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How should we tag old questions that don't specify an editon?
Can a Space Marine army consist of units from different chapters? has a generic question to which the answer varies by edition (quite significantly in this case).
How should we handle tagging of board games with different editions? says we should use edition tags:

A new tag should be added for the new edition and existing tags can be updated as needed if they only apply to an older edition. There will always be questions that can apply to all editions and those should still get a general tag.

Should we tag questions like the linked WH40k question with an old edition, and have new questions for new editions, or should we have a one-stop shop type answer for that question?

Does this answer your question? What is the current consent on version-specific tags?

@JoeW not really. This is not about new questions, this is about editing old questions.

I don't see how that wouldn't apply here, in the end we can't specify a version unless we have evidence in the question about what version it applies to.

@JoeW at the time of asking only 6th edition was out, is that enough evidence?

How do you know it was 6th edition and not 5th? Also how do you know the question isn't still valid as it hasn't changed in any of the newer editions?

@JoeW as I stated in the question, the answer varies a lot depending on the edition, I know that because I've researched it.

I acknowledge that the answer can vary a  lot depending on the edition, what I am saying is that you can't always determine what edition the question is talking about unless it specifies it.

Unless the version is specified in the question we shouldn't add version tags to a question. Even if you know the current version at the time of the question was 6th edition you don't know that is the version the person has and is asking about. If there is something in the question that can narrow it down to a specific version such as a mechanic that was only around for that edition it would be different.


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Considering the number of strategy questions, should we write specific scope limitations for strategy questions?
It seems to me like most strategy questions could be considered subjective and broad in scope, as many people will have different answers based on their own play styles.  However, when tailored to specific situations or rules, these are quite healthy, as it provides a resource to learn about optimum play.  Should we write out guidelines for strategy questions so that we receive more constructive questions and fewer "What's a good strategy for x?" questions?

I was drawn to this particular community because of the strategy discussions. As a newcomer to both Stack Exchange and the specific Board and Card games community, I noticed a disconnect between the questions FAQ and the actual most popular questions - specifically in regard to strategy. The FAQ roughly says:
"You should only ask practical, answerable questions . . . [not] open-ended questions . . . Your questions should be reasonably scoped."
Yet for Settlers of Catan, among the top 10 most popular questions are 5 strategy questions that are very open ended.
My attempt to create my first question, a strategy question for Ticket to Ride, always resulted in "The question you're asking appears subjective and is likely to be closed." Eventually I decided to word the question almost identically to a popular Settlers of Catan question and ignored the warning.
At the very least, the FAQ should be changed to indicate that certain types of strategy questions are okay. Perhaps examples of good and bad questions could be given. The current community seems to like moderately scoped questions like "In Settlers of Catan, how do you overcome bad initial settlement placement?"
But I'm guessing you don't want questions like "What are some good Go strategies."

I really appreciate the input from you as a new user!  I think you're right, we have some work to do on the FAQ.  The portion you noted (and everything below it) is standard boilerplate for all SE sites and can't be edited.  We could do more to encourage strategy questions above that though.

The two things that all new users should do is 1) ask their questions...whatever they want and 2) don't get annoyed when some get closed.  Don't self-limit, just ask away.  I'll bet most are cool and we'll work with you on the rest.  "Closed" is not the name I would pick for that state, something like "Time Out" would be better, but I can't change that :)  Some questions just aren't good fits for a Q&A site, but a lot are.

Thanks for your clarifying comments. In the lest than 2 hours I've spent so far, I'm very impressed with the system stack exchange has developed and think it has great potential to amass a huge and useful information repository. This particular meta discussion is especially interesting because it is suggesting that what works for one domain (stack overflow - very specific questions) doesn't necessarily apply to all domains (board games - reasonably scoped strategy questions are arguably the most interesting content).

The key for me is that strategy answers can be evaluated.  People who like that game can read them and intelligently judge the best strategies and vote them up.  Even if you haven't played a particular game you can usually suss out who has actually played a game 100 times by reading their answer. :)  There aren't likely to be 30 viable strategies for many games so the number of answers to any one question stays reasonable.

Strategy questions are the main traffic driver to this site so I don't want to take drastic action to limit them.
However, I think we can do better.  My preference is to nudge people in the right direction.  We don't really want 20 questions about the basic strategy for a game.  Dominion is kinda getting that way currently.
Check my recent answer to When should I start collecting Victory Points in Dominion?
At the time, I didn't think the question was an exact dupe but wanted to point the questioner at other questions that probably will go a long way towards getting the answers he is looking for.  Then he can (hopefully) ask more specific questions.
As opposed to this one Which exchange of money is best? that I thought was a duplicate.
As the number of strategy questions build, I think it will be to our advantage to keep them linking to one another so that newcomers are encouraged to experience more of what we have to offer.  Hopefully they will like it, and stick around!

One way to focus strategy questions might be to suggest to the asker to consider putting forth a strategy and asking about the strengths and weaknesses of it, i.e instead of

What are some good initial placement strategies for Settlers of Catan

trying

What are the strengths and weaknesses of employing a strategy of amassing the highest possible production probabilities while completely forgoing any consideration for road placement and settlement spacing

This may nudge the player toward taking the first step and also give others something to jump from in terms of having something very specifically answerable.

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sort: votes


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What is the history of game stacks on Stack Exchange?
In the 3 months I have participated in Board and Card Games, I have seen Magic the Gathering nearly spun off (then not). I have read of other game stacks that started independently or spun off from B&CG but I don't really understand the whole timeline or reasoning behind all these events. I think it would be useful for enthusiastic gamers who are new to Stack Exchange to have this reference post for information like:
When did each game-related stack start it's Beta?
Did it start independent or part of another stack to be later spun off?
Was a new stack proposed but purposely NOT spun off?
Why did it spin off and/or not spin off?
I don't want to see long explanations - just a date, title, and 0-20 words for each event with perhaps a link to a more in depth explanations of why various game stacks split off B&CG or started independently.
Why is this useful? I think it will be a good place to point to every time a new game proposal is considered (new stack, merger between stacks, etc.), so people can quickly get up to speed on past efforts. It will also help people like me (no expert in how Stack Exchange works but an avid gamer and participant in B&CG) get up to speed. Lastly, it will also help orient people toward the stacks that will best fit their gaming interests.
So, while all this is still young and tractable, who can answer the question:
What is the history of game stacks on Stack Exchange?

Perhaps a community wiki would be a good way to do the answer as I hope this is maintained over time as new game stacks launch, old game stacks merge, etc. Plus, it might already be the case that no single person actually knows every fact related to game efforts on stack exchange.

This doesn't fully answer your question, but a post I made on Area 51 long ago contains links to the various game proposals that existed at that time.  I'm not aware of any others currently.

2009 Launches

Go launched in fall as SE 1.0 site (shidogo.com), closed when Game of
Go was proposed on Area51
Draw 3 Cards (Magic the Gathering) launched in fall as SE 1.0 site. Still live. SE 1.0 sites were given one year to migrate but Draw 3 Cards was extended to 1/1/2013. After SE 2.0 area51 proposal was closed in March, 2012, Draw 3 Cards migrated to askbot (see Migration Successful, December 2012). Over 1/3 of Board and Card Games stack activity in March 2012 was related to Magic the Gathering, whose rapid growth may have been fueled by the area51 proposal. For more: See Draw 3 Cards blog.

2010 Launches

Gaming (Computers/video) 7/2010 beta launched, now full stack
(live here)
Role-playing Games 8/2010 beta launched, 4/2012 full stack
(live here)
Board and Card Games 10/2010 beta launched (live here ),
later absorbs other game-related proposals

2011 Launches

Game Development (Digital) 8/2011 beta launched, now full stack (live here)

2011 removed proposals:

Advanced Squad Leader
War Games and Miniatures
Bridge

2011 Closed betas:

Game of Go proposed prior to 3/2011, private beta 11/2011, closed
12/2011 (inactivity)

2012 Launched:

Poker 1/10/2012 beta launch and is live here.

Chess Proposed in 2010 then 5/1/2012 beta launched and is live here.

2012 Removed proposals:

Magic the Gathering Just before beta launch, closed March 2012, for these reasons.

2014 Sites shut down:

The Magic the Gathering Q&A site using Stack Exchange 2.0 software,
Draw 3 Cards, shut down in February 2014.

It is clear from the research I've done so far that there's a lot of interest in gaming among participants in the stack exchange network! This first draft is almost certainly incomplete and probably has some inaccuracies, so I'd greatly appreciate of other people can jump in and contribute little bits and pieces until this becomes complete and accurate. Thanks!

looks nice, thanks!

Not sure if it's interesting, but the Game of Go had a SE 1.0 site (shidogo.com) that was active in late 2009 and got closed when Go became a proposal on A51.

@mafutrct Exactly the kinds of detail I'm hoping to include. So I just stuck it in. Thanks!

Where does Draw 3 Cards fit in?

@AlexP Not being a Magic the Gathering player, I know nothing about it but did some Googling and added Draw 3 Cards in 2009. Can you please edit inaccuracies and provide additional information if warranted? Given my meager knowledge of all things MTG, and that this is a community Wiki, I'm more than happy to see you go in and change around anything I wrote related to Draw 3 Cards or MTG. Thanks!

@JoeGolton Oh, I don't know myself, hence the question! I never followed Draw 3 Cards and I'm not really familiar with the site proposal process or the SE 1.0 -> 2.0 migration process.

We do have until 2013 to host Draw3Cards on SE 1.0 server. You'll find a lot historical information on our blog: http://draw3cards.wordpress.com/ We are very sorry that the Magic proposal was closed ... we had planned on merging D3C into it, but now we'll have to migrate to some other platform, OSQA being the prime target.

@ripper234 Thanks - I removed the "??" indicating uncertainty.

In the 2012 entry, the link to the reasons is bad; the target discussion got removed.

@aramis Thanks for pointing that out. I sent a request to the team behind area51 to restore the links.

@aramis The link was restored for historical purposes. However, there used to be some discussion related specifically to Magic the Gathering which I can no longer find.

@JoeGolton the arguments against MTG probably mirror those against Go, Poker, and Chess... I'm glad to see poker up and running - it really doesn't appeal to many gamer-types, in the same way Chess doesn't.  Chess, SFB, Go, Poker, Shogi, and ASL all are games where knowing how to play and playing well are totally different levels of skill, and casual players almost always lose to high-skill players.

@aramis I wonder how many gamer types have one game they're more serious about? For me it's Bridge. For a couple of my gamer friends, it's Go. And yes - the majority of my gamer friends are not heavily into Go, Poker, Bridge, Chess, etc. But I've noticed that there's a few people participating in Board and Card games who know one of these games at least at an intermediate level.

@JoeGolton I've seen no SFB nor ASL questions, and the caliber of the Go answers is referential - not quality. In fact, the quality of answers on B&CG is significantly lower than on BoardGameGeek overall... but the Signal:Noise ratio is higher.

It's been years since this was updated. I just added something I thought historically noteworthy in 2014. Has anything else happened with game sites over the past few years?

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Is it Ok to ask question about Play-by-email version of a card game?
I was wondering about the "off-topicness" of questions concerning the "electronic" version of an old card game called "Waving Hands". This game has been translated into a "Play-by-email" in the 90's and is still up and running.
So my question is : is it the right place to discuss stragegy about this game here. Or do we have to join the "FPS/RTS/Heavy3D" community of Gaming SE.
I think this audience will be better for this kind game, but I'm not sure that electronic version are allowed here.
(FYI the PBem version of the waving hands game is called "Firetop Mountain" You can have more info here (although it's not really necessary to answer my questiob) : (http://www.gamerz.net/fm/Main/)

As long as the electronic (email/online) version has no major differences to the existing board or card game, it is well within the scope of this site.
I'm assuming that the strategy component of the game is the same when using email to play, so people playing the offline version will still find your question useful.
It's a different case if your question only applies to the electronic version - in that case, Gaming.SE might be a better place to ask.


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How can I tell if badge is possible to gain more than once?
I think it should be clearly stated in the Badges section.
For example, consider Vox Populi bronze badge:

Used the maximum 40 votes in a day.

This says nothing about possibility to get awarded with this badge multiple times.
I think that even bronze badges are something of an achievement for new users, and this improvement could make things less confusing.
Am I missing something, or the best way to tell if badge can be gained multiple times is to check profiles of most dedicated users and see if any of them has that particular badge x3 for example?

There's a few ways to learn this information.

Click through any badge. For example, popular question says: "Asked a question with 1,000 views. This badge can be awarded multiple times."
Any badge with the word 'first' can only be awarded once. For example, investor says: "First bounty you offered on another person's question."
Many badges are obviously only awardable once. Example: scholar ("Asked a question and accepted an answer.")
If you're still not sure, the thoroughly exhaustive meta badge FAQ will tell you everything you ever wanted to know about every badge.

The suggestion to make this information more explicit has been made before, but wasn't particularly popular.

Thank you. I just think that displaying the sentence This badge can be awarded multiple times not only on specific-badge site, but also in the complete list of badges would be much more clear. Or even some symbolic indication like (Multiple).

@beam022 - I happen to agree with you, and upvoted the feature request I linked to. In fact, this was first asked for way back in 2009. I suggest you vote for these also. SE feature requests are prioritised based on popularity, among other things.


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We should remove the [recommendations] tag
The first off-topic close reason is

Questions asking for game recommendations are off-topic.

but we still have the recommendations tag. I know that the tag description says that these kind of questions are "generally deprecated" on the site, but as we all know, users don't read. Plus, "generally deprecated" doesn't mean "completely off-topic". The existence of this tag encourages people to ask these questions.
In addition, it is a meta tag, which we should avoid. It describes the question itself, not the quality of the question.

I agree that this tag should go away.  Most of the questions thus tagged are closed, which is a hint.
Before we nuke it, though, we need to make sure that the affected questions will still end up with appropriate tags.  About half of these questions have a singleton recommendations tag, meaning they'll be untagged after removing this one.  Four of those questions are still open.  It's not entirely obvious to me how some of these should be tagged.
Maybe we don't care if closed questions are untagged, but we should decide that rather than just letting it happen.
The singletons:

Best strategic games and play online
Which games qualify as Gateway Games?
What interesting 3-player strategy games are available?
What is a good resource to discover new games? (NOT CLOSED)
How can I arrange a Christmas gift exchange for board game geeks? (NOT CLOSED)
Are there any magazines similar to InQuest Gamer in print today? (NOT CLOSED)
One vs Many board games
Card Games for Three Players?
What is a good board game to use for a programming competition
Advice for an experienced gamer who'd like to play nomic games?
Eurogames suitable for playing outside
What are great gamer games that are still great for uncompetitive groups.
What are some great 2-player games for a couple to play?
Quick engaging card games that can be learned quickly by a new group
Good travel games for two players, especially for playing on trains?
Best Light Strategy Party Games?
What are some good 8 player games?
Games that can be played with just normal playing cards that are engrossing enough for a hardcore gamer
What are good games to play during a one-hour lunch break?
Games that are quick to teach to new people, yet still fun and strategical
What games are suitable for a large number of people with only a pack of playing cards?
Where can I find reviews of board games?  (NOT CLOSED)
Hero Quest type games
Good games for playing in a bar
Games that play well with a wide range of different numbers of players
Good board games for single player
Board games for two players

I suggest that we start by deleting the closed questions in this list that are clearly off-topic.

Well, we should review them first to see if there's anything worth keeping/merging/historical-locking.  Sometimes a bad question attracts good answers.  I haven't looked at these; I only compiled the list.


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Is it ok to ask questions that are only valid for a limited time?
Looking at this question, I'm realizing that any good answer given will be wrong in 6 months, because which cards are in the Standard format change whenever a new set is released, and once a year some sets rotate out.
There is a similar meta question here, but it's not asking the same thing.
Also, there is a well-received question which has the same problem here.
One simple solution to this could be to just edit the question to ask about specific sets instead of asking about "standard". At the least, the answers given would remain correct even in a year, but it is hard to say if it would be good or useful question after the sets in question are no longer standard.
I seem to remember "too localized" being a close reason in the past, but I don't see it anymore. So should these questions be closed, edited to include specific set names, or just left alone?

The "Too Localized" close reason was removed four years ago. Now that it is gone, we no longer close questions simply because they are only useful for a certain period of time or a small group of people.
Regarding the current question, I believe that it is OK, but there should be clarification of which standard rotation the question refers to. A standard rotation can be uniquely identified by the most recent set, so it would be sufficient to restrict the question to "Amonkhet standard" somewhere in the question title or body. The same should be done for the other linked question.

Interesting, I'd missed that meta announcement back then... and wow, I didn't even realize I'd been part of this site for that long!!

I've added the mention of Amonkhet Standard.

This is an issue that exists for many SE sites, things change over time. Programming languages get new functions for SO, games get new versions, and new rules here, which is even more important for LCGs, CCGs and TCGs where the games update regularly.
In your example sets rotate out of standard, so of course what is in standard would change, but even questions that aren't so short term still can change with with changes to the games rules. Legend rule changed multiple times, Planeswalker rule is gone now and they just use the legend rule, mana burn was once a thing.
The best solution is to specify a time period and/or location in both the question and in the answer, for your example Amonkhet era standard. This would let people know they are looking at something with an expiry date.
For answers that were valid, but no longer are valid due to rules changes, we should leave the answer as is, but add in bold letters at the top a line saying it is no longer valid, something like This answer is no longer correct due to the change to 205.3j(Planeswalker rule) in September, 2017. Then we should post a new answer with current information.

Edit to add: For CCGs like Magic, the rules and cards may change too often for this to be viable, but for other games the option to tag a specific rules set exists. Dungeons and Dragons has 5* editions, Warhammer 40k is now into it's 9th edition - and these edition tags specify when a question and its answers were valid. It might be worth looking into adding "tag warnings" to the games that have editions, to suggest tagging the specific edition their question is about.
*3.5 could be argued make it 6 editions.

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Why do "auto-comment" options sometimes not work for review?
I've noticed that when I go to the "Review" section to look at things such as new answers in the queue, I sometimes have different options than other times.
Just now I was looking at an answer under the "New answer to old question" queue. I had options for "skip" or "no action needed". But there WAS an action needed; it was a new question posted as an answer. I wanted to flag it for deletion, and leave the "from review" comment that lets the user know to use "Ask Question". But that option wasn't there.
I manually flagged it for deletion, but this doesn't automatically leave a comment. How do you leave the "auto-comments"; why is that option sometimes there and sometimes not?

I don't know for sure, but I would bet that the available review actions and the results of those actions depend on which review queue you're in. In particular, I suspect that that comment comes from the queue actions to validate a "not an answer" flag in the Low Quality Posts queue.

Maybe I should include this in the question; but are the review options a StackExchange-wide thing; or can they be set for just Board & Card Games? If the latter, I think this post could also be updated as a feature request to make "auto-comments" available on all review queues.

I believe it's the same across the whole network, with the exception of Stack Overflow.

Yes, it's only available for answers on Low Quality Review Queue, and yes, it's the same on the whole network including SO. Some users use a userscript to easen the process: AutoReviewComments - Pro-forma comments for SE.

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Should we have separate tags for Classic and Modern Canasta?
There are a lot of questions asked with the “Canasta” tag where the answer depends on whether they are playing Classic Canasta or Modern Canasta. There are a handful of rules that overlap between the two; but not as many as there are rules where they are different.
I think most questions asked about Canasta are talking about Classic Canasta; as that seems to be the more popular version (some websites that list the rules for it only refer to it as “Canasta”).
Alternatively the Canasta tag could stay the same, with a new tag added for Modern American Canasta.

No I don't think we should make this change as it is a low traffic tag as it is.
There are currently a total of 56 questions with the canasta tag which makes me think that splitting them into separate ones won't do a whole lot of good. I think it will just take a low traffic tag and confuse users as to which version they should be using for their questions.


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Why does this site not have a mobile style the same as other SE sites?
If I visit any other Stack Exchange site from my phone, I see an easy-to-read version designed specifically for mobile. But when I visit boardgames.stackexchange.com from my phone, I see what looks like the normal desktop view; but because my phone screen is small; everything is tiny and it is hard to read and use.
I would guess that other sites simply have custom styling to support mobile; but they all seem to look the same as each other; so it seems like there is some sort of default mobile view provided by SE that Boardgames doesn’t have.
Examples of sites that look good on mobile: movies, philosophy, math, cooking, gaming... actually every site I’ve checked except Boardgames.

I see the mobile site. If you scroll to the bottom of the page you see, is there a link that says "Mobile"? If there is, clicking it should make you see the mobile site view.

@murgatroid99 Oh wow... I guess at some point in the past I clicked "full site", and it seems to remember that setting in a cookie or something. For most sites, clicking that link would only keep you in desktop mode for the current window or session. Thanks!

Unsure if I should delete this. It might be helpful if anyone else has this same issue.

I would suggest just expanding your comment about what happened into an answer, for the benefit of future readers.

All Stack Exchange sites have the ability to switch between mobile view and desktop view. While in desktop view; there is a link to go to mobile at the bottom of the screen:

The trick is that once you enter desktop view; this is saved, presumably in a cookie, so that you will always see this view from that browser, until you click the link to go back to the mobile view.

Yep. Though, as a note based on personal experience, those cookies do expire from time to time, so sometimes it will revert to mobile view.


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Can a gold badge holder nominate/vote to close a question as a duplicate?
I recently earned the gold badge for Magic: The Gathernig (yay), and that means that now if I mark a question as a duplicate, it is instantly closed. This is a fun new power that I promise not to abuse.
However, sometimes I see a question that I think could be a duplicate, but I’m not sure. Previously, I would have simply marked it as a duplicate, because that would just leave a comment saying “possible duplicate of”, and then other users could come along and decide if I’m correct or not. Now, I don’t want to someone that unless I’m completely sure.
So.. is it possible for me to still vote to close, rather than actually close?

No, once you have this power you cannot choose not to use it. Often, if I'm not entirely sure, I'll wait for two or three other people to vote before voting myself. That way, even though my vote is binding, it also requires at least some agreement with others. If nobody is voting to close the question, you can write the comment manually to hint to others to start voting to close.


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Should very low quality answers be deleted?
Often times in the review queue I will see a low-quality answer, in terms of content, correctness, etc. Recent example. Should I be voting to delete answers such as this? It is still an actual answer; even if it's both wrong and low-quality (other times it's just wrong, other times it's just low-quality. This one is both). It doesn't feel like "not an answer" is correct, because it is an answer. I would expect an answer such as this to receive downvotes, but not necessarily to be deleted.
Do we want to delete bad answers? If so, is there a non-subjective criteria for how bad an answer should be before it is deleted?
I am aware of the flag for this, which mentions "unlikely to be salvageable with edits". But flagging something seems different than voting to delete it.

Folks should read the "criteria" section here: https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/5222/133299 The quick summary is that deletion is for things that don't answer the question, and wrong answers should be downvoted not deleted, but we are free to modify that and delete more if we wish. If you'd like to suggest stricter criteria, go for it, but be sure to explain why you think it's a good idea and to hold off on voting based on a proposed policy until it's clearly been well accepted here.

The network-wide deletion FAQ address criteria for deletion:

For answers, any post that is not an answer (should be a comment, doesn't answer the question, etc.) should be deleted. Answers that are wrong or that dispense poor advice should be downvoted, not deleted.
These are general guidelines; some communities in the network may uphold more specific reasons to delete posts or not. For example, on Puzzling.SE, answers to a puzzle without explanation are subject to deletion, and some technical sites will delete answers which are not only wrong but also harmful when tried.

I'm not aware of any established modifications to this.
A couple specific things though:

Incomprehensible answers that can't be salvaged through editing aren't answers.
Sometimes the question may be asking for explanation, in which case barebones yes/no posts aren't answers.

I believe I'd support extending that last point slightly, to require "sufficient" explanation, e.g. a rules quote. But let's not make this about right vs wrong; if someone says "yes the rules say so", that's not a good answer whether it's true or not. So if we want to delete it based on a lack of explanation if it's wrong, I believe we should apply the same standards to similarly brief correct answers.
I really don't want us to get into the business of evaluating right/wrong via delete votes. For the sake of future readers, it's sufficient to knock an answer down to the bottom with downvotes, and possibly leave a comment about what the issue is. I know it might be even better to have it entirely gone if we're absolutely sure, but it's not always easy to be sure, and it's hard for other users to check our work if the answer is deleted.

Yes they should be deleted as there is no reason to keep around low quality information that is incorrect. The option to delete an answer is there so that we can help keep up the quality of the site.
In the case of the answer you referenced here it directly contradicts an existing answer that is quoting the rules but gives no supporting evidence to indicate that it is correct. In this case having two contradicting answers could prove confusing to a new uno player especially since neither of the answers actually provides a way to verify the correctness of the answer.
As for the criteria treat it like all other voting and judge for yourself. Generally I ask myself what does this answer do to the quality of the question overall when looking to delete a post.
As a side note I would like to point out that with enough reputation dealing with a flag in the low quality queue is the exact same as voting to delete it. The only difference is in the review queue it gets a special negative downvote that is part of the review queue

Please see my comment on the question. Your suggested criteria may be a reasonable policy but they are not current policy, unless there's meta precedent I've overlooked.

I would point out in the very answer you linked it talks about sites deleting answers based on their own policies and even gives two examples. "For example, on Puzzling.SE, answers to a puzzle without explanation are subject to deletion, and some technical sites will delete answers which are not only wrong but also harmful when tried."  Which in the case of the example answer given it would be deleted on puzzling because no explanation was given.

I noted that on the question ("...we are free to modify that and delete more if we wish. If you'd like to suggest stricter criteria...") and here "...may be a reasonable policy but they are not current policy...". If we want to adopt a given policy, great. But we need to do so explicitly, not just tell everyone to judge for themselves.

@Cascabel Is there a reason your comments are not in your own answer? Also, can you address why the "unsalvageable through edits" flag exists?

@GendoIkari I can go ahead and write one if you like - I didn't because I'd interpreted this as being more about defining deletion policy.

@Cascabel I hadn't considered that we might not have a well-defined deletion policy yet; and was asking the question to learn what that policy was. But if this turns into a thread for getting one defined; great!

Okay, wrote an answer. (Though I'd say we do have a deletion policy, it's just that it's the default one not a custom one.)


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Avira alert for js/wmd.js - false alarm?
My Avira antivirus program keeps alerting me about "HTML/Rce.Gen3" in wmd.js on this site. Is that just a false positive? It doesn't happen on stackoverflow.com, only this site, possibly starting when i logged in via Facebook.

nod32 version 4 report nothing...

VirusTotal says the URI is safe, yet the downloaded file is not, according to 1/42 scanners (Avira).
So 41/42 scanners say it's safe. I've submitted a false positive report to Avira, to which they replied:

The file 'wmd.js' has been determined to be 'FALSE POSITIVE'. In
  particular this means that this file is not malicious but a false
  alarm. Detection will be removed from our virus definition file (VDF)
  with one of the next updates.


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Do we really need a rules tag?
Since I'm not a Magic player, I have that tag ignored.  When I called up the site I was met with a huge wall of greyed out questions.  It seems a whole bunch of Magic questions where re-tagged with "Rules".
That got me thinking.  A large percentage of questions on this site are going to be rules questions.  I'd even go so far as to say non-rules questions would probably be in the minority.
Wouldn't that make the "Rules" tag redundant?  Couldn't every question be considered a rules question unless tagged otherwise?
Do we really need a "Rules" tag?

I didn't even notice that 'ignored tags' existed until you mentioned it; Magic's going straight in there!

I was just about to come here to post the same thing.  Rules is a tag that could apply to most of the questions on this site, and it just isn't useful.  I encourage looking at Arqade to get an idea of how tags like this will scale as the site grows.

... So are we actually going to go and remove [tag:rules], then?

@AlexP I hope that we don't just remove the tag. At least, it is useful in magic. Can't we change it to mgt-rules, and remove the tag for all questions that are not tagged magic-the-gathering?

@Pablo That seems to be a contradiction of what this discussion is about. The "overuse" issue is most pronounced within MTG questions.

@AlexP As far as I can see, the people active in magic are not opposing the existence of the rules tag. If the rest of the forum doesn't want that tag, then fine, but forcing the mtg people to not have that tag too seems excessive.

@Pablo We don't exactly have a good sample size to establish that consensus right now.

@AlexP With the people participating in this thread, we don't have a sample size large enough to determine that Board and Card Games is in favour of removing the rules tag  too :P.

I know this is off-topic, but just reading the degree of careful investigation, thought, and analysis you guys put into questions like this is what makes me love this site and Stackexchange in general. :D

Please note, everyone: mass retags (like other mass actions) are an admin function. So please don't try to manually implement whatever solutions and changes are discussed.

Given the way the tag is used, I'm gonna say NO.
The excerpt for the tag states,

Objective questions about a game's official rules.

Now, there are two ways you could interpret that...

Questions on interpreting or applying specific rules during gameplay.
Any question where the rules of a game might have bearing on the answer.

Well, #1 seems like a fine, specific bit of meta-data, describing the question and perfectly appropriate.
Ol' #2 applies to just about any question that could possibly be asked. And #2 is the one that seems to be used in practice.
Let's take a look at How does the double strike mechanic interact with other mechanics like lifelink or trample? (picked at random off the front page of the site). Tagged rules magic-the-gathering. Noticeably not tagged double-strike or mechanics.
Yes, the answer involves the rules of the game. So what? This should be true for most questions, whether implicitly or otherwise. Even strategy questions make the assumption that good answers won't be predicated on ignorance of the rules.
I strongly encourage the use of more specific tags when at all possible. Both for proper categorization, and for the pragmatic reason Alex P notes: if you make a tag or tags so generic that they apply to nearly every question on the site, you lose the bonus of having the most popular tag (inserted into the title) also be the one that most broadly classifies the subject matter.
Your sister site Arqade learned this lesson the hard way.

Have you ever been in a magic the gathering site before, like a forum? I assure you that rules is not a meaningless distinction. Anybody who has some experience in mtg knows that.

I think the rules tag on this site is pretty consistent. It's full of questions asking for rulings like you would get from a judge/referee. Logically, it's a pretty narrow scope; it's just that such questions are objective, detail-oriented, and often show-stoppers for people who run into them in play, so they're quite likely to be asked on the B&CG.SE.

@Pablo. This site isn't exclusively for MTG.  If MTG has a specific need for a rules category, maybe a MTG-Rules tag would be better.  I just don't see any other game where the tag would be all that helpful.

@Pablo: none of which is actually reflected by usage (the rules tag is NOT limited to MTG questions, as Caulyn notes) or noted in the excerpt. Stop and think about this for a minute: even if it applied to every single MTG question it still wouldn't be the most popular tag on the site. But it is. You're shooting yourself in the foot here.

@Alex: either you need to explain that in the tag excerpt ("rules == rulings") and remove it from all of the questions where that's not the goal, or you need a different tag to reflect this.

@CaulynDarr any other collectible card game, like L5R, yu-gi-oh, etc. would have similar requirements for rules questions like magic. Perhaps a generic rules tag shouldn't exist, and only specific ones for games, but Shog9 was arguing that it was a meaningless tag because it could apply to all the questions, and I was answering to that.

@Shog9 I don't know much about most other games, like you don't know much about magic, and thus I can't say if the rules tags make sense for most of them. Still, stop and think about this for a minute: perhaps the rules tag makes sense for other games in the same way that it makes sense for magic, and that's the reason why it's the most popular tag.

@Shog9 Could you give us some example of some question that have the tag rules but don't follow the criterion of "rules==rulings". At first glance, I don't find any problem.

@Pablo: read my answer here - if it "makes sense" for all games in the broad sense of, "applies to any question where an answer references rules", then it's a fairly useless tag.

@Pablo: the distinction I'm trying to draw here is between "questions on a rule" vs. "which rules apply to this scenario". So: the most recent question in the tag is clearly about the former, while the example I gave previously is the latter. A MTG example of the former might be something like this (although curiously the answer assumes the asker is looking for a ruling on the example he gave rather than a general understanding of the rules). Gonna ping someone else to have a look.

Applied the way it's actually being used right now, the tag isn't being attached to questions that aren't primarily about understanding the direct written rules of a game. If you retagged rules to mechanics, what would be gained?

@Shog9 but is that distinction meaningless? You need somebody who know the rules well for both. They attract the same type of people to answer them.

@Pablo: that's my point! If you're gonna slap a "rules" tag on every question that requires an answer from someone who knows the rules... Well, that's all of the questions.

@Shog9 No, a player can play a lot and know about strategy, metagame, etc. without knowing the rules deeply. No all questions require great rules knowledge. "questions on a rule" and "which rules apply to this scenario" don't cover all posible questions for a game at all.

@Shog9 Can you speak more to the difference between the Monopoly "immunity" question and the MTG Lion's Eye Diamond question? I can't follow the distinction you're trying to make.

@Pablo: trying to create a tag (other than the name of the game itself) that covers all possible questions for a game is actively harmful. Don't do that.

@Alex: I gave both of those as examples of "questions on a rule" - you shouldn't see a distinction there. An example of the latter would be the one I list in this answer: http://boardgames.stackexchange.com/questions/5950/how-does-the-double-strike-mechanic-interact-with-other-mechanics-like-lifelink - there is no question on a rule there; rather, the asker is looking for an answer that applies to a specific scenario within the game - yes, this will require the answerer to know, interpret, and quite possibly reference the rules in order to answer, but it isn't a question about a rule.

@Shog9 So, are you arguing for an inherent difference between "Rule X says Y; what does that mean?" and "Rule X says Y; how does that apply here?" ?

@Alex: I'm arguing that there's an inherent difference between "how/when/where does Rule X apply?" and "Which rules/practices/traditions apply in scenario Y?" - in particular, the latter will almost never be phrased just like that, while the former should always be clearly targeted at understanding a specific rule (and thus fairly easy to tag). IMHO, the fact that folks have had to go back and re-tag so many of these questions with the [tag:rules] tag indicates pretty clearly that its purpose is not obvious.

@Shog9 I see "How do I resolve this game action?" as, fundamentally, a question about game rules.

@Alex: this goes back to interpretation #2 in my answer - yes, most questions will involve the rules of a game in some fashion, as the game is largely defined by its rules. That doesn't make every question a question about the rules. Note that if this distinction is too fine to make in practice, that alone is a good argument for ditching the tag entirely.

@Shog9 But this is, like, the most direct application of the rules to play. Players interpreting the rules at the table is the "physics engine" of a board game; to me, that's what all rules questions are about. To the best of my knowledge, we're not seeing the rules tag eating up all the games -- just MTG. I think that has more to do with the fact that BC&G.SE is one of the best Magic rules resources on the Internet, but much more middle-of-the-road as a strategy resource.

@Shog9 "trying to create a tag that covers all possible questions for a game is actively harmful. Don't do that" I'm not doint that. Look at the 50 most recen magic questions. There are question that are not tagged with rules.

@Pablo I think the difference between B&CG and a forum is that on B&CG answerable questions are encouraged and discussion questions are generally discouraged because they are subjective. What results is that most questions will be about the rules of games as opposed to strategies. When we move more in that direction (and I view this discussion as part of that movement), then the rules tag will almost be useless, because almost all questions will have it.

@BBz Strategy questions are not at all discouraged! Listicles (even "objective" ones) and opinion polls are discouraged!

My view is that the rules tag is a meta tag and is mostly unnecessary.
Here is the "official" stance on meta tags, straight from the horse's mouth.

Is it useful?
I can empathize with the people who propose that it's useful to have MTG questions tagged with rules so that it helps them categorize the question mentally at first glance. But how useful is it?
My view is that since we encourage users to ask questions in natural grammar (not search engine grammar), it's easy to understand that a question is about the rules of a game if a user reads the question carefully. If a user didn't read the question, then perhaps the topic is irrelevant to begin with and a rules tag would be equally irrelevant.
Also, the Follower-to-Question ratio of rules is 0.0102. It has 5 followers despite being the most popular tag for questions. That suggests that most users don't find it useful.
It'd also be interesting to see (but I can't) how many users have ignored the tag.
How do I use it?
If I were to follow the rules tag, wouldn't that suggest that I'm either 1) interested in learning about any rules from any game, or 2) knowledgable about any rules from any game?
I think either scenario is rare. A question tagged rules would ideally be only about rules, independent of any game.
I can also see the usefulness of a tag in that situation, even if it's rarely used, because it won't be used as a meta tag. But the current use of rules is mostly generating noise.

Is following the only use case for a tag??

@AlexP I believe it's the intended use, along with filtering searches.

I think the current rules tag is just too general to be useful.  It doesn't really tell you anything about the question it's attached to except that the rules are somehow involved, which doesn't really help anyone.
Right now, rules and clarification are synonyms.  To me, clarification would be the perfect tag to use for questions such as:

Bottom card drawn during epidemic: Are 3 cubes added to the city pictured, when the disease in that city's region has already been eradicated?
Clarification of a Pandemic rule involving the Medic
What regions count towards support of another region?

The important thing to note about the above questions is that the question is about an actual rule, which would (read: should) be referenced in the question itself.  Good answers to such questions would mostly be about precisely defining terms, parsing text, and explaining things in a simple manner.  "Clarifying", as it were.
On the other hand, a lot of the existing rules questions tend not to be about a specific rule; rather they are about a specific situation.  For example:

How much damage do my other Goblins deal if my Goblin Chieftain dies during the first strike step?
In Monopoly, Is it OK for a third party to make a trade with a player who is about to lose?
Can routed ships retreat to port in the same sea area?

The thing that these above questions all have in common is that, rather than asking for clarifications on an existing rule, they're asking for someone who knows the rules to make a ruling.  These types of questions tend to require an answer either quoting the rulebook or digging up an errata/faq/guywhowrotethegame to give an authoritative answer.
The types of answers (and thus answerers) you'd want to attract with clarification and the types of answers you'd want to attract with (say) ruling are distinct enough that lumping them together is just doing a disservice to the site itself.

Really? For your definition of clarification, you need somebody who knows well the rules to answer. For your definition of rules, you need somebody who knows well the rules to answer. How would they attract different answerers, then?

The difference isn't about knowledge so much as skillset.  The ability (and willingness) to parse complex rules and explain them is not the same as the ability to judge a complex situation and apply (and possibly research) rules.  There is overlap, yes, but they are not the same thing at all.

In theory, there is a difference. In practice, is that really true? At least in magic, people who knows about rules is interested in both kind of questions. Magic is probably the game with the most complex rules, so it should be the game where the difference is most obvious. If the difference is not clear in magic, it's probably not clear for any game.

The difference is actually more pronounced in games with simpler rules, such as most board games, where anyone can pick up the rules in a manner of minutes.  In such cases, the basic attractor to a question shouldn't be "knows the rules" since the bar is so low; attracting people who can "understand and explain the rules" (i.e., a teacher) vs those who can "apply the rules to this novel situation" (i.e., a judge) becomes far more useful.

I think your third examples for "clarifications" and "rulings" are the same question.

I suspect (and I'm waiting on clarification from someone who knows better than I how this game is played) that a lot of the problems here arise from the fact that Magic has both a large ruleset, and a heavily specified canon of interpretation - in other words, it's not hard to find a rule that applies in any given scenario and only that scenario. This greatly tips the balance of questions from those that might be answered from a strategy or common-practice scenario toward those based (at least in part) on published rules or interpretations. Unfortunately, tagging cannot follow from this.

@AlexP, not quite the same, but the vagueness of the questions didn't really emphasize the difference.  I have added concrete examples which (should) make the distinction more clear.

Do you see ruling and clarification being used consistently if we establish a separation? I feel like it's hard to know which is which when you're the person asking the question -- especially, in the case of Magic, if you're an average casual player asking a question that isn't directly covered by the "learn to play" resources but is addressed directly by comp rules. Tags that can only be applied correctly retroactively rub me the wrong way.

Sorry, I can't imagine people following the clarification tag anymore than people follow the rules tag. It's also a meta tag and doesn't give more information than a well-worded question.

The main downside of an overarching "generic" tag is the way tags appear in titles (and, IIRC, digests?). It seems to just pick the most commonly-used tag. That means that, if the rules tag is most questions on most games, you end up seeing "rules - Interactions of multiple Parallel Lives" rather "magic the gathering - Interactions of multiple Parallel Lives" (which is what's happening now, and it's less than ideal).

That said, I think tags like rules and strategy are useful. They provide at-a-glance information about the nature of a question. I think the rules tag represents a conceptually sound, irreducible category: direct questions about how to interpret the game rules in play. These questions may take the form of "How do I apply this rule correctly in this situation?" or "Which rules apply in this situation?" but I think those are both, fundamentally, the same kind of question.
I think the tag's ridiculous popularity has more to do with the strengths of our site than with any kind of vagueness associated with the tag itself. In particular, BC&G.SE is one of the best resources for Magic rules questions on the Internet. Our format is great for rules questions and our user base is very good at answering them with detailed, timely, and accurate responses. In contrast, BC&G.SE is pretty middle-of-the-road for other Magic content, such as deck-building and strategy. It stands to reason that we'd attract more MTG rules questions than other stuff.
I don't see a way forward that involves deprecating rules because:

There is no clear separation of rules into distinct smaller concepts. (If you disagree with me, that's excellent! I challenge you to find one.)
Simply retiring the tag and saying that all questions are rules "by default" is a clunky workaround to what's practically a non-problem.

Perhaps we could create specific rules tags for each game? Instead of rules, we could have mtg-rules, dominion-rules, settlers-of-catan-rules, etc.

@Pablo.I think that kind of tagging is going to be hyper-redundant for general purpose use.  If the MTG players think a MTG-Rules tag is necessary though, I'm all for that.

@Pablo: the way you're applying [tag:rules] right now, a mtg-rules tag would be redundant: it would mean the same thing as [tag:magic-the-gathering]. You need to come up with a clear definition for when the tag is to be used first - if it is truly a subset of mtg questions and completely different from the ordinary usage, a prefixed tag might be appropriate.

@Shog9 Not at all, there are several magic-the-gathering questions that don't have the tag rules. I have been applying the same definition that mtg forums use. Between the 50 most recent magic questions, 19 don't and shouldn't have the rules tag.

@pablo can you link a couple of those questions in your answer?

Yes, it is necessary. Tags are not only used to organize questions in categories. They have the role of improving searchs, too.

But if searching for "Rules" and another tag returns 95% of a tag's questions, was it really helpful?

@CaulynDarr If rules are a mayority of the questions, then it is not very useful when you search using this site search. But it is still useful for SEO purposes (that is, to improve rating in search engines like google). And that would in turn help attracting more people to Board and Card Games.

@CaulynDarr Searching for [rules] plus another term could be useful, though. Especially for cards that tend to get mentioned repeatedly in strategy discussions (e.g. Day of Judgment).

@Pablo: forget about SEO. If tags are hurting your SEO, you have bad tags and bad titles - work on fixing the obvious stuff first.


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How do we get the questions per day count up?
The site can't get out of beta until we get our questions per day count up significantly.
We need some legitimate way to drive up questions.  We could spam lots of questions we already know the answers too, but that's not going to help the site in the long run.
We need to find a way to get gamers to come here when a new edition or game comes out.
Any thoughts?

Personally I care about increasing the activity on the site; coming of out beta would just be a nice side benefit. :)

Spamming a lot of questions we know answers to won't help in the long run, as you say, but adding questions we can answer for games that are under-represented might increase the chances that someone who has a question about those games asks it here. If I had a question about some game and couldn't find any reference to it on the site, I'd be reluctant to ask, thinking it might be a waste of time...

Get a greater variety of users, playing a greater variety of games?
We have a steady trickle of MTG questions because that's a complex game (with constant new content) that generates consistent rules questions -- it helps that the rules are robust enough that we can actually answer those questions, too. It's not the only game like that. But we don't have many questions about minis wargames (for which there are many rulesets, with unique rules and strategy concerns -- not to mention that questions about prepping game materials are totally on-topic!) and other card games (L5R, Pokemon, Yugioh, the various "LCGs," the recent Netrunner reboot, &c.). But we don't seem to have many users actively posting on those topics. My best guess is that it's because, as a community, we're not actively playing those games? But someone is, somewhere.
How do you grow that user base? I don't know. It's not something that we can fake, really. I think there's a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem, where it's hard to encourage any dedicated fans of (e.g.) L5R to post here unless there's already strong L5R content to make it worth their while.
(In many ways, RPGs SE had it easier, because it looks like they were able to hit their content quota just with D&D3/4 questions, and the rest is icing -- that kinda shows when you look at their front page, though.)

To encourage greater variety of games, I think we could be more proactive about encouraging questions on new games. Pat and a few other people are very encouraging to new users but I've noticed that when I post a first question on a totally new game, it tends to have few views, few votes, few comments, etc. (Cosmic Encounter and Vinci). Perhaps if we put more effort into viewing these questions (to get view count up), voting on (the quality of) these questions, that could help even if it's a game you haven't played.

@JoeGolton Good observation. I posted a kinda obscure question on RPG.SE and got no answers. But the upvotes at least made me inclined to check back more often.

@JoeGolton.  We should use bounties to keep those kind of questions alive and entice people to go find answers.

I can't seem to find a blog for this site.  I think it'd be a great way to drive traffic for new game releases and such.  Something we try to do at the IT Security SE to help keep the blog alive, is a "Question of the Week" post - do a write-up of an interesting question and its answers (not necessarily one from the past week) every week.

The fundamental "problem" with board games (at least so far as this Q&A site is concerned) is that unlike video games or RPGs, the majority of board (and card) games are designed with the principle of simplicity in mind.  This makes them awesome for picking up and playing, but it also means that most rules questions either are answered by reading the manual for a few minutes — we don't want to boost our counts with "general reference" questions — or, if the situation is not covered in the manual, are not objectively answerable.
Often the only real difference between a regular player who has read the rulebook and a "rules expert" is just that the expert also knows where to find the official FAQ and/or errata, or a more up-to-date version of the rulebook itself.  Short of getting one of the actual game designers/developers on here to answer questions, we have a rather limited supply of canonical documentation to work with.
Such questions obviously have their place on this site, and will continue to do so for as long as the site exists, but in and of themselves they are not enough for this site to reach the critical questions-asked mass to become successful.
Which begs the questions: What makes a board-and-card-games expert better than normal people, and what would said normal people want to ask said board-and-card-games expert that they can't just ask someone else?
The obvious (to me) feature that separates many BCG experts from the laymen isn't the fact that they know the rules to any particular game very well — as mentioned above, anyone can do that without much difficulty — but rather that they know a lot of games very well.  The questions that this type of expert would thrive at, where the layman would falter, would be any questions which tap into this breadth of understanding.
What we really need is more "game agnostic" type questions, which don't require knowledge of one particular game so much as a strong knowledge of games in general.
Off the top of my head, there are three major categories of questions which would really capitalize on the knowledge of a BCG expert:

General/abstract strategy
Game design and development
Game recommendations

(There are probably many more categories that aren't currently on the top of my head)
For this site to succeed, I feel we need to be cultivating these (properly scoped) types of questions, despite their tendency towards subjectivity.  We'll just need to make sure the principles of good subjective are adhered to.

I think game-specific strategy questions also have a lot of room for "expert" answers.

Speaking more generally, I don't look at this as "this is the site with the experts, unlike those other sites." I look at it as "this is the site with a format that emphasizes longevity, searchability, and detail-oriented answers more than a forum, wiki, or whatever."

I think board games tend to have trouble producing a volume of questions since the rules don't change much.  If a game has had the same rules for 10 years, there isn't new ground to cover.  Miniature games represents a good opportunity because healthy ones tend to have new editions every few years and multiple codex style expansions in a year.  We need to find a way to draw more miniature game players.

@CaulynDarr Well, there are new board games coming out all the time, so dedicated board gamers could potentially be seeing new material every month. I agree with you that miniatures games are probably the biggest untapped vein of deep questions and answers.

@CaulynDarr There are a few games that despite being decades old are very complex and tend to generate an unending supply of questions. I'm thinking Bridge, Go, Chess, etc. But for whatever reason these question-rich games aren't getting much traction here.

@JoeGolton, I can't speak for the others, but the Chess questions at least are probably going to Chess.SE instead of here.

The problem might be due to a tag not existing for a game. If a game isn't listed in the tags, a new user cannot create the tag to ask the question (I don't think we have a work around for this). This might have people turn away immediately.

Asking questions about games that you play will eventually up the site in Google rankings, which will entice other players to start coming here and doing the same.
Another point would be to try and make sure people give good answers. A simple "Go to this link (link)" isn't going to cut it. Quick answers are good to have, too.]
The basic strategy should be "Draw them here, keep them here." If the name starts triggering recognition, people are more likely to keep coming back. Maybe even make an account! The association with StackOverflow doesn't hurt, either.
I wonder, perhaps, if some kind of banner can be put up at Arqade, since the demographics overlap so heavily?

This isn't the first time the topic has come up, which makes sense, given how long we've been in beta. In November 2010, we talked a little bit about how to get our numbers up. One of the 15 "Top 7" questions is about how to promote the site.
And it's a problem that all beta sites deal with. Some just deal with it better ... and some have an easier time of it because of their audience. (Arqade, for example.) Either way, our goal has to be reaching a sustainable volume of good questions that can get us out of beta: if we seed questions, at some point we'll run out. If we lower the quality threshold, then even if we do get out of beta, we become just another site, with the added bonus of having to explain why these old questions were all closed while these new questions are allowed.
I think Alex has the right idea - more people asking more questions about more games. goldPseudo touches on some of the problem, that there are a lot of games that are designed not to bring up questions. (Chutes and Ladders, right?) But there are plenty of games that do bring up questions, as we've seen with MTG. We just need to tap those audiences (uh, not in a MTG sense), and that means pretty much the same thing it does for everyone else.
Individually, we can promote the site through social media, especially by posting questions that need answers. We probably all are connected to people who play games but aren't here yet, and maybe seeing a question they can answer will draw them here. We can remember to ask questions here when they come up while we're playing games ... but again, these should be good questions, not questions-for-the-sake-of-asking.
I also like Pat's suggestion from the Top-7 question: work with cons when we can. Drawing questions from attendees themselves is a great idea, although we would have to emphasize that they won't necessarily get an immediate answer (i.e. we're not a replacement for GMs) even if we make more of an effort to watch for questions during cons.
If there is a smaller con in your area, you might be able to work with the mods and SE so that BCG can be represented there. (Larger cons probably require more advance planning and more work. I've been looking for an excuse to go to Gen Con, which is local to me, but as Pat points out, the ROI for us may not be worth it.) In a sense, game nights at home are baby cons: we can use those as an excuse to post questions here when they come up (again, real, high-quality questions, not things like "Can I move forward with a 4 in Sorry?"), and maybe get one or two new people to check out the site as well.
All that is really about time and effort. Anything else is just fool's gold: there is no point in getting out of beta if we do it as Yahoo Answers 2.

Stop being so deletionist and rigid.
Encourage questions which don't have just one right answer and are open to interpretation and debate.
Recognize that what will work for boardgames.se is not exactly the same thing that worked on stackoverflow.

Are we being deletionist and rigid? The closure rate on this site seems to be quite low (not that I want it to be higher).

@AlexP The closure rate might be low now, but that might also derive from the fact that we've already scared off anybody who wanted to ask subjective questions, and now only those of us who know the rules are left. It isn't necessarily a bad thing, but I'm sure we're lost at least several avid board gamers who came here, asked a subjective question that came from honest interest and desire to learn/participate (I like this game, what else can you recommend?), got it closed, and just left because their first experience with this site was terrible.

@CrazyJugglerDrummer I take umbrage to the idea that you can't ask subjective questions here -- look at the strategy tag, for example! You're talking about recommendations, specifically.

SE sites aren't forums. Discussion does not work well on these sites, which is why few SE sites allow subjective questions, and why the ones that do struggle mightily with them.

The converse though, is that BG.SE is currently a boring ghost town.

Game recommendation questions were (are) so popular that I think it's worth brainstorming what kinds of templates could be used to solve some of the issues they bring up. I think there's an objective type of question here that is being completely ignored: an answer which is an objective (or nearly objective) list.
Example of non-game question: What towns that are within 4 miles of London, England?
The answer to this is objective, right?
Example of very objective game question: What games were made by EON before it went out of business? Please provide one game per answer with either a brief description of the game (this particular Q is low value because you can easily find the information elsewhere).
Now for one that has a little subjectivity creep in (and for which I actually want to know the answer!):
Which games are obviously Gateway Games, where gateway games are defined as . . . Please list one game per answer so the answer can be voted up (if it's a Gateway Game) or not
voted if it's not a Gateway game.
I know that stack exchange mechanisms are not particularly well suited to this type of question, but if you can nail down a precise definition for "Gateway Games" (which was attempted here), then the answer to this is actually an objective list, just like the answer to towns within 4 miles of London. Not only that, the objective list would be roughly ordered by popularity and degree of adherence to the definition, which adds additional value.
I would love to see questions like this. Other examples:
Which wargames offer simulations on a squad level that are on par with Squad Leader?
Which games have had the largest influence on Game Design over the past 40 years? Please list one game per answer and describe the influences this game has had on the industry?
What games can be enjoyed at various levels of complexity, such that both a 6 year old and a game-loving adult parent might enjoy playing together? Candyland does not meet this criteria as it is boring for game-loving adults. Bridge neither because it is far too difficult to learn. Rat-A-Tat-Cat, Backgammon, and Checkers are good candidates for this list because they can be enjoyed immediately at a very simple level but actually have significant strategy components that can be mastered over time and are therefore of interest to game-loving adults. Please list one game per answer and provide some reasons for both the adult and the child to enjoy the game. If there is a way to handicap the game, please include that information (i.e. Checkers - adult can start with 1 or 2 pieces removed).
TLDR; Can we do a restricted form of Game Recommendations where the questions have answers that are lists that are objective or close to objective, because they adhere to well defined criteria?

boardgamegeek.com already does these kinds of lists and probably does them better. I think we want to have answers that aren't just basic lists of things.  Answers should be things that require some expertise and analysis, not just things you can get from a Google search.

@CaulynDarr I did google search for Gateway games. I saw some lists on BGG for Gateway games. I was not fully satisfied that I had pegged down the definition of a Gateway game and I did not think the quality of the list(s) on BGG were all that great. There's no voting per item so it's hard to get a feel for which games on the list really belong, and which don't. I'll post an experimental Q on our Board and Card Games stack in a few minutes to see if we get a better result than BGG (http://boardgamegeek.com/geeklist/68876/gateway-games).

I posted a sample question (one to which I genuinely want to know the answer) on Gateway Games: http://boardgames.stackexchange.com/questions/7606/which-games-qualify-as-gateway-games I'd be quite happy to receive feedback on how I can modify to make it more suited to our site, and set up to produce a better answer than what can be found at BGG. @CaulynDarr

My experiment ran for only an hour or two before it was closed, as it was considered to be too much like a recommendation question. I actually think the word "recommendation" is a red herring and that a better way to state the community norm is: "Any question whose answer is a list or a solicitation of opinions is not welcome here." The "opinions" part was always obvious to me, but not the "list" part. So it's okay to ask for what defines a game as being a certain type of game, so long as a list (of more than a few examples just to illustrate) is not associated with the answer.

@JoeGolton I agree that each-answer-is-an-item lists are generally a bad idea, regardless of objectivity.

@CaulynDurr well if BGG is just overall better why not just use it instead then? You are working on a false assumption - that game recommendations made by an expert and a layman dont differ. I strongly disagree. An expert, for example game designer, knows what game elements make it good for certain types of players and their preferences, how game mechanics translate to game dynamics and experience, what makes a game a gateway game etc. He can intelligently make and argument for his answer. A layman doesnt even have a vocabulary to do so, he just says: it worked for me.

What about generating more broader not-for-a-specific-game question about games, something like: how a game should be to be considered like a worker placement game? or another one like: is stone age a worker placement game? why?.
At least we can do that with new games and encourage one or two quick questions about the mechanic.
What about "can somebody explain to me in a quick view the mechanic of that game?" or what about "how this (new game) is compared to this other game in the mechanic?". This last one is not a pool, is asking for facts.
This way we can attract people when looking for that game. And another type of question could be "Is the mechanic of X game on this online site exactly like the board game?". This one is easy answered reading the helps on the site usually, but could attract people too.

Questions should generate useful answers above all else.  Exceptionally broad don't really do that.

@CaulynDarr I was trying to reefer to games in general and not a specific game. see my edit.

We could allow more subjective questions that relate to game recommendations because these are very common questions and produce more traffic than almost anything else on the site. They are also interesting and nearly 99.5% of the time produce answers that are very helpful. However, they are subjective (NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!) and very often discussion/opinion based (Just looking at people replying to each other in comments gives makes my back tingle...), and thus are quickly burned at the stake and ejected from our community. If we allowed them, this site would soon degrade into total anarchy with subjective questions, the quality on all of the other questions would be destroyed, objective questions would get moved off the front page, and plenty of other unspeakable atrocities would occur. Just look at this pile of utterly terrible questions that make me sick my stomach if you want to see what I' m talking about...
That's why we should never, ever, ever let this happen, because the second we allow game recommendation questions this site will go downhill like crazy until it ends up being nothing but pictures of LOL CATZ that have nothing to do with board games at all. Thank goodness we're preventing all of that...
(Sorry for bringing up a topic that's already been flogged to death, but it was bound to come up in this context anyway ;)

-1 I don't mind that you're reopening an old argument, but you don't seem to actually address the reasons for banning recommendations.


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Can there be an LCG (Living Card Game) Tag?
Can there be an LCG (Living Card Game) Tag?
With all of the LCG games (LOTR, GOT, etc.) I think there will be a lot of duplicate questions regarding the idea of this game type for each individual game

No. LCG is a meta tag (data about data). Meta tags are detrimental to the Q&A format on SE. What purpose would an LCG tag serve?
Cons

LCG is a trademarked term, only Fantasy Flight Games can USDA it without a license.
The LCG model doesn't have a huge following.
What questions could possibly be asked about the LCG model that would be useful?

To add to what user1873 has said:
Adding a tag that would, by definition, encompass several games means that those games would not automatically have their game name added to the title of the page.
I think it is to our advantage that for games with more than a few questions that the game tag should be the most popular tag on the question.
However, mentioning that a game is a Living Card Game on it's wiki tooltip text here and linking to other LCG's would be a good thing to do.

I looked for questions marked trading-card-game. At the moment, there are none.
This leads me to think that living-card-game, as a tag for questions that are generally about "living" card games, would be a similarly narrow tag. Fundamentally the only generically-applicable question about LCGs that I can think of is "What does LCG mean?"


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How are these two duplicates
This first question was closed as a duplicate of the second.
Chess. What is it called when a pawn takes a pawn by being passed
What is the "En passant" rule in chess?
The first asks what it is called in chess when a pawn captures another pawn by passing it. The second asks what the "En Passant" rule is in chess.
Yes, these questions are related. Yes, the answer to the second answers the first. But that doesn't seem like it makes them the same question. The two questions are actually reasonable answers to each other. This is how you know they are not asking the same thing.
Is this how it is supposed to work? Even though the asker would have had to already know the answer to the question to identify the second question as the answer that was desired, it gets deemed to be the same question?

Thank you everyone for your valuable feedback. I understand now this is a bad question and will do everything in my power to improve it. As soon as I know what that is.

They are both asking about the same rule which is En Passant which means they can both be answered by the same question. Just because one is only asking about the name doesn't mean it can't be answered by another question that is asking about how the rule works. In the end having it as a duplicate is not a bad thing as that way others who don't know the name can have a better chance of finding the answer which not only give the name but explains the rule as well.

Aren't closed questions usually automatically deleted by the system after some time?

@Matt duplicate questions are not automatically deleted as they are a special type of closed question which is to help people find answers.

@Matt the purpose of marking a question as a duplicate is to let users find that question and be pointed to where the best answer is, so "When a pawn takes a pawn by being passed" will stay on the site, with the duplicate notification linking to the question about "En Passant"

@Andrew Yeah, that makes sense, I didnt realize duplicates stuck around. Although I'm still not convinced they are the same question. If I asked for someone to ID a game would it get closed as a duplicate of a question asking for that game's rules? I suspect not and I dont really see this as different. But I guess thats the minority view.

@Matt Perhaps, though in this case also, though some may not think that way, the fact that the move of taking a pawn with another pawn "in passing" is called "En Passant" literally in passing in French lends it a little more to being a duplicate.

@Matt as for duplicates staying around, the oldest duplicate I could find on BGSE is this question: https://boardgames.stackexchange.com/questions/2412/what-are-some-great-2-player-games-for-a-couple-to-play
8 years old this month


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Should we keep [combat]?
The tag combat currently has 8 questions, which are used for the following:

5: Magic: The Gathering
1: Munchkin
1: Dungeon!
1: Recommendation request for games with a certain combat mechanic (closed)

There is no tag wiki for this, and it's not clear how it's intended to be used. It looks as though it's being used for any combat mechanic within board and card games, and that suggests to me that it's too broad.
Should we keep combat or delete it?

Is there enough of an agreement to move forward on removing the tag?

@JoeW Definitely. Is the best way to deal with it to just manually delete it, bumping all questions for it to the front page? Or do we have a mod do some magic to remove the tag without bumping the question?

If we can get it done without bumping all the better but its not a lot of questions and can be done slowly if needed

This tag doesn't sound like it is one that will have any experts in it as combat is different in many games.
I would recommend removing this tag.

I've deleted the tag from all questions that have it.


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Are card recommendation questions on-topic?
Game recommendation questions are off-topic* on Board & Card Games Stack Exchange. But what about recommendations for specific cards within a game?
For instance, What are some cards that allow for returning Monsters to my hand? asks for recommendations for a Yu-Gi-Oh! card that matches certain criteria. Is this sort of question on-topic or off-topic for the site?
* See Why are game recommendation questions off-topic?

I think they should be (& remain) on topic.
These questions are generally well-scoped and are about achieving a specific functional purpose within a game. For card games like Yu-Gi-Oh, Pokemon, Magic: the Gathering, or Android: Netrunner, needing to do something specific in the game naturally leads to needing to know the cards that let us do that.
As experts of these games we can advise people on the cards available. We should also aspire to advise players on how to find those cards for themselves: give them fish, but also teach them how to fish for themselves.
Many novice players don't know how to find cards effectively when there's a rare effect they need. Yu-Gi-Oh has a community-driven wiki with cards categorised by effects. Magic: the Gathering has common wording structures we can search by and multiple good search engines to use. As experts we're well-placed to advise on using these tools.
The questions we get asked tend to only have a very limited pool of options available. Players don't need our help finding fairly common effects, just rare stuff. This means there's usually only a fairly small number of cards available, sometimes even only one or two. We can direct people to the body of cards available that suit the purpose and guide them through their options. If there aren't any perfect fits then we can advise on the pros/cons of the best-fitting options. If there's nothing at all that does that, we can advise them about that too.
This also means there's Good Subjective answers available, and it's possible to have an objectively correct or subjectively best answer: the one that correctly elaborates on the card set available and dispenses the subjectively best advice about applying those cards.
Answers to these questions should aim to do the following:

Suggest the full body of cards available that fit the qualities the querent is asking for, or at least the fullest that can be readily described (if it's actually a large request). We're aiming for comprehensive or complete answers in this context.
Walk the querent through how they'd find those cards themselves: teach them to fish.
Where there are unusual fits, e.g. the only options come with catches or restrictions, advise on the options available.
Where there's no fits for what the querent's looking for, tell them that. If they described what they were trying to accomplish, guide them to what they should be looking for to accomplish that instead. (E.G. hypothetically: "There's no cards that blink everything you have and all the counters on them in the event of a board wipe. Instead you should aim to make them indestructible, regeneration, or give them protection. Here's a search for the cards that do that, since there's a lot.")

I've seen some decent Q&A's on card recommendations in Magic: the Gathering on here. The ones I can remember & find right now are these:

Are there any cards that turn creatures into land? — Murgatroid elaborates on the extremely limited card pool for that purpose.
How many mono-red damage doubling effects are there? — I provided the asker with the list of cards that fit that purpose & walked them through the principles of finding cards with that function (or other functions).

Closely related is questions that are trying to explore the body of cards available in the game. For example, Does any cards care about the color of mana spent on other spells/abilities? asks about an an extremely unusual card concept; Ivo and Rainbolt both take that bull by its horns and explore what that could even mean for cards and point out options.

+1 for "Walk the querent through how they'd find those cards themselves: teach them to fish." I posted about this before, and I brought ideas about how to implement it. The community contributed their ideas too. It takes more than just the people reading meta changing their own behavior to actually bring about change.


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Are game development resource recommendations on-topic?
Game recommendation questions are off-topic. However, card recommendation questions for a specific game are on-topic.
Are game development resource recommendations on-topic? For instance, Where to go to self publish a game? recently got bumped to the main page. It's not a game recommendation, so it's not off-topic for that reason, but it does have a number of similarities to it.
Would this type of question be on-topic? And if so, what is an appropriate close reason?

Whoops, I voted to close as a duplicate of the wrong question, and now I can't recast my vote. In any case, I think this is a duplicate of Why are game recommendation questions off-topic?, because I don't see why any of that reasoning wouldn't apply here. Card recommendations are the exception to the rule in my opinion.

@Rainbolt Would you like to turn that into an answer? I already talked about game recommendation questions in my first sentence. My question was: does that situation apply to this one as well?

I would argue that the answer should be a "No".
Game recommendations are IMO borderline relevant, but game design and questions related to game design is a completely different topic. Even the playtesting phase of game design is a different breed. It could probably make for a nice Exchange site of its own, though.

I am not sure that it would be able to generate enough traffic for there to be a board and card game development site.

I think this is a duplicate of Why are game recommendation questions off-topic?, because I don't see why any of that reasoning wouldn't apply here. Card recommendations are the exception to the rule in my opinion.

Can you explain why card recommendations are a reasonable exception, to clarify why this wouldn't be?

@Cascabel That is explained in the answer to the question about card recommendations. Tomorrow someone is going to ask about some other kind of recommendation, and I'd rather point them to existing answers than pile on more opinions.


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Are there any plans for site promotion at large gaming cons?
With Origins, GenCon, and other large gaming conventions coming up soon, it seems like it might be a good opportunity to expose large amounts of gamers to this site who may not otherwise know about it. Are there any plans to promote Board & Card Games Stack Exchange at these cons? Fliers, handouts, ads in the program guides, flash mobs, anything?


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Request for [parcheesi] to be a tag synonym of [pachisi]
We currently have the tag pachisi. The tag wiki says:

A pawn-moving board game that originated in ancient India. The westernized version is called "Parcheesi".

Earlier this month, we had a new question tagged with parcheesi. As the tag wiki above says, this is a westernized name of the same game.
Both Wikipedia and Board Game Geek list the game as "Pachisi". Would it be possible to make parcheesi and tag synonym of pachisi?

The answer on the one question about pachisi seems to indicate that the games are different, and that tag was only added to the question after the answer indicated that it should be. Are you sure they should be synonymized?

Board Game Geek lists "Parcheesi" as an alternate name of "Pachisi", and forums posts, version listings, files, and others all use the two interchangeably. I couldn't find anything online about the difference between the two; just that "Parcheesi" is a trademarked term. I can't speak to the expertise of the answerer of the Pachisi question, but they seem interchangeable to me, much like how "Star Halma" and "Chinese Checkers" are interchangeable.

In order to figure out if they are the same game, I've asked a question on this site. We'll see what the top answers are.

Don't take my answer as a reason to not merge them.  I would merge the two tags.  I don't think the cultural difference between the the two versions is enough to warrant two tags.  As a Canadian with lots of recent games with lots of information available online I often find it hard to find all the details about these cultural games.

According to wiki Parcheesi is just a brand name version of Parchisi so it sounds like a good idea.

Parcheesi is a brand-name American adaptation of the Indian cross and circle board game Pachisi, published by Parker Brothers1 and Winning Moves. The game and its variants are known worldwide. A similar game called Parchís is popular in Spain and northern Morocco.[2] Parqués is its Colombian variant. A version is available in the United Kingdom under the name of Ludo.


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Rename tag [coup-the-resistance] to [coup]
Currently we have coup-the-resistance. This reflects the working title of the game during its Kickstarter drive. However, the final title of the game when it was shipped was simply "Coup", as the listing on Board Game Geek shows (it doesn't even list the working title as one of its alternate titles).
Could we please rename the tag from coup-the-resistance to coup? I'm not sure that a tag synonym is necessary, but would not be opposed to having it if others feel it should be there.

Done.
Hmmm, need to fill the space so I'll just note that for six questions to be retagged, I'm not sure a moderator was needed. :)

I thought that only moderators could rename tags, so I'm a bit confused about why they would not be needed.

I don't think anyone can "rename tags" - at least I don't think I can on the site I moderate... maybe I can and just don't know? I bet all he did was remove the [tag:coup-the-resistance] and add [tag:coup].

Moderators have a tool called "merge tags" which removes the old tag and adds the new one.  My point was that for six posts, it isn't overly necessary to go that route. :)

Well, the other reason for the post was to gather community opinion, which I think is a good idea before renaming an entire tag.


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Would B & CG be a good candidate to replace the GameSquad forum "Advanced Squad Leader Rules & Errata"?
To all ASL enthusiasts (and others). While it may seem arrogant to question a set standard, it is certainly not meant that way.
The current ASL Rules & Errata GameSquad forum contains a massive amount of knowledge about the rules of the ASL system. Because of this, it serves as an important source of information within the community. However, the "serial" character of the classic forum concept has some disadvantages in certain cases of which the following are most important:

Threads often wander off-topic
It's difficult to distill the final answer from long threads due to replies that are not answers to the questions
It's difficult to see if there IS a final answer to a question at all
Tagging is not possible

In my opinion the stackexchange concept is a much better way to build a knowledge base of ASL rules questions, that has more value on the long run. And with having more value I mean not having the disadvantages mentioned above.
Argument(s) in favor:

The stackexchange concept (voted answer, reputation system, meta site, etc. etc.) instead of the classic forum concept

Argument(s) against:

B & CG "generic" tags cannot be used for "ASL specific" tagging, so it's useless for that purpose
The rules questions will be separate from the other ASL GameSquad forums
There's already too much knowledge in the current forum
The current forum just works

Your opinions would be welcome.
N.B.: This proposal only concerns the Rules & Errata forum, the others are fine as they are.

the "serial" character of the classic forum concept has some disadvantages

If those are the things you're trying to defeat, that's exactly what we created this software to defeat, too, so it is a very good match.

I'd say that ASL is a good fit for the SE Philosophy, but the amount of material would overwhelm B&CG. Is anyone interested in starting an ASL site in Area 51?

Don't try to start a new SE site, if the Go and Chess proposals are any indication, it will take over a year to get off the ground.  Use B&CG, try to overwhelm us.  I dare you :)

@TimLymington - This has been attempted already in the recent past. By me actually. However, it was not considered a good idea by the Area 51 moderators. There are some threads related to this on the meta sites, if you're interested in the backgrounds.

I think that Board & Card Games Stack Exchange would be a better way to do the rule Q&A, but you're right that there's so much information on the GameSquad forum that it will take a long time to build this up.
Guess we better get started.


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Is it okay to ask if rule books are available online?
Is it on-topic to ask something like:

"Where can I find the rules for [game] online?"
"Rules for [game] in German?"

If so, would it be allowed to link to rule book scans made by fans, or should it only be allowed to link to offical sites (resp. rules published by the game author)?

Yes, you can ask if rules are available online. Yes, you can ask for particular language version of the rules. Both of these questions are answerable, and are a problem that many other people may face.
Even though it is a valid question, it probably isn't a very good one. The answer and solution that other SE members will provide will likely just be a Google search that anyone (including the pending asker) could do themselves.
As for linking to rule book scans, I wouldn't link to non-official rule book scans of the official rule book. Rule books are subject to copyright restrictions, so unless the author/owner had given permission to copy and redistribute rule book scans, then the fans who made the scans are breaking the law (BGG requires permission from the author to upload copyrighted works, so you probably can link to rules posted there.)


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Are questions about Little Wars on-topic here?
In 1913, H.G. Wells wrote Little Wars, a book with a set of rules for a toy soldiers game. It is similar to Kriegsspiel. I have a question about the rules  of it. Are questions about this game on-topic here? I checked the FAQ and this is what it said:

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, it is not played on a board, par se (see page 39). It is normally played in an area sometimes up to 18 feet wide. I normally play on a 8 foot wide (custom-made) table. Does this constitute a board game playable on a table, or is it off-topic here. The game fulfills every other requirement, but this one seemed stretching it. Are questions about Little Wars on-topic here?

Since questions on tabletop miniatures wargames are on-topic, (see, e.g., this) Wells' 'Kriegspiel' is certainly so.
Whether this was the original miniatures wargame or whether various military staffs (or indeed small boys) beat him to it would be another question; but I think that one actually would be off-topic.)

Thanks. I just wanted to makes sure. :)