text:
What syntax construct should be used for rulebook quotes?
When quoting the rules of a game, there are two obvious options:

Block quotes

and
code blocks

Each one has problems.
Block quotes are much more limited in terms of layout.  You can't have custom indentation or arbitrary spacing.
The following has no block quote equivalent:
    mmmmm    mmmmm    mmmmm
    nnnnn    nnnnn    nnnnn

The fanciest thing you can do in block quotes is bullets:

This is the closest block quote equivalent to the above:

mmmmm mmmmm mmmmm
nnnnn nnnnn nnnnn

Meanwhile, code blocks don't look as good on mobile and don't support bold or italics.  Are there general guidelines for when to use each (if ever)?

This is almost a duplicate of Can we agree on a standard format for MTG rules quotes?

@Rainbolt I found that question; it appeared to be entirely about formatting the contents of the quote blocks, not about quote blocks vs code blocks

You misintepreted the other question. The question was "Can we agree on a format for rules quotes?", not "Assuming that we all agree that rules quotes go in quote blocks, can we also agree on the remainder of the format?"

Any time you're quoting more than one line of someone else's text, you should use a block quote. If you really need custom indentation, you can represent that part of the quotation as a code block within a block quote:

This is a code block in a block quote:
    mmmmm   mmmmm   mmmmm
    nnnnn   nnnnn   nnnnn

With bullet points afterward:

Bullet 1
Bullet 2

On this site, you should only use code blocks when the specific indentation and spacing are essential (such as with tables or ASCII art), or when actually writing code.

Pretty much this. The kind of formatting you should use should always match the type of text you are formatting so that things like screen readers can properly parse the text.


text:
Should we burninate [legal]?
The consensus on meta seems to be that legal questions are off-topic for the Board Games site:

Are legal questions on topic?
Are game copyright issues on topic here?
Copyrights and Patents on Board games?
Card Game Legal Questions are off topic (apparently) can this be added to the of topic FAQ?

If that is the case, we should burninate the legal tag.  The existence of this tag and its description implies that question about game copyright are on-topic.

I would suggest that we burninate legal based on the question that you linked and the fact that it is a very bad idea to get legal advice from random people on the internet.
As a note on law.se they actually have a close reason regarding asking for legal advice. Given that a site dedicated to law has a rule like that I feel that a site dedicated to games with no expected legal knowledge should also take a similar stance though we don't need it as a specific close reason at this time.
Policy for questions that clearly ask for specific legal advice

Law.se needs that because there's a line people aren't supposed to cross between asking about the law and asking for legal advice - I don't see that happening here as much as it will on law, but for the record I think we should leave all legal questions to law SE

@Andrew it is still a bad idea for people to ask for legal advice from random people on the internet as well as giving legal advice to random people on the internet.

source: Stack Exchange

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sort: votes


text:
Are questions about playing space on topic?
Are questions about managing a physical play space on topic? I read through the current on-topic page, and it does not mention this topic. It seems like most of the topics are about the games themselves, and there's even a caveat the the game doesn't need to have a physical board (e.g. digital implementations of classic board games are on-topic).
Potential questions of this play space category could include questions about organizing physical pieces/cards, space requirements for playing specific games, and possibly even questions like this question about standing tables/desks for playing board games (which could be off-topic for other reasons, but that's not the point of this meta question). Are any of these kinds of questions on-topic?

What kind of answers would you expect a question like that to attract?

Depends on the question, but I could see techniques for managing game pieces/collections. Answers on how to make complex games states more organized or less confusing. Then stretching it a bit more, secondary aspects regarding keeping a board/card game in good condition for replaying the game (card sleeves? long-term storage?).

(this linked question is a recommendation question, but I could imagine a question asking about table surfaces/materials that are best suited for playing a specific game)

@Jessy why are you leaving that comment on this meta post? If you think your question was wrongly closed, leave a comment on your post or create a new meta question arguing for why you think it should be reopened. The fact that your question is closed as recommendation is not relevant to the discussion here where I'm asking if the other aspect of your question (regarding board game tables/hardware) is on topic.

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


text:
Did the site disable changing the link colour when the question is looked at?
In the past (on all SO sites, including this one), when I clicked on a link it changes colour to signify that I've viewed it.  This allows me easily to see where I left off reading prior in the list as well as if I've viewed questions before.
I noticed today I clicked into a question and there was no colour change on return to list or after hard refresh of the page.  Was this a chance (intentional or otherwise)?
I did not have the same problem on Stack Overflow (main), rpg or arqade (3/3 I checked) so seems to be here specifically, thus assuming not my webbrowser either (which currently is Safari on MacOSX if it matters).

I discovered today that if I type in the URL of the website in Safari this functions correctly but if I use the frequently visited section it doesn't.  That lends me even further to believe this is a Safari bug (tho it may affect other browsers as this feature exists across them).

Nope it is still there for me.

Thanks, I checked and it does work in Chrome.  Weird other SO sites work.  Offchance were you using Safari too?  That'd clue me if it was some sort of setting.

@joedragons No I was using chrome and sometimes I use vivaldi

For the record this workaround worked for me in Safari: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/7490591.  I'm going to assume it's Safari somehow, tho the blue colours are not the same, so I don't understand how it would be.  Maybe a Safari bug.  Thanks for the tip tho, accepting answer.


text:
Should we 'deal' with card games here?
There is a site dedicated to Poker and another one in Area 51 called Casino Gambling. Most likely it will get passed and created.
I have 2 suggestions:
1. Merge everything - Merge all 3 sites, and make this the site for game enthusiasts at any level. It will increase popularity of the site, and avoid scope confusion. Math SE seems to have done this excellently, questions at various levels and subjects are answered.
2. Keep board and card games separate - Make this site into a board game-only site and send all card game questions to a single site that merges Poker SE and Casino Gambling SE also.
Maybe it is too drastic a decision, but defining a rigid scope for each site (that avoids overlaps) might be a bit difficult later on.
If I am wrong, please let me know.

related: http://meta.boardgames.stackexchange.com/questions/995/are-we-as-the-board-and-card-game-stackexchange-too-broad-in-defining-ourselve?rq=1

I need some context here. Are Poker and other casino games currently off topic here? If yes, then I support this. If no, then this question makes no sense (what is there to change?).

@Rainbolt Poker is not off topic here, other casino games it depends on the game. I think ghosts_in_the_code's second proposal involves making them off topic here and requiring them to be posted on a Poker & Casino Gambling SE

http://meta.boardgames.stackexchange.com/questions/1248/are-casino-games-on-topic-here?rq=1

One problem I see with this is it is combining all card games into one group, even if they aren't really similar. Sure Poker and Blackjack may be similar and fall into a similar enough category to be grouped with other Casino games, but what about games like Magic or Dominion? They are both card games, but don't really have anything in common with Casino Games.

Surely you aren't suggesting there is more overlap between Magic and Poker experts than there is between Magic and board game experts?

@bwarner I know there is overlap between Magic and Poker, possibly more than with board games, but what about Dominion? That is a card game, but the overlap in user bases I would guess would heavily favor the board game experts over the Poker experts, where then should you draw the line?

@Diego I was arguing with the OP.  I think there is far more overlap in experts between Magic and board games than between Magic and Poker.

@diego If there is a site for all card games, there could be separate tags for house-rules, gambling strategy and non-gambling card games.

@ghosts_in_the_code There could be tags for that, but why separate them from board games? You say we should split them, but don't really give any reasons why we would want that split.

I can't answer this question until you define what you mean by "card game".  Until you state definitively that a game like Dominion belongs on a site with Poker, rather than a site with Settlers of Catan I prefer to think you don't really mean that.

Let's start with some context. Board and Card Games covers:

Board games
Card games

Including Poker

Other non-digital games

Including Casino Games

If Casino Gaming and Gambling were created, then judging by the proposal it would cover:

Casino games
Gambling

Poker covers:

Poker

Now that context has been established, we can consider the proposal. The goal appears to be to avoid overlap. Overlap in general is not bad. Too much overlap is bad. Total overlap is really bad.
Poker has total overlap with Board and Card Games. Not a single question about Poker would be off topic here. Also, looking at their Area 51 stats, Poker has been in beta for three years and is only hitting 1.5 questions per day. Given the total overlap and the poor question rate, I think Poker would be better served by merging with Board and Card Games. Poker is a card game. This site is called Board and Card Games. Makes sense, right?
There are two parts to Casino Gaming and Gambling: the games and the gambling. Gambling is off topic here. Therefore, if they can get the traffic, they have a good reason to exist separately.

First off, it doesn't look like the Casino Gaming and Gambling is going to be passed, it only has 8 followers and the person that proposed it has said he thinks there isn't much interest in a SE about gambling in general. As for you proposals:

I'm not opposed to merging Poker into here, but they are so until they change their mind it is a rather moot point.
I think this is a bad idea. For one in addition to not wanting to be combined with us Poker doesn't want to be combined with Gambling or Casino Games either, since while their game does regularly take place in a casino it involves more skill than luck and you aren't playing against the house. Also while Poker and some other card games like Blackjack make some sense being combined with Casino Games and Gambling there are plenty other like Dominion and other deck building games, and Magic and other TCG/CCG games that are harder to justify combining.

Here we have a clearly definied scope for our questions:

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

Poker clearly falls into all of those categories, which is why I'm not opposed to them merging into here, however not all casino games fall under that criteria, and gambling is not on topic here.
As Rainbolt says it seems like you are trying to avoid overlap, and I think having some overlap isn't a bad thing. Poker questions can still be asked here, and they generally get answered (the only on that hasn't was more about probability that poker anyway), if someone comes here with a poker question that is off topic we can always migrate the question to the Poker SE.
Gambling however is a completely separate topic from what we cover here, as such I do not support merging that proposal with us or expanding our scope to include it. If it can get enough support it can exist on its own, but not here.

The link to the meta on Poker only says that they don't want their site to die out, it doesn't clear mention that they don't want to merge with Puzzling.

Gambling may not have enough traffic on its own, but if we include it in our scope, we don't lose anything. Those who don't want to see such questions can just opt out of those tags. As the example I gave of Math SE, it would be very simple to say, keep algebra, geometry and stats as 3 different sites, but they have kept them together and it has ensured zero conflict in terms of scope.

@ghosts_in_the_code They don't explicitly say they don't want to merge, but by saying they don't want to die off they are pretty heavily implying it. As for gambling, I think is the possibility that some gambling related questions could be on topic here, but I don't think we should change our scope. The Math SE example is bad because all 3 of those categories are kinds of math, but gambling isn't a kind of game. Gambling can be used with games (and in those cases the questions can be on topic here) but it can also be used in other cases like slot machines that aren't.

There are lots of gambling questions that don't fall into B&CG's on-topic categories. Slot machines come to mind - they fail rules 3 and 4.

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text:
Answer strategy questions at a lower level
When asking/browsing questions on strategy to be used for games like Connect 4, Yahtzee, 2048, etc. I sometimes found people answering by giving a link to a research paper on the game, that most casual players can't understand.
Should answers that actually give 'rules of thumb' that a human can follow, rather than an optimal computer strategy be encouraged and preferred?

Upvote the answers you feel are useful and downvote the answers you feel are not useful. It's really not any more difficult than that.

This question is very similar to this one, I believe there is some good advice there as well.  http://meta.boardgames.stackexchange.com/questions/655/considering-the-number-of-strategy-questions-should-we-write-specific-scope-lim?rq=1

Answers should always suit the question.
If the OP is looking for research, give them research. If they're asking for general strategy, give them understandable things. If they're asking for the perfect strategy without explaining what they mean by that, figure out which one they mean and give them what they want - but they probably do mean the latter.
And on the flip side, if you're dissatisfied with existing questions and answers about any particular game, just ask a new question, making it clear that you're not looking for research papers, so it's not a duplicate of the old one.

But also, because questions and answers are meant to be a resource for other readers, I think posting answers which are at a different level than exactly what is requested by the asker is also okay, in some circumstances.

@DavidZ I tend to think it's best to answer as the OP wanted, and then also go on to provide other information if you think it's helpful, rather than just posting an answer that doesn't really suit them (unless the existing answers have it well-covered). Another option to keep in mind is just posting a new question and answering it yourself. You can link to it from the original question, and that way everyone's happy - people can look at the question that's at the level they want.

Personally I think that providing information at a lower level is a good thing, if all you know is that people say to do certain things it might hurt your play when playing someone who understands why and is able to change play style to counter. On the other hand there needs to be more to an answer then giving a link to an explanation and if the answer does that without attempting to explain and break down what is in the link then it is a very poor answer and probably should be deleted.

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


text:
Why isn't MathJax enabled on this site?
MathJax would be handy for formatting things like the formulas in the following abstract:

We analyze the most commonly used method for shuffling cards. The main result is a simple expression for the chance of any arrangement after any number of shuffles. This is used to give sharp bounds on the approach to randomness: $\frac{3}{2} \log_2 n + \theta$ shuffles are necessary and sufficient to mix up $n$ cards. Key ingredients are the analysis of a card trick and the determination of the idempotents of a natural commutative subalgebra in the symmetric group algebra.

Bayer, Dave; Diaconis, Persi. Trailing the Dovetail Shuffle to its Lair. Ann. Appl. Probab. 2 (1992), no. 2, 294--313. doi:10.1214/aoap/1177005705. http://projecteuclid.org/euclid.aoap/1177005705.

MathJax is off by default, but we can enable it if there's a demonstrated need. How frequently do cases like this occur?

@abbyhairboat "MathJax is off by default [...]" Why? Is it detrimental to performance? Does it takes a significant amount of development to enable? Your comment would make a wonderful answer to the question if it was explained. The question wasn't "Please enable it." but "Why is it disabled to begin with?"

@Rainbolt, there's been a few questions about probability on this site. Since we cover poker, M:TG deckbuilding theory, and Hi Ho Cherry-O here, probability and math go with us. I'll cheerfully admit that we don't break out the math on the vast majority of our questions, but there's still a few that could use it.

@PaulMarshall Why was that comment directed at me?

Basically, the reason I asked abby about her comment is that you can't only cover the pros. Sure, we could use MathJax. But we need to know the downsides too, so we can weigh the cons and the pros against one another. If we use MathJax on 10% of questions but it decreases performance by 20% on all pages, well that's just not good.

@Rainbolt (4 comments up) yes, it is detrimental to performance. My experience suggests that it adds an extra half second or more to page load times, depending on the speed of the client computer, though I'm sure there are more reliable studies about this. It may also have some impact on the servers.

@DavidZ Great. Do you want to post that as an answer? Coming from me, it's speculation. You seem to have experience to back it up.

@Rainbolt well, most of what I know comes from the discussions we had with the SE team when deciding whether to enable MathJax on [physics.SE]; I wouldn't really call it experience. I don't think I have much of anything useful to add to your answer.

There is a trade off with performance. Think about it: if performance was a non-issue, MathJax would be enabled on every site. Commenter David Z suggested (don't hold him to it) that enabling MathJax "adds an extra half a second or more, depending on the speed of the client computer".
Is it worth hurting the performance of every single question in order to make the math prettier on a select few? Not in my opinion.
Also, the abstract you quoted is categorized under The Annals of Applied Probability on a mathematics and statistics website (Project Euclid). Is Board and Card Games the best place to ask a question about that? Perhaps it receive better answers on mathematics.stackexchange.com.

Your reasoning is sound, but as you said we shouldn't hold commenter David Z on the statement that it adds at least a half second. Is there any way that we can get more reliable information on how much of a performance hit it really takes?

@Thunderforge No, I don't, but common sense tells me that running more Javascript on a page will take longer than running less Javascript on a page.

true, but if we can condirm that it adds something negligible (say, 10 ms), then I'd say it's worth turning on.

@Thunderforge If the performance hit is negligible, and if there exists a significant number of questions that don't belong on Mathematics SE that require complex mathematical illustrations, then MathJax should be enabled. I think that the burden is on the one requesting MathJax to prove both of those conditionals.


text:
Do specific mechanics in MTG need their own tags?
It seems that MTG has a ton of sub-tags that cover very specific categories. Are they really all necessary? I am not referring to alternate formats (as they can be seen as entirely different games), but instead I am referring to stuff like the keyword regenerate and "face down cards." Are they really necessary?
Here are some examples:

mtg-regenerate
mtg-indestructible
mtg-commander-damage
mtg-planeswalkers
mtg-face-down

I think they can be useful as they can help to find questions and answers about them.

See also https://boardgames.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1756/why-the-recent-addition-of-mtg-sub-tags


text:
Where would questions about the lore of a board or card game go?
I want to find out more about the lore of a specific card game (specifically MTG). Would this site be where I would ask questions regarding it, as they are questions regarding to a board game, or would I be better off asking them on the Fantasy Stack Exchange?

Lore questions on here are fine by current policy. They are also on topic for Sci-Fi & Fantasy SE as long as the game has science fiction or fantasy elements; SFF has a MTG tag.  You may ask on either one, since Stack Exchange network practice acknowledges sites can have overlapping topicality and allows that you can ask on whichever you want that services the topic. (Please don't ask it on both though, since the network community frowns on cross-posting.)
We've touched on this twice before and the community's come out firmly in favour both times:

Should game-adjacent questions be on-topic?
Are questions about flavor acceptable?

We're interested in board & card games but we're not limiting ourselves exclusively to their gameplay and have found it useful to explore areas around our games too.
I'm not sure how much ground we've covered in this vicinity though. Many of our games of course don't have lore at all, or not any lore that extends beyond the game materials we play with. In Magic: the Gathering specifically, which you've asked about, I could find three lore questions, and only the first one is directly asking about the nature of the lore:

Does the MtG lore have an official explanation for banned cards?
Where can I find the story of Magic the Gathering?
Are there Magic: The Gathering lore books for the recent blocks?

Stack Exchange works best when dealing with actual situations people face, and that's true for establishing meta policy as well. If lore questions turn out to be a problem subject, something we can't handle well or elect that we shouldn't handle, more lore questions on the site will help us discover what we need to do. If they're fine for the site, then all's well.
Please do ask away about game lore here if you'd like.


text:
Congratulations, you're no longer in Beta!
This site started private beta before July 2012, so it is no longer "beta", it is a full site by our definition. We've removed the word "beta" from your site banner because we believe that you aren't really a beta site any more, even if you don't get ten questions per day.

What this means for you:

the "Beta" is removed from your banner
the site is moved to the "Launched" sites list on Area 51 - which will also remove the A51 info box from the right sidebar
retain beta reputation levels
full-site elections will be delayed but will be scheduled eventually

This is the start of a process that we are already discussing internally and will be bringing to the network for public discussion once the plan is finalized. My hope is that this will mean the end of the monolith we currently refer to as "Graduation" in favor of a well-defined set of small targets to achieve the various elements that made up "Graduation".
I'm sure you have many questions, please feel free to ask and I'll answer what I can. It helps me out a lot if you can limit answers to focus on a single question/subject rather than asking a dozen questions in one answer.
Please feel free to follow the MSE discussion for more background on this decision. You can ask questions either here or there; I'll try to keep up with all of them. Your mods also have some info, so they may be answering in my stead.
Thanks so much for your patience and stay tuned!

Thank you!! I know this work has been a long time coming; I'm really glad we finally made it.

When do we get a proper logo?

@Zags I don't have an answer for you at the moment. We're already dealing with a backlog of sites waiting for designs from the graduations we've done since 2015 and we're still trying to decide when a site qualifies for a design moving forward. Leaving beta won't guarantee a design/logo.

@Zags: The comments to the same notice on History has some additional detail on the delays.

Related reading: Is this our chance to “graduate”? Is this something we want?

Related meta reading: Experimenting with Pro Tempore elections also Let's break up with “Graduation” and remove a bunch of “Beta” labels

Is there an eta for other graduation benefits such as being able to migrate questions to another site?

We won the longest beta award!
Can we have a gold beta badge now :P.
O wait, the longest road only adds 2 victory points.

I am glad to see this as I am sure others are that this is happening not only for this site but for other long term beta sites that are part of the Stack Exchange Community. I am looking forward to when the backlog gets to our site and we can work on a new theme and everything else that comes with graduating from beta.
I also hope that initial graduation process and removal of the beta tag can help spur growth of the community and possibly lead to partnering with other websites that are part of the large board and card gaming community around the web.
As a side note I would like to thank the hard work of the moderators and all the community members for the hard work in maintaining this site. While I am not sure of the election process for moderators I hope that all of the current ones are asked to stay on as they have done an amazing job over the years!
A side question, outside elections when are we scheduled to get other graduation benefits such as being able to migrate questions to other sites?

"Full-site elections" implies that all the moderators would be elected. Current moderators could still decide to self-nominate and might be elected, of course. (That is, it'd be up to the community to ask us to stay on.)

@Cascabel Thank you for the clarification, I was under the impression that we would keep the current group (from those that wanted to stay on) and just elect new ones if more where needed.

Yeah, I know they did that for sites that were remaining in beta, but I think they were always called "pro tempore elections".


text:
2021: a year in moderation

As we say goodbye to the old year and welcome the new one, we have a tradition of sharing moderation stats for the preceding calendar year.
As most of you here are aware, sites on the Stack Exchange network are moderated somewhat differently to other sites on the web:

We designed the Stack Exchange network engine to be mostly self-regulating, in that we amortize the overall moderation cost of the system across thousands of teeny-tiny slices of effort contributed by regular, everyday users.
-- A Theory of Moderation

That doesn't eliminate the need for having moderators altogether, but it does mean that the bulk of moderation work is carried out by regular folks. Every bit of time and effort y'all contribute to the site gives you access to more privileges you can use to help in this effort, all of which produce a cumulative effect that makes a big difference.
So as we say goodbye to 2021, let us look back at what we accomplished as a community... by looking at some exciting stats. Below is a breakdown of moderation actions performed on Board & Card Games over the past 12 months:

Action
Moderators
Community¹

Users suspended²
0
11

Users destroyed³
5
0

Users deleted
1
0

Tasks reviewed⁴: Suggested Edit queue
10
266

Tasks reviewed⁴: Reopen Vote queue
0
75

Tasks reviewed⁴: Low Quality Posts queue
11
423

Tasks reviewed⁴: Late Answer queue
4
210

Tasks reviewed⁴: First questions queue
9
104

Tasks reviewed⁴: First Post queue
1
494

Tasks reviewed⁴: First answers queue
6
61

Tasks reviewed⁴: Close Votes queue
13
405

Questions unprotected
0
1

Questions reopened
6
9

Questions protected
0
14

Questions migrated
0
1

Questions merged
1
0

Questions flagged⁵
0
98

Questions closed
11
111

Question flags handled⁵
37
61

Posts undeleted
3
14

Posts locked
1
15

Posts deleted⁶
45
312

Posts bumped
0
130

Comments undeleted
2
0

Comments flagged
11
177

Comments deleted⁷
214
260

Comment flags handled
129
60

Answers flagged
9
626

Answer flags handled
188
450

All comments on a post moved to chat
2
0

Footnotes
¹ "Community" here refers both to the membership of Board & Card Games without diamonds next to their names, and to the automated systems otherwise known as user #-1.
² The system will suspend users under three circumstances: when a user is recreated after being previously suspended, when a user is recreated after being destroyed for spam or abuse, and when a network-wide suspension is in effect on an account.
³ A "destroyed" user is deleted along with all that they had posted: questions, answers, comments. Generally used as an expedient way of getting rid of spam.
⁴ This counts every review that was submitted (not skipped) - so the 2 suggested edits reviews needed to approve an edit would count as 2, the goal being to indicate the frequency of moderation actions. This also applies to flags, etc.
⁵ Includes close flags (but not close or reopen votes).
⁶ This ignores numerous deletions that happen automatically in response to some other action.
⁷ This includes comments deleted by their own authors (which also account for some number of handled comment flags).
Further reading:

Wanna see how these numbers have changed over time? We posted a similar report here last year: 2020: a year in moderation

You can also check out this report on other sites

Or peruse detailed information on the number of questions closed and reopened across all sites

Wishing everyone a happy 2022! ^_^

It's cool to see some of these stats released, thanks!


text:
Where do we request changes to the site?
I don't so much have a question as a proposal that I'd really like to see effected. I'd like to argue for and push for longer tags to enable clear full titles with expansions, as squashing under the limit and having to clarify the game name in my body is annoying. Where is the proper place to do this? I figured meta is obviously good for questions but guessing it's not the proper place to outright propose changes such as these.  Is simply tagging it feature-request sufficient? Didn't seem so.

Are there any specific examples you've found where the 25 character limit has caused problems?

Well, board games often are long names and clunky to shorten. Why do it? to improve readability? The argument for concise variables in programming works for me because they are embedded in a 'sentence' structure of sorts in code logic and can get really verbose in that context, but, here, the tags are typed once and neatly arranged in one place. I feel there's a clear way to identify and search when we're expected to simply type some or all of the game title instead of having potential conflicts or incorrect matches when someone searches settlers looking for a different game.

I understand your reasoning, but I'm curious to know if there were specific situations that you've run into where you felt that there definitely needed to be more characters. Was there a certain game?

My previous comment is rooted without knowledge of how the tag system works with regard to searching of course. I think it just feels simple to write Arkham Horror Curse Of The Dark Pharaoh and see hits specifically related to it and how many questions pertaining to it, than search for titles that intersect and collecting questions about different games under the same tag potentially.  I read it was a hard limit to change in the codebase so the gripe is minor enough that it sounded not worth pursuing in the end.

In answer to your followup, I don't think any situation made me feel i had to have 25+ characters. It was mostly just not liking seeing an abbreviation for a title that wasn't the title of the game. Maybe the search function for tags is loose enough that they will catch minor problems and provide good results regardless.

One situation that recently came up, I wanted to add 'the-captain-is-dead-adrift' (expansion to The Captain Is Dead), but couldn't because of the limit, so I had added 'the-captain-is-dead-ep2' but this seems clunky. What do people do if ep2 doesn't even fit? Do I have separately 'the-captain-is-dead' and 'adrift' or 'expansion-adrift'? Obviously if there is a game called adrift, there is now a conflict that obscures the tag. The tag I added asked me to create a tag wiki, and I didn't like the thought of creating one for two conflicting possibilities. I'll probably go with 'expansion-adrift'.

I also notice that when I change it to "captain-is-dead-adrift" (removing the "the" just to make it fit), searching with "the captain is dead" fails to find the question.  That seems like a quality of the search feature that doesn't jive with having to improvise (cut off words, abbreviate) the tags like this. If I had to abbreviate something like "Curse of the Dark Pharaoh" to "Curse of Dark Pharaoh" to fit a tag restriction, I'd hope the search feature would be a little looser and trigger a hit despite the query containing a term that wasn't in the tag.

That does make sense. Since this question already has an accepted answer, perhaps it would be good to raise a new question if it is difficult or impossible to find specific games using search because of the tagging.

This is the spot.  The site admins will see everything tagged feature-request.  There is no guarantee that they will respond, though.
This has been status-declined on meta.stackexchange.com in the past - Raising the 25 chars limit for tags

Thanks, I also see the issue being more relevantly put forth here http://meta.gaming.stackexchange.com/questions/1037/increase-tag-length-limit-to-30-characters. I guess this will not be happening.


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Requesting tag for AnyDice
Many game designers and boardgame fans use Anydice as an analytics tool... There are questions regarding it specifically applied to board games. RPG SE has an anydice tag, but asking "RPG-looking, but not really" questions regarding Anydice there feels indirect.
I think we could use an anydice tag.

Tags can only be created by using them in a question's tag field. You can't create them in advance. So the tag will be created when:

someone submits a new question and adds the tag anydice to it, or
someone edits an existing question and adds the tag anydice to it.

On this site, you get the create tags privilege when you have 150 reps. With your current amount of reps, the edit would need to reviewed by a moderator or by another users who has enough reps (you need 1,000 reps to directly edit other people's contributions without review).

On board games.se, because we're a "beta" site, our privileges have different rep progression — it'll take 150 rep to be able to add a brand new tag, and 1,000 rep to edit freely without review. 2,000 is the normal amount for unreviewed editing though on non-beta sites.

@doppelgreener Thanks. I've added links to the relevant privileges in the help centre.

Looks good!


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Can we implement an easier way to tag Magic cards in posts?
The [mtg:cardname] syntax is better than nothing, but truthfully it's more trouble than it's worth, particularly with posts that have a large number of cardnames in them.
I think we need either a much shorter syntax (1-2 characters rather than 6), e.g.:

{Dark Confidant}
  m-DarkConfidant
  $Dark Confidant$

Or alternatively some sort of automating tool that just checks your post for cardnames and autolinks them. So you could write your post, then click the autoformat button, and ideally it would show a modal with "The following valid cardnames were found in your post, have we made any mistakes in identifying them?" and the user would have an opportunity to maybe uncheck one if it's a false positive.

Not that it strictly matters, but speaking as a JavaScript engineer I know I personally would enjoy implementing this as a feature, would be fun.

Really, it's that much of a problem for you to add 6 extra characters?

On 30 cardnames? Yes. Yes it is. But you're the high-rep user with editing privileges here, I suppose if you enjoy adding these to everybody's posts, then who am I to interrupt your leisure work.

By the way, it took me less time to edit the card links into your question than it has to write an answer for this question.

I'd prefer no syntax at all, with links rendered on a per tag basis. If the question is tagged magic-the-gathering, automatically link all Magic: the Gathering cards. Likewise with Pokémon and Yu-Gi-Oh!.

Brilliant idea! That handles murgatroid99's objections regarding this not only being an MtG site.

Even if restricted to questions with the MTG tag, there is still one issue with zero-syntax linking. It's a problem that you can even occasionally spot in articles on the official MTG site: there are a few cards, mostly instants and sorceries, whose names are single English words, some of which may be used in ordinary prose, not intended to refer to the card. If links are generated without any syntax, those words would become erroneously linked as well.

That's why I proposed a pop-up with a checklist saying "Are all of these intended to be MtG cardlinks?" And you can just remove any false positives like that.

In the rare circumstance where a question has to link 30 cards, it would be more efficient to simply compose the question in a text editor and use search and replace than to come up with a shorter but less useful syntax.

TL;DR: A shorter syntax and built in automatic linking both probably will not work well. But an extension or other client side tool that automatically adds links in the editor would be great.
New Syntax
On the surface, it seems that it would be reasonable to make card linking easier by shortening the syntax. But in fact, we cannot have any shorter syntax without causing problems, either there or elsewhere. There are three relevant pieces of the current syntax, and I contend that they are all necessary.
The mtg identifier
This site is not just a Magic the Gathering Q&A site. Those questions need to coexist with questions about other board and card games. Imagine that in the future some other TCG becomes popular enough that we want short links for its cards too. With the current syntax, we can just extend it naturally: [pok:cardname] for Pokemon, or [ygo:cardname] for Yu-Gi-Oh. But if the syntax for linking to the card doesn't contain the game name/abbreviation, then we'd have to come up with a new syntax for each. Even if that never happens, a syntax without the card name still precludes anyone else on the site using that to mean anything else. For example, if we used {cardname} as the new syntax, then we'd be saying "Nobody else can surround any text in curly braces unless they want a MTG card link".
The [] delimiters
The code parsing a post needs some way to determine where a card name begins and ends. Two of your suggestions, like the current syntax, have delimiters that cannot appear in card names, which makes that problem very simple. The other indicates the end with a space, with words separated by capitalizing the first letter of each. But that can cause its own problems with some cards. m-AcolyteOfTheInferno, for example, would probably be rendered incorrectly as Acolyte Of The Inferno, and if you forget to capitalize the linking words, it probably just won't work at all.
The : separator
As long as we need the mtg identifier, we need some separator so that we know that the game identifier is done and that we are in a card short link instead of a regular link.
Automatic card linking
It would be an even worse idea to add automatic card linking to the question editor. I mentioned above that MTG questions have to coexist with other board and card game questions; well, our editor is the same as every other site's editor. Adding that feature would require either adding it network-wide or branching the editor to add it just to this site.
User-side automatic card linking
There is another option. Someone could develop a Chrome Extension (for example) with a button that replaces card names with card links when writing or editing a post, so that you don't have to do it manually. This would be quite useful, and would not require anyone else to change anything.

I've seen automatic card linking completely destroy text on dedicated MTG sites. It would be horrific here. (Some card names are common words. Some card names are substrings of other card names. :O )

One thing that should be remembered is that you are talking about saving some users from having to type in 6 extra characters when posting or editing a post versus a programmers time to implement the changes. While it would be nice is the amount of work that it would take worth a developers limited time when you are talking about a low traffic beta site?
When looking at the big picture you see there are a lot of big changes currently happening on the Stack Exchange network as a whole to improve the overall user experience and I would wager that would have so little in return that it isn't even worth considering until this site graduates beta and they have time to evaluate how much of a benefit this would give users.


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For archival purposes, does this SE have a mechanism for highlighting a question may be outdated?
While reviewing a question regarding Magic the Gathering, I came to the realization that my downloaded copy of the Comprehensive rules was outdated. In one of the recent updates, they inserted "701.6 Create."
Aside from the date stamp, are there other mechanisms to queue to readers that the answers may be slightly out of date?
Related: for those with answers on Magic the Gathering, or others that are interested in the archival strength of the SE, the rules changes may cause need for answer edits.

It is actually possible for an answer to be out of date when it is posted if the author has outdated information which makes it harder to determine what is outdated and what isn't

There is no system for marking posts as "potentially out of date".
Clearly, that sort of thing would be hard to automate; in principle, every answer is potentially out of date.
If it was possible to manually mark a question or answer as out of date, it would always be better to comment or edit with the necessary correction.
In addition, as diego points out, there is a bounty reason

Current answers are outdated: The current answer(s) are out-of-date and require revision given recent changes

So if you find a question with significantly out-of-date answers, you can post a bounty to encourage people to update the answers.

I understand the complication in automating such a thing, largely since there isn't integration between SE and Wizards. Mostly, I just balked at the "ask a question" button, while wanting to recommend people check their answers. Planning on how I'll cycle through mine. It is regrettable answers aren't associated with a tag, like "mtg-rules" for easy  searching.

Probably at least 90% of the answers on questions with the tag [magic-the-gathering] are rules answers.

It also might be useful to point out that one of the bounty reasons is "Current answers are outdated:The current answer(s) are out-of-date and require revision given recent changes." So if you find an answer that is out of date you can create a bounty to have someone else come and update it if you don't want to.


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Request a tag for "Fallout-board game"
A new board game is out, Fallout Board Game which I think needs a tag. More specifically, I was planning to as a question regarding it, but cannot since there is no tag.


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Do questions about Jane's Naval Wargame fall on topic?
There is this "board game" called Jane's Naval Wargame. It is an extremely large simulation wargame played by two teams in an extremely large area. Do questions about it fall on-topic here?

Related: Are questions about 'Little Wars' on topic here?.

Depending on the Jane's Naval Wargame you're playing, it may meet the question guidelines detailed in the help center.
I am aware of a "Jane's Naval Wargame" that includes using miniatures, made of paper tokens, based off the specifications detailed in Janes. It is played on a combination of nautical Charts and Topographic land maps, and follows a turn based structure, where mission orders are given, then processed.
The short coming I expect you might run into is a low population of individuals that use this site and are aware of the intricacies of the game. To my knowledge, it is mostly played by military offices and NCOs, in an academic or leadership development environment.

I don't know anything about the game and a brief google search didn't convince me that I'd found that right version of "Jane's Naval Wargame" so I'll drop back to our canned response, in our faq.
How do we define Board Games?

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

When in doubt, just ask the question on the main site.  It might get closed as off-topic.  That's not a big deal.  Thanks!


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How do I filter out all the *Magic: the Gathering* questions?
Suppose I am not interested in Magic: the Gathering. How do I filter out all the Magic: the Gathering questions?

If you go to your Preferences page at the bottom of the page there is a place to put in favorite and ignored tags. Put magic-the-gathering (and any other Magic tags like mtg-commander) in there, and if you want to hide them completly choose the 'Hide questions in your ignored tags' option.

I do this with [bridge] because it's incomprehensible to me. It works well. \o/ (no offense meant to bridge players.)

Ignoring [magic-the-gathering] should be sufficient to hid every question about Magic. If there is a question tagged [mtg-commander] but not [magic-the-gathering], that is an error that should be corrected.

You could also add mtg-* to the ignored tags, which should ignore all tags beginning with mtg-. (Caveat: In case a game’s name starts with "mtg-", and it’s not related to MtG, it would be blocked, too, of course.)

Alternative to going to your preferences page, is to hover over any question's tags on any page until the hover tooltip opens up. Then, click the Star twice to turn it into a red cross. This effectively puts it in your ignored tags.


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Is there any interest in creating a recurring day for Code-Golf-esque MTG questions?
Topic
I would like to discuss the idea to include Code-Golf-esque Magic the Gathering style questions on the B&CG StackExchange.
Background Info
What is now the Programming Puzzles & Code Golf StackExchange, started off as the code-golf tag on StackOverflow. The Question Asker would post challenge questions with potentially many answers, and users would compete to post the best answer according to fairly strict requirements. I believe it might be fun to post similar style questions focused around MTG.
Proposal
Would a similar tag be appropriate for B&CG StackExchange?
If yes:

Whether this should live on Live or the Meta (or similar to Code-golf where questions are originally asked on the meta, refined/tweaked and then posted to be answered on the actual StackExchange)
What sort of restrictions should be placed on when the tag can be used (anytime or once a week type thing)?
What type of questions would be On-topic (Build a deck around a specific theme/interaction/card, try to build an instant win combo with X card, do X with only this colour, or some other style)
For each On-topic question a set of requirements that would be used to evaluate answers (Win in least amount of turns, least amount of mana spent/CMC of cards, most upvotes wins, etc.)
Any other ideas you may have on how this could work

If no, that is ok too :)
Though it would be helpful if you leave an answer with a reason (Too off-topic, not something you are interested in, etc.)

Puzzling.SE does have some questions that deal with Magic that would probably fit this style of question

@diego Interesting, I had not seen those questions on Puzzling.SE previous, just flipping through the ones you linked it seems like people not knowing the gamerules that well might be a common problem there. Seems like something that would be less of an issue here on B&CG

I would like to point out that asking for a deck to be built is just generally too broad, even with restrictions.

@murgatroid99 I agree it is usually too broad since there are so many possible answers. In order for deck building questions to be answerable there would have to be some sort of defined criteria for judging them. Code-golf does a good job of reducing the near infinite amount of answers (in nearly any programming language) by judging based on byte count. I'm not sure what would be a good analog for "Lowest byte count wins" in a magic deck though, so deck building questions might just need to remain off-topic...

Asking someone to build a complete deck is more like asking for a complete piece of software on Stack Overflow than asking a code golf question. You can't just call it a puzzle and make it OK.

(Note: these are my personal opinions, and should not be construed as describing policy)
I do not believe that this type of question is well suited to this site. These questions come in two primary varieties, and there are issues with each
Puzzle Questions
These generally provide a board state (plus cards in hand, etc.), and ask how to win during the current turn, or some similar task. If designed correctly, there is usually one correct answer that any reader can verify.
The problem with these questions is that they screw with the intended purpose of this site. In theory, the asker "should only ask practical, answerable questions based on actual problems that you face", and the answers answer that question in order to help solve that problem. With puzzle questions, the asker is creating a game for the answerers to play.
Keeping this in mind, some questions in this category are perfectly fine if framed in a certain way. We have had questions that ask "Given this board state, can I win this turn?" But questions like this should focus more on how cards and/or rules interact than on enumerating all possible lines of play and determining whether any of them resulted in dealing exactly enough damage to the opponent.
Optimization questions
These are questions that provide some restrictions that may narrow the card pool, then ask for the best outcome that can be constructed from those cards (e.g. deal the most damage, draw the most cards, win in the fewest turns).
These kinds of questions can have more of a place here, but many varieties are too broad or have other problems. Even if there is a restriction like "only use blue cards" or "only use sorceries", there are still thousands of cards to consider. And if you narrow it too far, you risk turning the question into a game of "figure out which card I was thinking of", or running into the same problems that puzzle questions have.
Code Golf
Code golf is different in some ways that allows it to avoid these problems. For one thing, in most programming languages, the number of building blocks is relatively small, and much smaller than the number of Magic cards. And the relevant languages are Turing complete, which means that you can do (almost) anything with those building blocks. This means that there is the potential of an endless variety of questions, and that anyone with algorithm design skills and even cursory knowledge of any programming language can provide an answer with relatively little additional research.

Thanks for taking the time to write an answer. My intention with the question  was to gauge interest and pick brains for potential pitfalls. As much as you specify you aren't describing policy, your position as a high-Rep user (and ♦) does add a bit of weight to your answer.

For what it's worth, Magic: The Gathering is Turing Complete, but it would be pretty lousy for golfing questions.


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Should MTG card links be added to more than the first instance of the card name?
On this question, the question came up what's the recommended practice for linking cards...

link only the first instance, and text-only references to the card name for all following mentions
link every single instance of the card

The way I've seen it done most often is to link all cards, which (as in the question referenced above) tends to make the post more useable, and more easily identify text from card names. However on other platforms such as Wikipedia, the recommended practice is to only link the first instance within given reason.
Should MTG card links be added to more than the first instance of the card name?

Can you link to an example of a question (other than the one you edited) in which every instance of every card name is linked? I don't believe that this is what I've generally seen, or how I have generally edited posts.

https://boardgames.meta.stackexchange.com/q/1445/409

@murgatroid99: The very related link Jefromi posten (and the question linked within) aside, I'm actually having trouble finding examples, whereas the practice of linking exactly the first instance and nothing else is overwhelmingly omnipresent, making me doubt my initial impression. I suppose I picked up habit on a few posts I've seen one after another a while ago, giving me the impression of being the way to go...

@TheThirdMan or perhaps others are editing out the extra links as was mentioned by Gendolkari in the linked question?

@Malco: Possibly, but either way, it's the dominant practice by a great margin now that I look at it.

I am more in favour of only Linking the first instance of the card as per Wikipedia standards.
One thing that I find when looking at questions or answers that have every instance of a card linked, is that all the blue can get a little visually overwhelming. I find it is a lot easier to accidentally miss a link if there are a lot in a question or answer. I believe that it is a better idea to link cards only once, so that each link stands out better individually.
Additionally I believe that additional links is just duplicating information, as in if you clicked the link the first time it is unlikely that you will need to click it again. Though it might be handy to have the link there to click if you skipped it the first time around. I think it will be easy enough to go back and find it if you have to, if there are less links overall.
As far as I understand the choice of linking every time, or just the first time is probably pretty dependent on personal preference. But there is some reasoning behind when to duplicate and when not to duplicate links out there.
Edit: As per the comments I think best course of action is to use your common sense. Try to reduce the number of duplicated links as much as possible, but if linking the card again makes for a better reader experience then go for it. This shouldn't be a hard and strictly enforced rule, more just a guideline for better readability.

Just my 2cents, it would probably be worth getting some of the more active MTG users to contribute since they are the ones that it will affect the most.

Note that the Wikipedia standards do leave room for extra links when it'll help (e.g. infoboxes, separate from the main flow), so I'd say here, use your best judgment. If you're repeating the name a bunch (You attack with your X, they block with their Y, you activate X's ability, giving X double-strike, ...) then it's obviously excessive, but if it's in very different parts of the answer, far enough apart that the reader might've missed or forgotten the previous link, maybe it's helpful.

@Jefromi I guess like most things it boils down to "Try to do X, but use your common sense". Though it is handy to have a meta post in case someone wants to know the generally accepted practice.

To clarify, are you proposing only linking the first instance on the page, or per question/answer?

@JonTheMon: Personally, I'd say per question/answer. Due to search engine and anchor link redirections to specific answers, it makes little sense to assume that any reader will start at the top of the page.

@TheThirdMan Agreed, good answers should be able to stand on their own if possible anyway.

Normally I'd say if it's been a page or two, an extra link is rather welcome. I hate scrolling up to the top to click on something I've now decided to further research. That said, if your answer is more than a page or two, you might want to Pascalify it. Also, when making a list of cards, I'd repeat the link so someone can middle click down the list.

@corsiKa does have a point. There are times where some questions or answers do take a lot of text, particularly those that involve the interaction of a lot of rules which are copped into the answer. We may not want to discourage relinking cards once we get to that point, particularly considering users on the mobile app will see less content at a time and will need to scroll back quite a ways to find the link again.

@Andrew feel free to use your better judgement when writing or editing the "one link per instance"  is more of a style guideline, no one is going to yell at you if you link more than once and it makes sense. That said in regards to multiple page answers, those should be few and far between in the first place, so you should treat those as a special case from the get go.

@Malco True, though I do have a few answers that are long text walls, if you need three rules that is alot of text, and that's on top of explaining the significance of each, plus I've had questions asking how to deal with a situation and laid out all the options for handling it, like my answer to this.

I'd encourage us to adopt a style of "link only the first time, but feel free to break this rule if it aids comprehension to do so."
Like, if you mention a card once and then mention it in a different context four paragraphs later, linking to it again is no big deal. Because readers might forget about the card's little details by the time they get to the second reference, or skim to the part of the answer that seems most relevant to them. That's not a link anyone should remove for the sake of making the site "more proper."
However, linking every single instance is likely to overload the reader, as Malco points out, and it actually gets in the way of understanding by making it harder to recognize "oh, I just read about these two cards already two sentences ago, only this third card is a new thing I have to look at."
That means that, in the overwhelming majority of cases, you're probably going to only link once. Since most of our answers aren't, like, ten paragraph essays. (Some, however, are ten-paragraph essays.)

For example, if you've got a decklist, it makes sense to linkify all of them instead of going through to identify which are first references.
E.g.

"Why is Jace, the Mind Sculptor, banned in a bunch of formats?"
[paragraph of text discussing CawBlade] Note the interaction of Jace's Brainstorm-like ability with other cards, like Squadron Hawks, which can functionally turn "draw 3, replace 2" into a pure "draw 3."
…
[later on, you present a modern-day Legacy Countertop/Miracles list to explain how JTMS holds up even in an environment where average card power is amazingly high so the rest of the deck doesn't need filler just to make Jace better]
Spells:

4 Brainstorm <-- might as well link this even though you did already
4 Ponder
2 Counterspell
…

+1 I'm on board with this. Linking to every instance is definitely unnecessary, but there have been times I've felt it's totally necessary to link to a card for the second time for contextual reasons, so I dislike the idea of disallowing that.

+1 this makes sense to me, basically just a better written version of what I was trying to say :p


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Is this question on topic and if so, what's the appropriate tag?
This question was recently asked and I was looking for a better tag as identify-this-game doesn't really suit it. I went through several pages of tags and couldn't find anything suitable.
I then checked the meta of what is on topic, and I wasn't sure if it's even on topic? It could be coming across as a game recommendation question, but it's not clear cut.
Is it on topic? If so, what tag should it use?

Seems extremely broad to me

Found the answer, looks like this meta question and answer pretty much confirms what I thought


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Should Magic The Gathering have it's own StackExchange?
So I've been browsing Board & Card Games for a while now, I've used it to ask many questions and try to help when I can. I've noticed that Magic The Gathering is probably around 75% of the content on this site. Should this warrant a separate site specifically for MTG?
Disclaimer: I love MTG also, it's just that it seems to overshadow the rest of the games out there.

This was proposed recently and declined as 'This proposal would tend to drain audience from an existing Stack Exchange site.'

Also I know it seems like Magic is a lot of our content, but questions tagged [tag:magic-the-gathering] are only about 30% of the questions on the site (2215 out of 7212).

@diego: Ok thanks for that, I searched quickly and didn't see this proposal. I agree that draining users from one site to another isn't optimal.
Also, I didn't do the math, just based on personal opinion of what shows up. Thanks for the info.

One other thing we have to take into account is that this site has a large established base of users, reputation, and duplicate closure targets in the [tag:magic-the-gathering] tag.

Good question!
There are reasonable criteria for suggesting that Magic should have its own Stack Exchange — such as a desire to attract a community of Magic-focused players who don't identify with the "board games" label — but, from the perspective of this site, its presence isn't a problem.
Here's my argument for why that's the case:
1. Magic isn't drowning out the other content.
For example, I've got Magic as a favorite tag, so here's the front page for me right now:

That's about a third of the content. Someone who's not a fan of the game might grumble a little, but if they block the tag they'll easily be able to browse the site and see questions they're more interested in.
In contrast, over on RPG Stack Exchange, I've got tags related to D&D/D20 (D&D3.5, Pathfinder, D20 system, D&D4, D&D5) on my ignore list, and here's where that gets me:

This is what actually dominating the content looks like.
So why doesn't D&D have its own Stack Exchange, then? Well, that brings us to our next point...
2. In the view of this site, Magic is a part of the broader "board games" ecosystem and community.
A lot of the board-game questions are about what you could call "designer board games" or "hobby board games" — board games that appeal to fairly dedicated players, who enjoy them as a hobby above and beyond the average person's exposure to board games. Many people in that community have played Magic, whether casually or devotedly. Many hobby board game shops are only able to survive because they sell Magic products and run Magic events to get people into the stores.
There's some tradeoffs there: some folks will argue that you could build a bigger or better community if you focused on Magic players who think of themselves exclusively as Magic players. But this site does clearly demonstrate that "board-games" people are happy to ask and answer Magic questions.
And that overlap means that...
3. Magic questions help us get answers to other questions.
By its nature, B&CG isn't a site that attracts a lot of "generic" questions. (There are some: about how to design games, about customizing game components such as miniatures, about structuring board game tournaments.)
It's actually really, really helpful to have a popular game or two that create a constant trickle of questions. Because it means a significant portion of the "expert" user base has something to do on the site every week. This keeps them coming back so they're around when questions about other areas of expertise arise.
Like, imagine you have a user who's really knowledgeable about Magic, Carcassone, Netrunner, and historical recreations of ancient board games. Having that user regularly visit to answer, vote on, or just skim the Magic questions means their eyes are there when questions about the rarer topics come up.
It's similar to how Java and C++ constitute a huge volume of Stackoverflow questions, but splitting either into its own site would hurt Stackoverflow because the people answering Java or C++ questions are also there answering questions about more specialized or esoteric topics. Just like lots of experienced programmers know and care about Java and C++, lots of experienced board-games players know and care about Magic.

Note that I'm not addressing the perspective of a different site. I'm sure there are arguments for why a unique Magic site might be great for that site and its prospective community (you can read them on Area 51, probably). But the key question here is "Is Magic bringing B&CG SE down?" And the answer is, "You can rest easy, because it's actually lifting it up!"

Thanks for your response, very helpful insight on why it should stay. I'm new to the "meta" part of stack-exchange and this was very helpful in understanding the way it works.

"Magic isn't drowning out the other content."
It certainly feels that way ;)

@Pod If you ever feel like the content that you care about is being drowned out, there is an easy solution. You have the ability to filter your search by tag. Add the tags that you care about to your "Favorite Tags", and you will forever be able to find those questions with a single click. Add the tag to your "Ignored Tags" and check the "Hide ignored tags" box, and you will never see those questions again.

Alex P answered this well, but I thought some might appreciate the historical context. There have been attempts, as described in the history of this site:
What is the history of game stacks on Stack Exchange?
Note that there was a MtG-only site using Stack Exchange 1.0, then 2.0 software. It closed in February 2014 due declining activity.


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Are chess questions on-topic here?
In conclusion, it seems, chess is technically on-topic but typically not asked. My question is from a slightly different angle: if there's a SE for it, why is it on-topic at all? Should all posts tagged chess be closed or migrated?

It has always been the philosophy of the StackExchange network that determining whether a topic is on topic should be done on a purely per-site basis, without considering whether the topic is on topic on any other site. This means that it is OK if some questions are allowed on multiple sites, and it is also OK if some questions are not allowed on any site.

There's alot of overlap between different sites on Stack Exchange, Stack Overflow for instance overlaps with Code Review and Database Administrator, and to a lesser extent Server Fault, probably more but those are the ones where I am a member.
While there are many other sites that could carry some questions, so long as they meet the intent of the site they are posted on, they are on topic. Chess is a board game, so it fits the Board & Card Games exchange site. We may want to mention to those posting topics for games that have their own exchange that the other exists, in case they don't know, more specific sites are likely to get better quality and quicker answers, due to everyone there being interested in the more specific topic, and no questions from other topics pushing their question down the page, but that doesn't mean we should move the question.

That's fair. I'll add to your first point Super User, Ubuntu, Tex-LaTeX, Unix and Linux, Ask Different (for AppleScript questions), Mathematica... Basically, pretty much everything in the "Technology" category of sites.


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How do I ask a question about a board game without a tag when I can't create tags?
I want to post a question about the Slay the Spire board game. However, no tag exists for the game and I don't have enough reputation to create the tag. What tag should I use when asking my question?

Post it with a tag such as house rules or identify this game but make sure it is clear what game you are asking about. If you do that someone who has the ability to make new tags will update the question with the new tags.


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Should new board games be self contained in the post?
I noticed this site is mostly dominated by MTG posts, which obviously do not contain the explanation of how to play it, since it is well known.
But if I were to post a question regarding strategies for a new board game (there is obviously no tag for this particular game), should the post before everything contain as much detail as possible about the rules and gameplay, or should I simply link first thing, to the rule sheets and a gameplay video, and proceed with the question?

In actual fact: of the site's 8,056 total questions, only 2,547 are MTG. It certainly has more questions than any other tag though, and has almost 9x the questions of the next most popular tag.

Just go right ahead and ask about your question, and make sure to name which game it is.
Including tons of extraneous rules about the game and gameplay would only act to obscure your actual question, so leave that stuff out. We encourage questions to focus exclusively on the pertinent details, and the Stack Exchange network has a practice of cutting out things like signatures, salutations, and unnecessary backstory. If you did include all those details, they'd probably just get removed by an editor (such as me).
Anyone who's answering your question should already own the game and be a player who understands it well. Such a person doesn't need the game explained to them.
Anyone else can google the game if they feel they've got a decent chance of answering it anyway despite not having played it. That's a risky move and not something we necessarily encourage since it's difficult to have confidence in an answer like that and they can just easily be totally wrong.

Another option is to just include a link to the official site, BoardGameGeek, or something similar. That will give them enough information to understand the game and seek out more information (e.g. online copies of the rulebooks) to answer the question if desired.


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What tag should I use for a Spoons-related question?
I have a question about the game of Spoons.  (Unless the comments indicate otherwise, I'll assume that readers know what this game is.)  I'm wondering what tag I should use for this question, or if I should even ask this question.  Board & Card Games Stack Exchange does not have a Spoons tag.  What should I do?
NOTE: I'm not asking that a Spoons tag be created, since there's like only one pre-existing question about Spoons.

Go ahead, ask the question.  Don't worry about the tags.  We've got a fair number of people who will edit your post later and fix up the tag.
We prefer any question about a specific game be tagged with that game name (and generally not too much else).  It isn't something that a newer user needs to worry about though.  Just use any tag that's handy.
Thanks for asking!

I have a question about a game for which there is no tag. What do I do?

I think this is good justification for creating a new tag, at least for as long as this community continues to categorize questions by the name of the game. If we move to a system where we tag questions according to some kind of "category" (zombies, war, cooperative, etc.) then things might change.
It's okay if you're the first or second person to ask about a game. Go ahead and create the tag.

I don't have enough reputation to create tags. What do I do?

Unfortunately, the system won't let you tag a question using the untagged tag. Pick a tag that clearly does not fit your question, and use that one instead. Then, put a bold sentence at the top of your post like "This should be tagged spoons, but that tag doesn't exist, and I don't have enough reputation to create it. Please retag."

During the edit grace period, I removed the suggestion to flag with a custom moderator flag. I decided this isn't really something a moderator is required to fix, since any high rep user can do it. Plus, I'm not a mod. I'll let the mods ask for more flags to handle. :P


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Why are questions being downvoted?
This question is -2
This question is 2
I don't see the latter being any more 'valid' of a question.

For the one that is currently at -2 it has been edited extensively from its original form. It was previously not very clear what the user was asking, which is probably where the downvotes came from (though not having cast either of them I can't say for sure)

The question you cite as being at -2, used terminology from a game with infamously, extremely precise definitions in a way that made no sense. Because of that, and the way the question was structured, it would be quite incoherent to many people. It also didn't demonstrate an effort to understand the ability or rules involved - such questions are generally discouraged or disliked on Stack Exchange, and in some cases either de facto low quality or de jure off-topic.
It has been improved somewhat from its original form, but remains difficult to interpret.
The second question at +2 is neither of these things. It clearly asks about a specific component of a specific process of a specific format, and shows an understanding of both the basics involved as well as potential implications relevant to it.
It should perhaps have been split into two questions, related but not necessary to each other, but there are no problems with either actual question.

The main problem with the question was that even after a request to clarify the question, the question was not edited, until an other user made a big edit to clarify it


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Is it acceptable to ask for the rules or instructions to an obscure board game?
I've read the help center and seen nothing about not asking for rules, and I've done several searches here on Meta for the same information. Since I can't find a definitive answer, I prefer to check before I ask the question.
Recently, I found a board game I'd never heard of in a rummage sale: "Deer Hunters Challenge" from Mills Game CO. I bought it and brought it home, and while it appears to have all the pieces, there are no instructions with the game.
I've used every combination of search terms I can think of, and browsed several "board game rules" sites and this game just does not come up. It seems to be a pretty rare and obscure game.
Would it be on-topic to ask for the rules/instructions to this game on this site?

This is perfectly acceptable as finding the rules for a board game is on topic even if it is an obscure one. The fact that you have done some searching on your own is also good as it shows you are not just expecting others to find the answer for you.
I would go and post your question and best of luck on finding the rules.


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Reopen old question to provide good answer
I was browsing across questions and I came across this one.
I made a comment about the game Exploding Kittens, and I feel like it should be an answer because the game is specifically marketed as being similar to Russian Roulette and the OP specifically asks about using "dice or cards" and being "kid friendly". As I mentioned in my comment, Exploding Kittens is marked as appropriate for 7+.
My question is: Should this old question be reopened so a good answer can be provided (for both the OP and others)?

That question is closed as "Off Topic" because it is asking for game recommendations, which we do not allow. It doesn't matter whether someone has a good game to recommend. That question will stay closed.

I've seen it asked in just about every off topic for recommendations question in the comments, but never answered, why is there a tag for recommendations if we do not allow recommendations questions?

The tag exists because there are still questions that have it. They're all closed, but they're still there. People could spend a few days going through and deleting all of them, but the tag can also be useful as another way to communicate that it is off topic, using the tag wiki.

Unfotunately most users do not read the tag wikis. They barely look at tbe usage info.

Perhaps se needs a feature to lock out tags kept for posterity to a permissions level then. Or if one exists we should use it here.

To give an answer with a wider scope:
Questions aren't closed to prevent people adding new or updated answers.  Questions are closed because they don't meet the site's criteria and have been deemed unsuitable.  So closed questions simply don't get reopened just to get new answers.
There is another mechanism to affect the ability of users to post answers - Question Protection.  A question may be protected by a moderator or trusted user if it has been subject to a number of poor quality answers.  It prevents users with less than 10 reputation on the site (i.e. association bonus is ignored) from posting answers.
If you have a new answer that you would like to add to an old question, then go ahead and post it.  This is, after all, what the SE system is all about.


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Should we dual-tag my question?
Some background: I recently created this question: Are all events one-shot?...
At the time, the betrayal-at-baldurs-gate tag didn't exist and I didn't have the reputation to create it, so I tagged it under betrayal-at-house-on-hill and flagged to get help from the Mods (thanks Joe W!) who created the BaBG tag and removed the BaHoH from the Q.
We're having a discussion on whether both tags should be kept.
The thing is... while they are different individual games, there are a lot more gamers familiar with Betrayal at the House on the Hill and they could potentially provide with insights.
As ikegami puts it:

In this case, the answer is the same for both games, so you could mention that in your answer, so we could dual-tag, so we would help more people.

Should we use both tags?

FYI, flags are only seen by moderators. Retagging doesn't require a mod, though, just 150 reputation. So while mods can of course add tags too, a comment on your question asking for a tag is generally all you need. Plenty of 150-rep users are going to see new questions.

Yup. Thanks for your comment @Cascabel. I'm aware of that. This post is more about consensus on handling double tags.

Okay. I said that primarily because you said "flagged to get help from the Mods (thanks Joe W!)" and the mods didn't actually do anything - Joe W isn't a mod.

@Cascabel ... oh, the flag was because I couldn't create a new tag.

Yes, I understand why you flagged. I'm just saying that you don't actually have to flag for that purpose, because you don't need a mod. (And clarifying that Joe W did not see your flag.) And indeed, a user with sufficient reputation helped you long before a mod saw the flag. You can still flag if you like, we'll obviously help too, but it's often easier and quicker to just let the community help.

fyi I just retaged the question because I saw in it that the game you where talking about was different and you couldn't create the tag.

Just because two games are similar doesn't mean that they should both be tagged on a question where the answer could apply to both of them. In my opinion having multiple game tags on a single question can lead to confusion that the games are all expansion/addons and not really help future readers by having both present.


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What generic (?) tag to use for games that have no tag?
I would like to post a question about makruk, for which there is currently no tag. After looking through the available tags, there seems to be a problem for users with less than 150 reps who want to ask questions about games for which no tag exists yet. untagged obviously can't be used for this. I could not find more generic tags I could use instead, e.g. asian-boardgame or chess-variant. What should a user do about tags in this type of situation?

Somehow, "identify-this-game" is often used. It works for me since it's easy to spot that it's in need of fixing.

What you ended up doing was probably your best course of action:
Write your question and add the closest possible tag you can find. Leave a comment to your question asking for someone to add the tag that you would like. If it is a tag that should be created, someone with sufficient Rep will come along and create it for you, if not they will switch the tag to a more appropriate existing tag.
I would also like to note that asking in the general chat room was also a good idea since you wanted to speed up the process. :)

Also note that tags don't exist until they are attached to a question. You can't preemptively create a tag. So asking a question with some other tag, then leaving a comment to have it changed to a more appropriate one is the best course of action.

What counts as "The closest possible tag"? Arguably when tagging with the name of a board game, each tag would be equally close.


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What's this new "get updates" box and why doesn't it have any functions?
I've seen this across nine different Stacks I follow, so I presume it's everywhere.
The last few days, I've been getting a little box in most (all?) questions with a bell icon inside and "get updates on questions and answers" -- but there's no active text in the box, the bell isn't active, and the only function that appears to be available is to close the box with the X in the upper right.
Is this a preview of an upcoming feature, a bug, or a bugged/failing feature that's supposed to be live?  I've looked in other parts of the UI and don't see anything that lets me specifically follow a given question or answer.  What's up with the bell box?

You might look at meta stack exchange and check there for an answer as they get more traffic than we do and someone with more knowledge on this feature might be able to help you. https://meta.stackexchange.com/

I thought I'd try one of the low-traffice Stacks first, because the main meta isn't always very friendly and might have enough traffic for my question to scroll off the first page without being read...

@JoeW So, apparently there's a new UI tag below each question, everywhere: "follow" in between "share edit close delete flag" somewhere.  Subtle enough to miss.

The "Get updates on questions and answers" box has an arrow pointing to the follow button.

Hmm.  Maybe it's just my autism.  Change the interface and put a box with an arrow on it and I still miss the change...

To be fair, the contrast on the arrow is pretty bad.

It's to draw attention to the new 'Follow Questions and Answers' feature:

You can follow any question or answer (that you did not author) by clicking on the [follow] button that is shown in the menu immediately below the post (alongside the [share] button):

After you have followed a post, you will get inbox notifications for all new answers (in the case where you followed a question), comments, edits, and notices. You will not receive notifications for any action that you performed. As was mentioned in the earlier post, we are not making changes at this point to the notifications received by a post owner, or due to @mentions.


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Graduating from Beta: generating more questions per day
It has caught my attention that this site has been quite some time on Beta mode, and it seems that across users of this site this seems to be a thing we wish to overcome.
Doing some research (this post, which lead me to this Meta SE post), it seems that "all we need" is to obtain at least 10 questions per day, in average:

Fast forward through all the boring analysis, and here's the result: from now on, when a site starts to consistently receive ten new questions every day, we'll consider it for graduation.

So here is what I ask: How can we encourage more questions to be asked on the main site?
Should we take in the task of asking more? Should we strive for more new users, or encourage "stealth" users to engage on the site?
Currently the Area 51 stats of the site indicate a 3.7 questions per day average. Although I am recent to the site, seems to me that the average has stayed around that amount for at least a year. Is this also something to consider for the actions we should take?

There's a request to change how de-beta-ing works here: https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/303727/lets-break-up-with-graduation-and-remove-a-bunch-of-beta-labels -- that would let us drop the "beta" label as well.

@doppelgreener interesting, will read it thoroughly. Still, don't you thing it would be better if we raised that stat a bit? (Is that you Peridot?)

I talked about this a bit in chat, but why exactly do you want to leave beta. What benefits or changes do you foresee from BCG's graduation.

@Malco so you are saying we should stay in "beta" indefinitely? I am sure graduating has many benefits, to many perhaps to say in comments. Surely there is info about that in Meta SE. So now I ask you, why wouldn't you want to graduate, or what benefit we get from staying beta?

@DarkCygnus The obvious way to reframe that is what benefit we get from graduation, or what the harm is in staying in beta. Note that the main results of graduation are moderator elections, increased rep thresholds, removal of the beta label, and a sense of accomplishment. Really, the activity (questions per day, and all that comes with it) is the actual core benefit for the site. So I'm all for talking about how to keep on growing the site, and we can do that mostly as a goal in and of itself, with graduation being just a nice potential future acknowledgement of that growth.

@Cascabel agree, the graduation (if it still applies to when we reach that point) is the outcome of other benefits, like more Qs asked. That is why I asked How can we encourage more questions to be asked on the main site? and not How/why can we leave beta? (as that has already been asked). Hopefully more Qs will give this community more momentum and "mass"

@DarkCygnus I'm not saying that we should stay in Beta forever, but what you are proposing is that we should take steps to try to build numbers faster than what has been happening naturally. Making changes to the site to increase QperDay to 10 is not only a good deal of work, but could be potentially disruptive. To decide if we as a community want to do this we need to weigh the potential benefits with the costs. As it stands right now I don't think there is that much to gain by making aggressive changes to the site so to hit 10 Q/day.

@Malco never did I say about anything "aggressive". And yes, the deciding as community is the point of this dynamics, so we can know how to proceed properly.

@DarkCygnus You didn't mention it specifically, but in order to double the current Questions per day in a short time we would need to make some pretty aggressive changes.

@Malco seems that you could turn these things we have discussed into an answer, perhaps encouraging more Qs is not what we need to improve this site (or push it towards graduation in a non-aggressive way).

There are a couple of issues that may be fundamental obstacles to improving our long-term question volume, that we have to take into account when considering potential solutions to the problem.
First, many board and card games are relatively simple and open, as compared to video games, for example. By this I mean that the rules generally fit within a booklet, and all of the game pieces and cards, etc. can be examined by payers without even playing this game. This means that in most cases players can generally understand the basic functionality of the game on their own, and most rules questions come from either a lack of clarity in the writing, or genuine ambiguities in the rules as written. And if the rules are genuinely ambiguous, this site may not be the best place to ask for help, because without additional information answers are unlikely to be authoritative or definite. A major exception to this is Magic: the Gathering, with a 200+ page rulebook and about 17,000 different cards, and it's no coincidence that we have nearly ten times as many questions about it as about any other game.
Second, in my experience most people play relatively few board and card games. This would mean that if someone comes to the site asking for help with one particular game, there are relatively few other games that they can ask or answer questions about if they stick around. This can have the effect of limiting the breadth of the set of games we actually see questions about.
In addition, I think Magic: the Gathering deserves its own special mention, because it provides such a large fraction of our total question volume. Magic has a very large number of rule and card interactions that generate questions that are usually easy to answer directly and definitively with authoritative sources. This makes it basically ideal for this site, but we are still not necessarily the best place to ask those questions. There are at least a couple of places on the Internet where you can ask those questions of judges directly, which has the benefit that the answer comes directly from an authority, and is generally considered to be binding.

Interesting analysis... but you didn't really answer my question: How can we encourage more questions to be asked on the main site? I get what you say about asking of ruling, but there are other things to ask of a card game: strategy, tips and specific plays, historical perspective, etc., so I think that even board games that don't have 200+ pages of ruling have material for good Qs and As.

It's true, I didn't answer that directly. But I think these may be fundamental obstacles to substantially increasing our question volume in the long term. At the very least, these are things we have to account for when trying to improve the situation. And you mention other kinds of questions, but we can't exactly make people need answers to those questions and ask them well and in large quantities.

We can't make people ask, but we could certainly think about what kinds of non-rules questions we could ask and answer, how to help people ask them well (since not asking well tends to lead to closure otherwise), and ultimately try to lead by example and actually ask some questions.

@Cascabel indeed, perhaps leading by example (asking non-rule stuff perhaps) could encourage other users to ask similar things, increasing the notion of the on-topicness of those subjects in the site.

@DarkCygnus This does answer your question. It's reasonable to answer any "How do I do X?" with a list of reasons why X may not be possible or feasible. As for your ideas about strategy and history questions, If nobody is asking those kinds of questions now, then public interest must be low, or the questions do not fit the format. The site has a Q&A format, and I doubt that will ever change.

not all sites has a Q&A format per-se. Some sites allow a degree of opinion on the answers. Maybe refiting this to allow some degree of opinion could be benefical?

We do allow allow opinions on answers to a certain extent. I think this comes up most frequently on strategy questions, where answers always have some degree of individual judgment. But those answers still have to be justified by facts and/or experiences.

Rather than trying to get 10+ questions per day, we should petition for an exception to let us graduate
Philosophy.SE was in a similar state as we were. They were around for 6 years and had far exceeded every threshold, except for questions per day. And yet they were allowed to graduate with only 5.7 questions per day.
Writing.SE is in the same boat. They have been open for 7 years and are far and above the every threshold except questions per day. And yet they are still stuck in beta with no end in sight. They are currently building a case to exit beta, using the precedent of Philosophy.SE doing the same. (Update: They have now formally submitted a request to Stack Exchange.)
Especially if Writing.SE is allowed to graduate despite having less than 10 questions per day, we should also petition for an exception to let our site graduate.

More broadly, there is a Meta Stack Exchange topic about changing the way that beta and graduation works, given that there are several sites like ours that are seven years old yet are still "beta". Ultimately, it may be decided that the criteria for graduating may need to be reevaluated.

Yeah, let's hope that Meta SE thing is reevaluated

I'll chime in here about the MtG aspect and say we're going to hit a point (and we might already be there) where the majority of questions are going to be duplicate "How does the stack work?" or "How does  mechanic work?" This is especially a problem because MtG generates a pretty hefty-sized chunk of the question inflow. I'm not sure how to address this other than to keep closing and linking to the existing answers though.

Do you feel there has been a rise in the duplicate questions asked about mtg?

Well looking at the last 30 MtG questions shows 5 Duplicates and a few that might also be considered. I'd say slightly? It's more a matter of the simpler "confusing" interactions and rules have already been covered but new players will still be tripped up by them and come to ask. And as time passes, this knowledge base will steadily grow so there'll be more and more dupes. I don't know if you want to call that a problem or not but I think it's going to start becoming more common. @DarkCygnus

Interesting, perhaps then after some base is formed the community will start to ask different sorts of questions, maybe more strategy or history related, rather than more common or basic questions. Perhaps this behavior is typical of the evolution of card game questions (i.e.: yugioh could be on its early stages, but eventually also start to reach that base of questions and migrate to more complex ones).

On another note, I am a frequent user of The Workplace SE, and I also notice that there are currently a high % of questions that are closed as dupes, or basically are different wordings of dupes.

How can we encourage more questions to be asked on the main site?

Get the boardgamegeek community ask their rules questions here instead of at the game specific rules forum section (https://boardgamegeek.com/forum/name-of-the-game/rules).
Not that I have an inkling of how to achieve that.

And how you propose we "get" those users to ask here?

There's virtually no appeal in posting rules questions here. The rulebooks for most new releases are hosted on BGG, for crying out loud!


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Could we consider reopening this Yu-Gi-Oh Question?
I edited this question and now it's clearer what it is asking: Can I play Yu-Gi-Oh! with only level 5 or higher cards?
I voted to reopen, and would like to ask the Community to consider voting as well.

This question reached 5 votes and was reopened :)
Thank you for taking it into consideration.


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Can I ask about spoken word games here?
I want to find some information about spoken word games. Can I ask about them on this site? I am thinking of games that don’t require equipment, like for instance I Spy.

Strictly speaking I Spy would be on-topic as it hits the 4 qualifications that we use to define an on-topic game here:

Be playable on or around a table
Have objective rules of play and win conditions (Ed-- Debatable, but I think it can be agreed that there is a set of general rules to follow in I Spy.)
Offer dynamic challenges, either through other players, randomization, or both
Be playable by hand, by human players implementing all of the rules

Beyond the strict definition I think I would be OK with good questions being asked about I Spy, especially since there doesn't seem to be a better home for them on the SE network.

Great! I couldn’t find anywhere else on SE to ask about the games I’m interested in (not in fact I Spy, but this was the best known example...)

Agreed. Ruling out I Spy would lead to a grey area about then ruling out Code Names, which is quite obviously on topic.