of a way to dismiss some flags on a post while marking others helpful, so unless you wanted to decline all of them you were kind of stuck.  (If my understanding is wrong please correct me.)

Speaking as a user here and a mod on another site, I agree - the spam flag was misused on that post, and I've seen it on other deleted posts as well.
The spam flag is meant for actual spam: people trying to advertise. (And the offensive flag is for actually offensive things - hate speech and so on.) That's why the deletion with those flags triggers that replacement text, to keep people from ever even seeing spam links or offensive content. The feature was added in October. It's not for hiding away silly/stupid/pointless/misguided non-answers; it doesn't trigger for the "not an answer" flag.
So that answer? Not an answer. Whoever flagged it as spam was misusing the flag, and the text should not have been replaced.
Unfortunately I think this is something only mods can address. If the answer is undeleted, the replacement text goes away, then it can be deleted again. They can also decline incorrect flags; if the spam flags aren't marked as helpful, this feature won't be triggered.
(If you happen to be a mod, you can find deleted answers by searching for "is:answer deleted:yes" - I think you might find a few more this has happened to. But as I just discovered, mods don't actually see the replacement text. You'll have to just trust that it happens to anything where there's a spam flag showing as helpful in the post history.)

I'm confused. Are you saying the text on this deleted answer has been replaced? I don't see any replacement text.

@ire_and_curses Oh, ick, I think it might show the full text to mods. That's really hard to test by yourself - you need a mod account and a high-rep account :( I've pasted what we see into the question.

@ire_and_curses I found a few questions on cooking that were flagged as spam and deleted, and I don't see the replacement text. Pretty sure this is something that's visible only to 10k users (2k on beta sites), but not mods.

@ire_and_curses It sounds like there's a much bigger problem with spam posts on bigger sites, so they're erring on the side of masking out posts unnecessarily. Unfortunately that places the burden on mods to decline spam flags (even if the post is going to be deleted for other reasons) to prevent the post from being masked out, and we can't even see that this is happening.

Thanks for this investigation. Maybe worth bringing this up on the main meta?

@ire_and_curses Posted there, linked in question comments above.


text:
"Clue" tag rearing its ugly head

Possible Duplicate:
Do we need a a Clue and a Cluedo tag

There's a question with the 'Clue' tag now. This has some history: we discussed this a long time ago and decided that once we would be able to, we would make 'Clue' and 'Cluedo' synonyms. At some point Brian C deleted the 'Clue' tag, but it seems to have arisen again. I tried proposing a synonym, but I don't have the requisite 5 rep in either tag. Could a mod please make the synonym?

Synonym created. Closing as a duplicate to avoid splitting the discussion.


text:
Should questions purely about online versions of a game be allowed?
Here's one example: Are there any English servers where I can play Mahjong online?

Good question. I have doubt about the opposite too. Should be allowed to ask about board games based or similar to an on-line or computer game?

@bigown: if you feel that's an important question, it might be better to ask it separately.

I will wait some answers about your question first.

In my opinion, if the online version of the boardgame is still really like the boardgame then it should be OK.
So the question:"Where can I play boardgame x online?" is valid IMHO. But questions about the scoring system used in the online version are off.
At least, that's what I think is best.

Agreed. For example, in the mahjong case, the mahjong solitaire that is a popular computer game is off-topic, as it's pretty much only played on a computer. The mahjong multi-player gambling game is on-topic, as it is a valid board game (card game? tile game?) and asking about venues for playing online doesn't fundamentally change that.

@BrianCampbell Please see the related discussion at meta.gaming.

Um, well, I think something like VASL would be on-topic for anything but a tech question (belongs-on-superuser) but anything you couldn't resolve manually is firmly off-topic.

Questions that can't be answered manually are probably belongs-on-gaming, actually.

Since I created both the question and the Mahjong proposal at Area 51, I'd like to add a few remarks.
The Gaming.SE site it about computer games, mahjong behaves more similar to card games than to the games there. Also, I am going to ask many other questions about Mahjong itself (having nothing to do with playing  online).
The proposal was closed because it is "a subset of Board and Card games". So either the question should be allowed on this site, or the proposal should be reopened. I personally believe that the proposal was closed rightfully, because this site can provide a home for Mahjong.

I definitely think that Mahjong questions are on-topic. It's the online aspect that's questionable. That's also what this meta-question is about.

I agree, Mahjong questions belong here.  But "Why does XYZ Mahjong client always ask me to log in when I connect?" probably does not.

It's a tricky one, as the expertise here is naturally online-savvy and slanted towards board games, but I'd say no, not when it is purely about the online version. It's better suited to gaming.stackexchange.com.
The clue is in the title of the site - 'Board and Card Games' ;)
I toyed with reposting my 'Is there an iPhone/smartphone version of Diplomacy?' question from gaming.stackexchange.com, but if we allowed those types of question we'd open the flood gates to all kinds of 'I like X, where is it online' questions and a lot of overlap with gaming.stackexchange.com.
To put it another way, of the two sites, where would you ask 'I like Half Life 2, what board games would i also like?' - probably not gaming.stackexchange.com.

especially now that gaming does not allow game-rec questions! :)

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5/


text:
Is the correct term for the addition to Settlers of Catan that adds 5-6 player support, expansion or extension?
I've always referred to the additions to Settlers of Catan that adds Settlers of Catan support as Extensions.  It's what's printed on the 4th edition box.  I've noticed though, Catan and Seafarers 5-6 player expansion that it was changed to call it an expansion.  I've corrected the text back in the post, but it's got me thinking.  What's the correct terminology for these additions?  Expansion or extension?
Also, are there any other games that add support for more players like Settlers of Catan, and how do they refer to these additions.

P.S. "4th edition box".  I don't have the rep to edit your post to fix this, though.

@Powerlord Fixed.

I've found this discussion on the net. Although it defines the terms differently than I would have it does seem to fit the observed usages better.

In a very general description, one might define these verbs as follows:

To extend = to increase or be increased in length or distance, in one dimension;
To expand = to increase or be increased in size, in two or more dimensions.

Unfortunately this definition is not very useful since we're dealing with a mostly metaphorical use.
Wikipedia however does not include any gaming related bullet point in under Extension, where under Expansion it does. Furthermore I've only ever heard the term "Expansion" used for additions to CCG's or Online Games.
I would thus conclude that the generally accepted term is Expansion...

I agree most games only call things expansions, but I'm curious if other people follow the exception to the norm Catan has their boxes labeled.

@ICodeForCoffee: Even Catan used to call them "5-6 Player Expansion."

@Powerlord So which form is correct for Catan now?

@ICodeForCoffee, my copies (old editions) all say expansion, my conclusion is bad translation, since you'd never use extension in an american description of a game, its always expansion.  I'm blown away that you edited it back.

@Lance Roberts.  I own the current American 4th addition of Catan.  It clearly says Extension on the box.  See for yourself:  http://boardgamegeek.com/image/268840/the-settlers-of-catan-5-6-player-extension

@ICodeForCoffee, I saw the box cover for the new one elsewhere, it's a shame they didn't get better translators for the new edition.

It's also called Extension on BoardGameGeek.  I was just going with what I thought was the standard on the edits.  You can change it back if you want.

all_licenses: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5/


text:
Multiple Questions, same author, similar topics
I have noticed tonight that there are a few (count 7) questions asked in the space of 3 hours about the game Mahjong. All by the same user.
https://boardgames.stackexchange.com/users/60/mafutrct
From the few that have answers, they seem to be very basic, simple Google Search type answers. I would class this as spam. Should these questions be closed, or are they relevant enough to be "on topic".
I assume the same action should be taken as the Poker Questions Texas Hold'Em Shotgun Questions, so I will flag and vote to close.

This is a bit different than the poker questions. It's not nearly at the same rate, nor are the questions nearly so formulaic. I think that we should warn mafutrct that asking a series of such similar questions, with such easily Googleable answers, in so short a period, could be seen as spam; point them at this thread. I don't think that this warrants immediate action, except for closing any questions that we would close if they were posted alone.
One of the reasons I hesitate is that many of the questions seem genuine; mafutrct is quoting some set of rules that he finds unclear, and asking for clarification on them. It may be that he is simply getting into mahjong at the moment, and looking for resources for help as he learns.

Agreed. Reducing to one or two a day, say, would make it nonobjectionable to me.

I think the same. Not good questions but if @mafutrct doesn't abuse, they still be open.

Agreed, these are better questions than the poker series, although still spammy.

We've gone to the opposite extreme of most SE sites, and seem to panic every time it looks like somebody is asking a lot of questions -- that's the whole point of the site. It doesn't matter how trivially easy the answers are to find elsewhere, that doesn't impact their viability on the site. The spam flag is intended for posts like "hey guys, go to this website to buy sweet handbags at 80% off!"; multiple related questions simultaneously are definitely not spam. The poker questions were an edge case because they were literally copy/pasted with a couple words changed, but these aren't nearly that bad, they're real questions

I admit I definitely jumped the gun on flagging some of these posts, and you make a good point -- we should not be deterring people from asking questions.  I apologize for being too hasty.

As the person in question, I'd like to confirm that I am getting into Mahjong currently. I do not completely understand the rules yet, nor am I familiar with the slight or not so slight differences between rulesets. I already did some googling but it was nowhere enlightening enough to answer all my questions*. I was hoping that people familiar with the game could shed some light on the issues I have trouble with.
I also planned on having a site specific to Mahjong (Area 51 proposal) but it was closed because "this site can provide a home to the questions" - so I went ahead and added the questions I had to this very site. I did not intend any harm.
Finally, but this is a minor point compared to the above, I've had a similar discussion before (sitting on the other side of the table) and it was confirmed to me that time and order of questions should not affect their "rating" (this happened on SO more than a year back). Edit: Having read the thread about poker spam, I agree that my behavior in this case may have (I'd like to quote this) "caused discomfort", and I'll try and restrain from posting so many question in a short timeframe in the future. Does not hurt to wait a day.

*Also, I believe that googleable questions are welcome on SE, at least that is the policy over at SO.

Thanks for replying! Yes, I don't think you're doing anything wrong in each individual question, it was just a lot of questions at once; and after the poker spam, we are a bit wary about that. Easily Googlable questions aren't unwelcome, but we'd prefer not to have too many of them; if you just spread your questions out a bit more, they would be fine.


text:
Are tag-specific badges available in public betas?
I was poking around the tag statistics tonight, and noticed that Brian Campbell has 132 votes for the Recommendations tag, but no badge for hitting 100 upvotes in the category.
Are these badges available in public beta?  If so, am I miscalculating something?

Yes,
He has not collected votes in 20 different questions as required.
From https://boardgames.stackexchange.com/badges?tab=tags

You must have a total score of 100 in at least 20 non-community wiki answers to achieve this badge.

Also, I collected the badge for dnd4.0 in the RPG SE beta.

interesting, thanks for the clarification.  When I did a mouse-over on my sql badge on Stack Overflow, it made no mention of the 20 different questions.  Where did you get that answer from?

@LittleBobbyTables - added link, sorry for the ommision

Ludwing -- thanks!  Somehow, I had never seen that tab before.


text:
SmarterGamer.com -- what gives?
I was doing some research on the "Shadow Hunters" question asked here to back up my answer, and managed to stumble up on the exact same question at SmarterGamer.com.
It looks like a StackExchange site, but it doesn't have any StackExchange information, so is it just a clone site dedicated to all-things-games?  I wonder if there could be any potential confusion between this site and that one?

SmarterGamer was started independently as a StackExchange site. However, SmarterGamer was notified a while back that the site would be getting shut down in favor of this site.
See: http://smartergamer.com/questions/790/site-going-away
Not sure when that will actually happen, though.
Those questions are mine, both here and on SmarterGamer. I was simply transferring over ones that either didn't get answered or didn't have completely satisfactory answers. I was considering transferring others (at least ones I asked). Seems a shame to lose the knowledge if that site goes away.

interesting, thanks for the clarification.  I figured you were transferring them over, since they didn't have any answers, but I was confused about the existence of the site.

As a follow-up to Todd's answer, it seems to be common practice to merge in SE1 sites (Chip Hacker got merged into Electronics and Robotics, Basically Money got merged into Personal Finance, etc.), so assuming that happens here those questions won't be lost, they'll just become part of this site. I'm not sure what that means for reposted questions; we might have to manually close them as duplicates

Good to know, though it may be difficult in the case of SmarterGamer because we also covered computer games over there, so they couldn't all be copied.

@Todd Good thing you guys didn't get rid of board/card games tags over there then ;)

@Todd When the Gadgets SE2 beta didn't work out, I think the questions got merged to the appropriate other SEs if they existed, such as Apple for Apple or iPhone related questions, Android for Android related, etc.

I guess as long as things were tagged well, we should be ok then. I wonder when that would likely happen.


text:
Let's get critical: Jul 2013 Site Self-Evaluation
We all love Board & Card Games Stack Exchange, but there is a whole world of people out there who need answers to their questions and don't even know that this site exists. When they arrive from Google, what will their first impression be? Let's try to look at this site through the eyes of someone who's never seen it before, and see how we stack up against the rest of the 'Net.
The Site Self-Evaluation review queue is open and populated with 10 questions that were asked and answered in the last quarter. Run a few Google searches to see how easy they are to find and compare the answers we have with the information available on other sites.
Rating the questions is only a part of the puzzle, though. Do you see a pattern of questions that should have been closed but are not? Questions or answers that could use an edit? Anything that's going really well? Post an answer below to share your thoughts and discuss these questions and the site's health with your fellow users!

Final Results

Sacrificing to regenerate from Supreme Verdict
Net Score: 7 (Excellent: 7, Satisfactory: 4, Needs Improvement: 0)

How to play Ring of Valkas?
Net Score: 1 (Excellent: 3, Satisfactory: 4, Needs Improvement: 2)

Game of Thrones 2nd Ed vs 1st + Expansions
Net Score: 3 (Excellent: 3, Satisfactory: 6, Needs Improvement: 0)

Can abilities with a [Click] cost be used during a run?
Net Score: 7 (Excellent: 7, Satisfactory: 2, Needs Improvement: 0)

Question regarding strong 2c opening
Net Score: 3 (Excellent: 4, Satisfactory: 3, Needs Improvement: 1)

How do I interrupt a loop after multiple iterations?
Net Score: 8 (Excellent: 8, Satisfactory: 0, Needs Improvement: 0)

Does Cell Portal restart the run?
Net Score: 1 (Excellent: 3, Satisfactory: 2, Needs Improvement: 2)

What general approach should be taken opening hands with 3=1=4=5 and 1=3=4=5 shape?
Net Score: 5 (Excellent: 5, Satisfactory: 2, Needs Improvement: 0)

When should I mulligan in Android: Netrunner?
Net Score: 5 (Excellent: 5, Satisfactory: 2, Needs Improvement: 0)

Can we take "Death Company Tycho" in an army without a Death Company?
Net Score: 6 (Excellent: 6, Satisfactory: 0, Needs Improvement: 0)