text:
Why should I use this instead of boardgamegeek? What's the elevator pitch?
What is the elevator pitch, given the big elephant in the room that is boardgamegeek?  I am happy to be convinced that I should pay attention to things here, this has at least the following things going against it.

The focus is a bit broader here than at BGG, and this actually works against the site.  I don't care for things like Risk, Monopoly, or Trivial Pursuit.  I believe BGG does a better job at hitting the sweet spot of topic focus vs potential community size.  Sure, there might be a page about the classics on BGG, but no one actually really talks about them.
There is a pretty helpful established base of users at BGG already.
The domain specific integration at BGG provides a lot of value.  At BGG, I can ask a rules question, or I can simply find a link to the rules.  I like to have discussions about boardgames that are a bit less guided than the simple Q&A feel that StackExchange gives.
I can argue with the game designers at BGG, and that is pretty awesome.

What does this have going for it?  Perhaps a better culture (imported from top level StackExchange) of cultivating and condensing one really good answer to a question?

Board Game Geek's design hurts my eyes :P

We're still writing the Elevator Pitch.

This question is my biggest issue with BCG.SE. Establishing in what ways it offers something that BGG can't is the single most important thing for BCG.SE's survival as an independent site, to my mind.

Might be a joke, but I actually agree with @Jon: BGG design is only a few steps above "hideous".

I like the basic design of the 'geek. It's gotten much better than it used to be, save for the loss of the down-thumb vote.

I tried to address this question a bit when announcing this site on BoardGameGeek. My conclusion was that we're more complimentary to BGG, rather than competing with it, though obviously there's a certain amount of competing for people's attention and time. To quote myself:

StackExchange is a question and answer system which has grown out of the very popular https://stackoverflow.com/, a Q&A site for professional programmers. It has several advantages over other forums or Q&A systems. Unlike forums, you don't have to wade through pages of responses to find the actual answer to a question; answers voted up will move to the top, and the questioner can accept an answer which will become the top one. Unlike other generic Q&A sites, StackExchange sites have specific communities devoted to the topic in question, not just a lot of people answering questions on everything. And unlike most sites of the sort, it also involves wiki-style community editing, in which users with enough reputation can edit questions and answers to provide clarification, fix small errors, or clean up formatting or tagging.
...
BoardGameGeek is a great resource, and the Board and Card Games StackExchange is complementary to it, I think. BoardGameGeek has a lot of information on it, and sometimes people might not be able to find the needle they're looking for in the haystack of BGG.

First of all, yes, BoardGameGeek has some definite advantages in the size of the existing community, and the integration of its game database. The first is one that can hopefully be improved as this community grows; likewise, the issue you mention about designers already being on BGG could be addressed by getting designers to answer questions here as well.
The integration issue might be able to be addressed here; some other sites have added JavaScript to make domain-specific features work (such as rendering TeX on the math oriented sites, or a shortcut for adding card images on a Magic: The Gathering SE 1.0 site); it might be possible for us to do the same here, adding a feature that could easily embed BGG game links and/or images.
But that still leave the fact that in the meantime, as we grow our community, we need to be able to say what differentiates us. I think there are few things:

The biggest benefit is the actual StackExchange system with questions, answers, voting, and editing. On BoardGameGeek, if you want to ask a rules or strategy question, you have to do it in a forum format. This means that you ask a question, and then there may be several replies of varying quality that are hard to sort through. In some cases, you may get several pages of replies, at which point finding anything is quite hard, and the SEO will be totally broken because the question and answer will be on different pages. On StackExchange, the best replies will be voted to the top; the one that actually answers the question will be at the top and prominently marked. Small errors, or typographical or formatting issues, can be fixed by anyone with enough rep to edit other people's answers (or left as a comment that will be displayed immediately below the question or answer), instead of having to keep reading through the thread to find the one bit of errata that someone else posted.
The simplicity and focus of the site. BoardGameGeek is very complex and busy, with lots of stuff going on. It can be hard to figure out how to ask a question, or where to look (a few of my more poplar answers here have simply been instructions for how to use BoardGameGeek effectively). StackExchange, in contrast, is relatively simple and focused on question and answers. I've pointed out BoardGameGeek to people and heard "ow, I can't even figure out where to start looking."
Better SEO. This is related to the above; the simplicity and focus on SE sites, as well as the emphasis on quality content through voting, helps it achieve better Google rankings. There have been questions that are answered on BoardGameGeek, but a simple search didn't answer it; I had to try adding "site:boardgamegeek.com" to my search in order to find the answer, and filter through a lot of irrelevant results.
The Creative Commons license on all of the content is another reason that I prefer to use SE to BGG. I used to contribute fairly heavily to BGG, but BGG and the authors of any content retain sole rights to any of the content posted there. Thus, BGG is allowed to use and profit off of my content as they see fit, while I'm not allowed to use the database or anyone else's content for any other purposes. This makes it hard to, say, create a read-only fork of BGG with a better interface, which could be quite useful and by competing with BGG inspire them to clean their interface up a bit. BGG is a collaboratively edited resource, but pretty much wholly owned by a few individuals, while all of the content in SE is available for anyone to use as they see fit (within the bounds of the license).

Finally, I disagree with your point about the focus being broader here than at BGG. I think that what's on topic at each is pretty much equivalent. BGG has Risk, Monopoly, and Trivial Pursuit pages, with forums that people discuss them, which can show up on your front page. There may be a slightly different proportion of questions on certain games here vs at BGG, but that's going to be the case anywhere; I don't think that in the long run, there will be much more discussion of Trivial Pursuit here than on BGG, especially if we succeed in getting more serious gamers involved here. And if there are games you're particularly interested in or don't want to hear about, add them to your "interesting tags" or "ignored tags" lists.

Just realized that this is a bit more of an essay than an elevator pitch... hopefully, someone can sum it up into something a bit shorter and sweeter that can be used to convince people to try out SE.

Cool, thanks.  I mostly buy it on the basis of SE being a lot better for Q&A (I've certainly answered many basically identical questions on the BGG RftG forums, and I can't just link and collapse the dup into the original, which has been an annoyance for me) and at the worst case, this will force BGG to compete.  I am happy to see BGG flourish, even if it means a small set of people profit from my contributions, so the license doesn't matter much to me.

@Rob I don't mind the creators of BGG profiting from it; more power to them, they've created a great resource an shepherded a community into producing a lot of really good content. But I like it when I can reuse the work from any collaboratively edited content that I produce; I would like to be able to build on and modify it (such as, producing game recommendation tools, or the like), but the licensing terms of BGG forbid that. It's not a huge problem, I still use BGG sometimes, but it does reduce my enthusiasm to contribute.

Good question to get the brain cells firing on the elevator pitch, but I'm not completely sure we're competing against or should be used instead of Board Game Geek, we're a complement to it.

Brian's answer is awesome.  I just wanted to add one thing.
At BoardGameGeek each game has it's own forum (many forums actually).  If you put a rules question in one low traffic forum, it may be quite a while before you get a good answer.  Here, we effectively have ONE forum.  Everyone is able to easily look at all new questions as well as search out old questions for particular games (tags).
This site already has a good number of folks with a knowledge of many different games.  Are those folks trolling thru dozens or hundreds of games forums on BGG?  I doubt it.  I think over time this will lead to better, quicker answers here for more games.  We do need a bit more traffic first though!
Note - BGG may have this functionality available (to see all new questions). I'm not aware of it though.  I wouldn't be surprised if anything I thought was lacking at BGG was actually there!

If you look way down on the front page, in the left column under the forums, you'll see a "Game Forums+" section. Depending on your settings, it may not be expanded, or may be elsewhere; or missing entirely, in which case you can add it at http://boardgamegeek.com/geekcentral/edit. It shows new questions in all of the game-specific forums. There's so much going on on the BoardGameGeek front page that it's easy to miss, but there is a place where you can see questions about all of the games going by (note that this demonstrates my point about how much cleaner and simpler BCG.SE is).

@Brian - I figured there was a way! but I find B&CGSE much more usable for my needs in this instance

@pat you've just summed up as benefit the big PROBLEM with SE. One Big Forum.

@aramis - so you'd rather visit 50 different forums to check out every game you are interested in?  Not me!  I vastly prefer the method used on this site.

@pat you obviously haven't learned how to use BGG, then. I don't have to. I set my subscriptions on the games I want to follow, and the board collates the new threads and active threads into a single list for me every time I hit the site. (And does so across the three domains, even.) Folderization is a stregth... otherwise, CP/M would still be dominant in business computing...

@aramis - forum or SE, being told that my strong opinion is wrong and that I'm ignorant is no fun so you can "win" this one.  My opinion stands unchanged.

Here's my 2¢ as a BGG user who is just starting to use BCG.SE:
• I go to BoardGameGeek to push out info about games I'm working on/have worked on, look up stats on specific games, and download supplemental materials about boardgames.
• I come to BCG.SE for little "hit and run" boardgame-related snippets.  I come here when I have a moment or two to spare to read or write a little blurb or two.
As several people before me have stated, the two sites are complements.  I strongly agree, since that's how I'm coming to use them.

I am not sure.  I did a little experiment.  I posted the same question to BGG and here.  The results did not look good for here.  At least right now, there isn't really critical mass for getting good responses.  I had more responses on BGG than I had views on BCG.SE.  http://boardgamegeek.com/thread/599990/is-there-much-strategy-and-planning-in-seven-wonde   http://boardgames.stackexchange.com/questions/1954/seven-wonders-is-there-much-strategy-and-planning-in-it-or-is-mostly-luck

A year on, and I suspect that Rob's comment still holds true... the user base here just isn't big enough, and far too many users want an all-in-one site. Which, due to the nature of StackExchange, it can never be.


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Merging with RPG-SE definitely better than closing

Questions per day 15 questions per day on average is a healthy beta,
  5 questions or fewer per day is
  worrying. A healthy site generates
  lots of good content to make sure
  users keep coming back.

We have 3.2, RPG has 4.5, both below the worry line. Sum is 7.7, still little more then half the "healty" value, but at least over the red line.

Users Every site needs a solid group of core users to assist in
  moderating the site. We recommend:

150 users with 200+ rep
10 users with 2,000+ rep
5 users with 3,000+ rep

We are slightly below the line, RPG is over it — though I suppose many users frequent both sites.

Visits/day: 1,500 visits per day is good, 500 visits per day is
  worrying. A great site benefits people
  outside the community. Eventually, 90%
  of a site's traffic should come from
  search engines.

We are at a worrying 358, while RPG is better at 764. Combined that would make 1122, which is still below the "good", but more than double over the worry line.

Now, I know that RPGs and Boardgames are two different things, but the audience is vastly the same, and while different they are quite related.
I'd rather have two separate sites, but if we risk one (or both!) not making out of beta, I'd say merge them if that would help them survive.
Sure, RPG is flooded with D&D questions, which I personally find totally uninteresting, but that's beside the point. I guess.

The only valid reason to merge is if you honestly believe these two topics are so related that these communities belong together.
Merging out of a sense of "if we don't, we can't survive" is not a valid motivation for merging. You have to make a case that these communities love the same things (and to a lesser extent, have common "enemies" or things you dislike), and having their question sets merged would appeal to both communities.

That's an interesting question @Jeff.  The two hobbies certainly live side by side IRL, and I expect the individual gamer overlap is quite high.

You can normally buy boardgames and roleplaying games in the same stores.  Then again, sometimes you can buy comic books in these same stores too... and that might be pushing it.  (Still, games are games.  Why lump "board games and card games" together, but not the much more thematically similar "boardgames and roleplaying games"?)

@thesunneversets: I know this is old, but... In that case, why wouldn't we just merge this site and RPGs into Gaming, which gets considerably more traffic than either?

@Powerlord: I see a lot more connection between pen-and-paper roleplaying games and boards-and-counters boardgames than I do with online gaming.  Maybe that's arbitrary?  I think it's something to do with getting together with a group of 3-5 friends and making your own fun out of some very simple components.

@powerlord that does not seem like a good idea to me; these communities are quite different, as @thesun indicated

I wouldn't mind merging with RPGs (though my roleplaying days are more or less behind me).  As you say there is good crossover between the two groups, and the chances of cross-fertilization are high.  I also find it notable that, when I post questions about Magic The Gathering, I get a lot of answers from people with <100 reputation!  There's no sense in us being snobby about things that clearly help invigorate our site, and widen its perceived appeal.
The original Stack Overflow happily has questions about the intricacies of C memory allocation sitting side by side with stuff about WordPress and jQuery.  For a Stack site to work, and work well, it is clearly not necessary for every question to appeal, or even be comprehensible, to every user!  In fact it might even inspire us to investigate things outside our comfort zone...

Right or wrong, I think this question is better posed to area51.
FWIW, there is no timeline to get out of beta.  There has been only one site shut down related to low traffic.

Oh good, I thought the risk was higher! Can this be moved if need be, or I'd need to open a new post?

@Looris - I don't believe I can migrate a question to area51 so a new one would be best.

Correct, no timeline on beta.  You're getting questions, those questions are getting answers, and your traffic isn't dropping.  It is normal for sites to have horizontal traffic and then hit a tipping point where the stats curve upward and climb each week.  That's the right time graduate.  We are happy to keep BCG in beta until then, so a merge out of desperation to save the site shouldn't be on the radar, in addition to what Jeff mentions in his answer.

I distinctly don't want to merge.  any more so than we should answer questions about Star Trek here.  I'm doing what I can for this site, because I've always loved board games, and I find BGG frustrating for doing what SE does beautifully.  I think it's really just a matter of advertising and time before we get up above any threshold values.

source: Stack Exchange

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sort: votes


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Why is this one in-topic and this one isn't, when they are the same question?
Is there any way to rehabilitate the "junk rare" Lost In The Woods?
Has there ever been any use for Lich?
Same question, different card.
One has been appreciated by the community, while with the other one I'm being mocked.
I'm refraining from throwing insults AOE, since I know this wouldn't help, but I definitely feel insulted.

One thing to remember is that the rules for acceptable questions do change over time and the other question you linked was asked over 3 years ago.

I actually think the question is fine, and I wouldn't vote to close it. I suspect that at least some of the problem people have is with your tone. The last paragraph especially (I know it was added in an edit) reads as somewhat condescending and seems to imply that readers wouldn't normally "pay attention."

This sort of question is often referred to as a broken window. It gets asked so often that main meta has a tag for it. There are many reasonable explanations for why your question received different treatment.

The question is three years old. The community three years ago may have been more lax when it comes to opinionated questions.
Close vote reasons are subjective.
Different users see different questions.

I see no evidence that the community was mocking you. There's normally some negativity present when close voting happens, because nobody likes their question to be closed. If you firmly believe that another user is mocking or insulting you, flag the comment.

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


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If Magic SE opens, will all Magic questions be migrated from Board and Card Games?
SE won't migrate questions from Draw3Cards ... but if a proper Magic SE 2.0 opens, will questions be migrated on mass from Board & Card Games to Magic SE? They will definitely be "more on topic" there than here.
Let's not turn this question into a debate whether Magic SE should open or not, and assume for the moment that it will.

Based on the stance towards migrating poker questions, I would assume no.

Closing this as the Magic SE proposal has been shuttered.

@PatLudwig Sucks that Magic SE was declined. The Magic tag is the most popular tag here, and has about as much traffic on this site as the next four games combined, and would benefit from having its own site. It's not fair to rob Magic of its site just to revive Board & Card Games.

No,
Beta sites are discouraged from migrating in general.  Furthermore Magic would still be on topic here.  Other SE sites overlap in some areas, we wouldn't be breaking new ground here.

Can you say why?  It seems seeding a site with the ultra-relevant could only help it?

@NealTibrewala - Magic would still be on topic here.  There is no need to migrate questions that are on topic here.  As I noted, other SE sites overlap, and coexist just fine.

Where would a person like me contribute to the discussion on a MtG SE ?

If the Magic SE proposal manages to get into beta and further, out of beta, then there might be some room to discuss it, until then though shuffling messages between betas seems somewhat futile.

This makes the most sense, as I understand it a beta SE can fail.  Moving relevant questions from B&CG only to lose them if a beta doesn't make it to a full site would be a waste.  If the Magic SE becomes the primary source of MTG related questions then migrating would make sense.

Well... if they were migrated and then M:TG SE were to fail, they'd most likely be migrated right back.


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Is tag:avalonhill a good tag?
I recently removed avalonhill from several questions, because:

the tag wiki claimed that it was for WWII wargames by Avalon Hill, but Avalon Hill publishes a lot more than that.
it's a meta-tag, about a category of things, not a specific topic.

Is that reasonable, or is this a tag we want to keep around?

Not that I disagree with your overall point here, but that's not what "meta tag" means. A meta tag is one that describes the question itself, not the subject matter. If I tagged a question with [beginner], or [spoiler], or [subjective], those would be meta tags.

@murgatroid99 It's kind of a continuum. Specific game is totally fine, beginner is horrible, space-games is pretty bad, games-by-publisher-x is maybe okay but still a bit meta. Meta means describes something other than the question's content, and naming the publisher doesn't really tell you much of anything about the question. (I assume Avalon Hill's war games all have similar mechanics so it makes sense to talk about them as a category, but without refining the tag to mean just that, it includes things like RoboRally and Acquire, definitely broad enough to not mean anything.)

I think it would help to clarify (in the question, not the comments) why you think "avalonhill" is a meta tag. You could borrow from The Death of Meta Tags. Does "avalonhill" describe the content of the question? Can "avalonhill" stand alone as a tag? Is the meaning of "avalonhill" subjective? If the answer to any of these questions is "No.", it is probably a meta tag.

So, do we have an actionable decision on this?  Paging @Pat...

What is special about this particular group of games that it warrants a "grouping" tag?  What about a tag for collectible card games?  Or deckbuilders?  Or any of hundreds of other potential categories?
I don't think "This is more convenient than having to watch several tags individually" is a good enough reason to have a tag.  We'd quickly be overrun by everyone's different classification systems, none of which would be applied consistently.
You can find some excellent thoughts on this topic from Grace at https://gaming.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3320/how-should-i-tag-on-gaming-se-are-genre-tags-used/3321#3321

+1. I think you should summarize some of the key points from Grace's post, in case it ceases to exist.

As a gronard, I was about to write an answer to say, "No it's not worth keeping around."  Your post is terse, excellent, and far less antagonistic than mine was going to be.  Thank you.

There are two choices here:

remove the tag, because its meaning is really nonobvious and it's not actually providing a lot of utility in the current state.
create a new tag, something like avalon-hill-wargames so it's actually clear what it means. (Improving the tag wiki is a good start, but it doesn't solve the problem of having a tag whose name doesn't match its meaning.)

Either one is fine, and I'll happily defer to people who care more about wargames questions than me. I just don't want a publisher tag with secret (wiki-only) meaning.

I own more than half of these old games, including Waterloo, Afrika Korps,  Third Reich, and Alesia. I find this tag very useful to highlight games and questions that I am interested in following, rather than having to tag all the games individually.
There is an entire generation of Grognards that grew up with these games, on which we cut our competitive teeth, for whom this tag makes eminent sense. There is even an annual tournament hosted by the Boardgame Players Association, the World Boardgaming Championships, which is dedicated (primarily) to these old classic games. Waterloo and Afrika Korps in particular are regarded as classic evenly balanced contests.
Also, as many of the classic wargame titles can refer to one of many different games, of different styles, age, and complexity, the tag assists in identifying which of many possible games a questioner is inquiring about.
Further, I propose that anything that helps to leaven the current MTG-emphasis of this site is a good thing. Nothing against MTG - I enjoy playing it with my son - but the site is over-weighted in MTG questions for a general-interest member.
Finally, for any gamer older than about 50, the term Avalon Hill can only have one meaning - the classic wargames produced by that iconic company between the release of Tactics II in 1954 and it's purchase by Hasbro in 1971

Okay, but for everyone under 50, or anyone over 50 who wasn't playing war games before 1971, it's ambiguous. I'm not saying it's impossible for it to have value, but if it does have value, it needs to be something like [tag:avalon-hill-wargames]. That is, your answer basically confirms that there's an issue here - it's only a certain set of people who understand it as is.

By the way, generally if a title when used as a tag is ambiguous, you fix that by modifying the tag, not by adding another - for example you could say [tag:waterloo-avalon-hill] and [tag:waterloo-not-avalon-hill] if there were two games with different publishers.

This answer supports the idea that avalonhill is a meta tag. From The Death of Meta Tags, "If the tag commonly means different things to different people, it's probably a meta-tag." If, as you describe in the answer, it means something different to different age groups, it's probably a meta tag.

I'm not 50 yet, I own several AH games and not a single war game.

@ToonKrijthe: The brand name Avalon Hill was bought by Hasbro in the mid 1970's, and has been batted around amongst several companies. Wizards of the Coast owns it now I believe. Just because the games you own are branded Avalon Hill doesn't make them classic TAHGC games, identifying which is the intent of the tag. The problem is that the acronym TAHGC is a bit obscure for a tag name. You also, by being < 50, fail my broad-brush selection.

@PieterGeerkens, if so, the wikipedia page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avalon_Hill) is wrong. They say it was sold to Hasbro in 1998.
Diplomacy, Civilization and 1830 are from before 1998.

Considering how SE admins killed the Magic proposal while allowing Chess and Poker, I do not believe we should be actively trying to "leaven the current MTG-emphasis".

Returning to this, it seems you are in a minority: the votes are strongest on the answer saying these don't warrant a grouping tag. I'm going to go back and remove it from all the places where it got added back again. If you really think there's something here that needs to be labeled, I'd suggest asking a new meta question with a specific proposal addressing the concerns here (and making the name avalon-hill-wargames or some such, not avalonhill).

@Jefromi: I've got a corollary - just delete my account from this stack, and I promise never to post on it again. You and your buddies clearly are trying to make this a MTG exclusive site, so I will stop  hindering you.

The questions are great, and it's just an issue of how to tag them. I've answered tons and tons of non-MTG questions, and I'd be as mad as you if it turned into a MTG-exclusive site. Fortunately no one's trying to do that.

The one reason I can think that it might be a good idea to label these things is if the games are at the core essentially the same game with different units/scenarios layered on top, so questions/answers about one tend to apply to others too. I don't object at all to a tag like avalon-hill-wargames if that's the case (see my answer from a month ago); it just needs to be explained that way rather than as "I like to search like this".

@JefromiOkay CRT scan for every classic AH game is in fact identical: http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-2m5hdimEnPE/TsVrwmSVXjI/AAAAAAAADQc/vVIiHoeoYXA/s1600/PBM+D6+COMBAT+RESULTS+TABLE.jpg D-Day; Waterloo; Afrika Korps. Stalingrad; Battle of the Bulge;  all used the same CRT.

@Jefromi: Also if you look at the results from the annual World Board Game Championships (Lancaster, PA every July August) You will see the same names re-occurring in several of the games as Champions. These games are compared to Chess in being very deep, relative to the simple rules, with standard opening that one must learn in order to compete at a high level.

@Jefromi:L SE has deliberately been designed to NOT be a democracy; for sound reasons. It is an oligarchy/meritocracy, so when you use the excuse that the site is democratic, and take the results of a small self-selection as a valid poll/vote of some sort. my dander gets stirred.

It's not a democracy, but at the same time, sometimes we need to pick a single answer. The accepted way to do that is to ask on meta, solicit opinions, and go with the crowd unless there are some really obvious reasons not to. It's not an "excuse", it's how the site works. I'm not saying this has to be the final say, just that given the arguments presented here and the voting, it seems to be the best choice for now. If you want to change it, make a more convincing argument and use a better tag name.

Yes, we should keep the avalon-hill tag around.
Sometimes questions revolve around publishers themselves. If we're asking about the publisher, it's valid to have a tag for the topic — the publisher.
We shouldn't use this tag however on questions merely about games Avalon Hill produces.

Would you tag all questions about any of these games with the tag, or just ones about the publisher?

Just questions directly about the publisher. We do not need to give the games their tag.

I don't understand why games of this publisher can't be tagged with their publisher tag. As @ForgetIwaseverhere said, if you're insterested in one you're probably interested in the rest, as certainly is my case. Current "wargaming" tag is very general and full of Warhammer 40K. It would be nice to access content in a quick and efficient manner.

Okay, that makes perfect sense to me - though note that when this was written, most of the tagged questions were about single games, so applying it only to those about the publisher was more like getting rid of it than keeping it.

@Jefromi Ok, got it. :)

Right now, we have one question about the price of Avalon Hill games, and an open meta discussion about if that sort of pricing question should be on-topic. I'm having a hard time imagining other types of questions where this tag would be allowed, and aI don't . So far, we haven't needed similar tags for other manufacturers, like Hasbro, Fantasy Flight Games, AEG, etc. Would a generic [publishers] tag fit the needs for questions specifically about game publishers?

@Thunderforge No, because I'm not an expert in [publishers] like I'm not an expert in [board-games]. I might however know a lot about a specific publisher like I might know something about specific board games.

Oh, my good God.
So you removed "avalonhill" tag, huh? And that's why I had to search for these games one by one, and still missed some... Madness.
I totally subscribe what @ForgetIwaseverhere user said, and I'm far from being 50 years old.
Get back the tag, you semi-barbaric card dealers kiddos. You ruined hobby shops in the 80-90s with your Magic and Yugi-Ohs and now you want to ruin this SE! :D
More seriously, I think the tag is badly needed in a Board & Card games SE, but I concede that a more open definition mentioning not only WWII wargames would also help.
EDIT: As of right now there's a new "avalon-hill" tag here:
What's the most valuable Avalon Hill wargame?


text:
Are questions asking whether a category of games exists on-topic?
We recently had a question "Are There Any Board Games That Involve Both Memory And Luck?" (now deleted) The body of the question described a hypothetical game, with a series of luck-based events which can be bypassed later by remembering the earlier outcome, then asked if there were any games like it.
I believe we've had a few similar questions in the past, as well, though I don't remember clearly enough to quickly search for them.
Note that game recommendation questions are off-topic, because they invite open-ended lists of games, as well as opinions.
Game identification questions, however, are on-topic, provided they include sufficient information, because they in principle have one correct answer.
Where do these "does X exist?" questions fit in? On- or off-topic?

These questions must be taken on a case-by-case basis. Generally they'll be off-topic, but some may be on-topic.
First and foremost, we do not want to allow people to skirt the rules on recommendation questions by replacing "please recommend some games in this category" with "do games in this category exist?" The issues will be the same in both cases. Therefore, any question where the category seems likely to match many games are off-topic.
The exception would be when the criteria are so specific as to narrow things down to a small set of games, essentially like an "identify-this-game" question. Unfortunately, these are also often not going to be terribly interesting, useful questions. If it's not actually an identification question, then the criteria are ultimately just the OP's wishful thinking, and such a game may or may not exist.
The example here seems to be more on the open-ended recommendation side of things. It may not be the most common game mechanic, but it's not terribly unique either. A rough description of a game mechanic does not make for a sufficiently specific question, and again, asking "does X exist?" instead of "please recommend games with X" does not avoid the underlying issues associated with recommendation questions.

Note: this answer is based on my understanding of site policy, so I would be surprised if it's substantially incorrect, but I am of course not infallible!

I don't even think a feature matching question that returns a small set of games should be an on-topic exception. The requirements may only return eg. 2 games now, but what about in 6 months, 2 years, or later? After some time has passed the set may be the same, or may be significantly larger. My personal opinion is that the question itself should be the only indicator of whether it is on-topic or not, the size of the answer set should not be a factor because that can change over time.

@KenHerbert I don't necessarily disagree with your conclusion, but your reasons feel a bit like a slippery slope argument. We have a decent number of subjects where answers can change over time, that's not a reason in and of itself to discard questions. If a question really does somehow go from "there are only a few games in the world like this" to "there are tons of these", we can always just close it later.

"Are there any X" is an example of a question where there is no actual problem to be solved.  The proper response is, "Why do you want to know?"

You should only ask practical, answerable questions based on actual problems that you face.

In general, I wonder what the real question is when faced with these types of questions.  Encouraging those askers to share might lead to very interesting questions for the site.

The two most obvious reasons I can think of are, someone is interested in game design (whether curiosity or inspiration) and wants to see an example, or someone is essentially looking for a game recommendation but in a very specific sense.

@Jefromi - and once they fill out the question some and provide some background it may become valid.  In most cases, probably not.   Neither Game Recs or curiosity lead to great questions.


text:
How should we handle silver-bordered (Unstable) rules questions?
With the release of Unstable, we're starting to get rules questions. Of course, although there's a FAQ, the actual comprehensive rules do not cover silver-bordered sets, and never will, so to some extent it is up to the players to determine how to play cards.

In my experience the community has proven more than capable of upvoting good answers, downvoting bad ones, and otherwise moderating silver-bordered questions without the help of this meta question and its answers. I see answers that source blogs, MaRo's tumblr, and actual rules (where possible) getting more votes than those that don't. So what exactly do you think the community is doing wrong or could do better? Can you provide any concrete examples from the main site?

@Rainbolt See my answer here: "It's useful to have a single canonical question" and "we don't really need to reiterate that full spiel on individual questions." I have seen answers with relatively long explanations of why you can do whatever you want, and relatively little devoted to answering the actual question. It's nothing awful, but we could do slightly better, and it's also often better to discuss on meta quickly just in case, rather than waiting to see. And of course, the fact that the community upvotes good answers doesn't mean it's bad to provide meta guidance about how to write them.

We should answer to the best of our abilities, using available resources if possible (the FAQ, Mark Rosewater's social media rulings, and anything else similarly "official"), and our best reasoning beyond that. That presumably means starting from the available rules, but also includes taking into account gameplay quality: a strict rules-based ruling that completely breaks the game obviously isn't helpful.
To give some background on the overarching philosophy of Un-set rules, it's useful to have a single question about Unstable and silver-bordered rules in general, covering the "it's for fun, do what you want" ideas. We sort of already have one: Should "standard errata" be applied to silver-bordered cards? asks specifically about errata, but Alex P's answer is pretty general. We might want to post a more clear version of the question, though.
But individual specific questions are totally fine too, and we don't really need to reiterate that full spiel on individual questions. It's unnecessarily repetitive, and besides, people are coming to us looking for whatever advice is available to help them have that fun game.

A single canonical question for silver-bordered rules would be very welcome. That said, I could still see additional questions about Unstable being okay on a case by case basis, if it's clear that they're aware they are in "houserule" territory.

@Thunderforge I don't think we need to insist that questions make it clear it's a house rules issue. First off, it's not necessarily. Sometimes there'll be a ruling from MaRo that the OP wasn't aware of, or even a FAQ entry. Second, the point of this is to remind people answering that "do what you think is fun and consistent with the rules" isn't really a full answer, and doesn't need to be repeated in all of them. The OP shouldn't have to remind everyone of that every time. It's not a case by case basis thing. This is an actual game, and it's fine for people to ask how to play it.

I suspect some people may be reading your "It's useful to have a single canonical question" with an implicit "and close any other Unstable questions as dupes of it" (since that's what having a "canonical question" on something typically implies on SE). Based on your reply to @Thunderforge, I suspect that's not what you actually meant, but it might be a good idea to edit your answer to make that fully explicit.

@IlmariKaronen Thanks, updated a bit.

I think the dicey thing is there's kinda two classes of Un-card questions:

"How does this card work?"

All of these have a clear answer based on the card text, FAQs, and a bit of "common sense" — that's a bit different from how we answer regular MTG questions using Oracle text and comp rules, but it's very consistent with how we answer a lot of non-MTG questions.
I don't think there's any real ambiguity here.

"How does this card work in a combo with some other non-Un-card?"

These get dicier because the truest — but least useful! — answer is essentially "It was never designed to work in all cases." You can still try to answer it, and probably come up with something that'll work fine, but there's an inherently tension there because you're taking this other card that works in black-border detail-oriented they-have-a-full-time-employee-for-this you-can-get-a-certification-letter-saying-you-know-the-right-answer-to-this world and dragging it into the pretend-you're-twelve-and-don't-have-the-Internet-to-help-you world of the Un-cards.
I think you can still answer these questions, but it would pay to have a little Ur-question or tag wiki or something you can link to that just says "Hey, so, the way Un-cards exist outside of the proper comp rules of Magic means that they can produce wholly contradictory or nonsensical situations when you introduce them to all the corner cases of individual cards, and also you should just make stuff up" after which you can give your actual answer about how you'd rule it.

Broadly I agree with you - it's useful to have a canonical question, and maybe to link to it in a tag wiki. However, I wouldn't call things "dicey" here. I know these questions are not always as rigorously answerable as black-bordered MtG rule questions, but that's a really high bar. It's totally fine to have questions that involve a little bit of good judgment and might have a few different good possibilities. The people answering (and voting) just have to be aware of this, and write (and upvote) answers that try to help the OP decide what to do, and not write (or upvote) useless answers.

@Jefromi The interesting and challenging thing here is that it's an opportunity to think like a Rules Manager rather than a Judge: some stuff just doesn't work within the letter of the rules, but how do you apply the overarching spirit of the rules to integrate it with minimal disruption.

Sure - that's very close to what I described in the first paragraph of my answer. I'm just saying that's not "dicey". It's totally fine - and in fact expected, and good - to have questions that go beyond reading the rules, applying them, and repeating them to people.


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On-topic help center spring cleaning
All righty folks, the on-topic page in the help center is pretty wordy, and we can probably make it more useful to users by:

making it shorter
moving the longer details into a canonical "summarize the site scope" meta post

We can also proofread while we're at it.
So let's do that collaboratively here. There's an answer with the current help center text below; we can edit from there.

Help center

Board and Card Games Stack Exchange is for expert Q&A from people who like playing, discussing the strategy of, and getting rules clarifications of board games, designing board games or modifying the rules of existing board games.

How do we define board games?
Please see this meta question for the full discussion, the summary is:

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

What are some examples of board games that are on topic here?
This is far from a complete list, but we have many questions on the following:

Collectible Card Games

Magic:The Gathering
Pokemon

"German" style board games

Dominion
Settlers of Catan
Carcassonne

Traditional board games

Axis&Allies
Monopoly

Traditional card games

Bridge
Poker

Strategic games

Chess
Go

Cooperative board games

Battlestar Galactica
Arkham Horror

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

Warhammer 40k
Warmachine
Battletech

For a question to be on topic, it must relate to a game that is on topic, but the particular instance that the question is referring to may loosen those rules. Questions about playing games with giant pieces will make a game not playable around a table, but if it's a game that could be or is normally played around a table, it's fine. Questions about Go problems or Chess problems are fine, even if they are static puzzles, since they are related to a dynamic game. Questions about computer implementations of board games are fine.
For more help, see "What types of questions should I avoid asking?"
If your question is not specifically on-topic for Board and Card Games Stack Exchange, it may be on topic for another Stack Exchange site. We're not the right place to ask questions about:

Computer games, try gaming.stackexchange.com
Role Playing games, try rpg.stackexchange.com
Puzzles, try puzzling.stackexchange.com
Game Recommendation/Shopping questions, this includes all questions that could be phrased like:

Best game for ... ?
Which game is like ... ?

Please look around to see if your question has been asked before. It’s also OK to ask and answer your own question.
If no site currently exists that will accept your question, you may commit to or propose a new site at Area 51, the place where new Stack Exchange communities are democratically created.

Meta canonical

I suggest reducing the long bulleted list of 7 categories and 16 examples to just a handful of comma separated examples (for example, "Magic: the Gathering, Checkers, Warhammer 40k, etc."). It would almost cut the length of the post in half. Does anyone else agree?

Yeah, something like that sounds good. We can turn it into a sentence instead of bullets no matter what, and we can either give a handful of example games, or categories, i.e. "Traditional board/card games, "German" games, collectible card games, miniature wargames, ..." We can always shift the full list into the meta canonical.

I thought about that, and I think it's a good idea, but I couldn't wrap my head around how you go about asking a canonical "What are some examples of games that are on topic here?" without it coming off as a shopping list question and getting closed.

@Rainbolt The meta canonical here would presumably be "what is the scope of this site?" not "what are some example games?" and part of the idea is to make this editing easy by not having to actually delete anything; we can just point to that from the help for extra details. But if really all there is to discuss is "what categories of games are on topic?" and we write a canonical answer including some examples, then that is perfectly fine. We are not going to pretend that anything in that vein on meta is a shopping/recommendation question.


text:
Autocard not working for Platinum Angel
The generated url is:
http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Search/Default.aspx?name=%2b%5bPlatinum%20Angel%5d
Which somehow returns no results. If you add quotes around it (best approximation for our searches I could manage using the search on gatherer), it does work:
http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Search/Default.aspx?name=%2b%5b%22Platinum%20Angel%22%5d
and that works for a couple other examples I tried. Not sure if it works for everything, though.

Murg found that it seems to do this for all cards that share a name with a Vanguard card. There is a link to all of them in chat (I'm on mobile so I can't easily get it)

Chat transcript and Vanguard card list. Weird.

Is there any plans on fixing this bug? It can get old to edit a question into the autocard format only to find out that the card in question is impacted by this bug.

We've built up a nice repertoire of regression test cases from bugs we've had in the past, so I collected them here to help ensure that any fix to the autocard tool does not reintroduce an old bug.

Regular cards (Lightning Bolt)
Cards with apostrophes (Death's Shadow)
Single word cards whose names are a subset of another card (Island, Curiousity)
Double word cards whose names are a subset of another card (Sun Titan)
Cards that are also an avatar (Platinum Angel)
Both an apostrophe, and an avatar (Hell's Caretaker)

2018-03-09 Test Results*
Base URL is gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Search/Default.aspx (replaced by ellipses below).

[mtg:Lightning Bolt] -> ...?name=%2b%5bLightning%20Bolt%5d

Pass

[mtg:Death's Shadow] -> ...?name=%2b%5bDeath%27s%5d%2b%5bShadow%5d

Pass

[mtg:Island] -> ...?name=%2b%5bIsland%5d

Fail

[mtg:Sun Titan] -> ...?name=%2b%5bSun%20Titan%5d

Pass

[mtg:Platinum Angel] -> ...?name=%2b%5bPlatinum%20Angel%5d

Fail

[mtg:Hell's Caretaker] -> ...?name=%2b%5bHell%27s%5d%2b%5bCaretaker%5d

Pass

I'm going to assume that fixing the autocard tool is not the highest priority item for the Stack Exchange developers, but that they might be persuaded to fix it if we provide the algorithm. So with some help from the folks in chat I took a stab at it, and found a solution that works:
https://jsfiddle.net/ws165r64/37/
All of the generated links go directly to the card in Chrome, Firefox, IE, and Opera.
*If you want to check my test results, be aware that the autocard generated URLs appear to be baked into the posts. For example, the Sun Titan bug was fixed in 2016, but old posts were not retroactively fixed. To see the current behavior, go to the site chat and type [mtg:cardname].

It seems this also fixes our language issue: if my Gatherer is configured to another language, the English name still works, finds me that card, and specifically finds the version of that card in my language. It also looks like we've never used this option; it was suggested in 2014 but a different option was picked instead. This one might be the one we ought to have picked all along.

Could this be posted as its own [feature-request] so we can better find & point users to it? (It's come up a few times since.)

@doppelgreener Done. Can the Autocard feature be improved (again)?

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


text:
Answers That Add Virtually Nothing To Previous Answers?
I should get some other opinions on this before I let it irritate me...
What is the general view on the following scenario:
One poster answers a question correctly and pretty thoroughly.  Half an hour later, another poster answers the question again, almost word-for-word, but with perhaps one small additional feature.  E.g. it could be a Magic question, and the second answer gives the paragraph number of the rule in the Magic Comprehensive Rules, whereas the first answer just quoted the rule.
In some respects the second answer may be better as it has a small amount of additional content that the first answer lacked - but from another point of view, it could be deemed a sort of blatant parasitism, doing very little work other than making a tiny change that could have been suggested in a comment or edit instead.
As I say I see pros and cons to this kind of activity, so I just wanted to poll others on what they thought.  N.B. I am not suggesting that one of two posters "simul-posting" an answer should be penalised due to the unfortunate accident of failing to hit the return button first... but half an hour later, it doesn't seem so likely that this is what happened, surely?

Related: Handling answers that build heavily on (or are copied outright from) existing answers; I've been accused of plagiarism. What do I do?

Mm, I'm not so worried about whether it constitutes legally actionable plagiarism, more about whether it's a slightly shady way of gaming the reputation system.  I guess the worst outcome of it (aside from "unfairness issues") is questions ending up with two virtually identical answers, which may not even be a terrible thing... at least it corroborates what the correct answer is.

Yeah, I guessed that's where you were coming from. Those related questions don't really discuss the etiquette angle too much (which is why I didn't post them as an answer). But the surrounding discussion is interesting.

Funny. I actually asked something similar a long time ago: Etiquette: When is it ok to edit your answer to include information from someone else's?

I'd like to just note that sometimes it takes 20 min. or so to look up a comprehensive rule, formulate an answer, then get distracted by, I don't know, actual money-paying work :), then come back 15 min. later and post the answer without noticing someone else has already answered in a similar way. Like you say, usually two similar answers don't matter. More than once I've deleted my answer if it isn't substantively different in content than a more well-articulated answer.

@ghoppe Upvoted because I agree that it feels like good etiquette to delete your correct answer if it arrives later than an answer that says exactly the same... through no fault of your own.  Subsidiary question: should moderators feel any need to "tidy up" the answers in the event that multiple identical answers are posted?  What if someone adds an identical answer to an existing one 6 months down the line (unlikely and ineffectual though this would be?)

I knew this question sounded far too familiar. It's been asked on this meta here (and I answered it). Is it bad form to source content from other people's answers?

I wouldn't worry about it, nothing's broken here.
1) You do not own an exclusive right to be a sole answered of a question. You cannot plagerize statements of fact.
2) Answers that are posted after another answer may have been started before another answer (this might be the case because the answer took the time to quote the rule in question, format the question nicely, and link to the relevant authoritative document. Doubly true if using a mobile device to input the answer)
Quick answers are not necessarily the best answers. If you do not make it obvious that you quote from the MtG CR, someone else is likely to take the effort to do so to make it clear that the rules quote was authoritative.

Don't worry, I'm in favour of the actual best answer to any given question being generated on this site.  The only question is whether we all aim for that cooperatively or competitively!

Genuinely not meant to be a dig, that last comment, by the way.  This entire site network has been set up on the concept of getting people really competitive in order to trick them into doing collaborative work...

In my experience on StackOverflow, if two answers are equivalent preference is usually shown (in voting and in which one is accepted) for the earlier answer--and we, as voting and commenting members of the community--can encourage this behavior here.
I might take action depending on the situation--a downvote if it's very close and probably a flag if it's verbatim.
I think the ideal outcome would be a comment from a 3rd user encouraging the second-answerer to either expand his answer to make it substantially different or to self-delete.

Though note that if the two answers are within an hour of each other, as in the scenario I described, eventually both answers will end up marked "5 hours ago" etc etc, and it will be really difficult for the casual observer to tell which one was first.  Not that "I was lucky enough to arrive on the scene first" is a good reason for getting all the glory, but then "I arrived on the scene second, and copied out the answer almost word for word" seems like an even worse one!

@thesunneversets Yes, hours later on the same day is hard to distinguish--which is unfortunate--but once the day is gone they get time-stamped. On first reading your question I was nervous you might be referring to me in answering this question, but it's clear now that we were 3 minutes apart (and, I believe, different enough to justify keeping both up).

@shujaa "but once the day is gone they get time-stamped." It takes about 2 or 3 days, it seems, as your answer's timestamp currently shows up as "2 days ago".

The etiquette I've seen on some other sites is that if there's a reasonably thorough answer that's missing one small thing, someone else will edit it in (if it's straightforward, like a source citation) or suggest it in a comment (if it might "put words in" the author's mouth).  If the author edits to incorporate that information, it's good form to give a hat-tip to the commenter (since the comment will probably be deleted as obsolate later), but this isn't universal.
All that said, there's no "I got here first" lock on information; if a later answer explains the same points more clearly, for example, that might be the more-valuable answer even if it didn't start from scratch.  If I'm the later answerer I only answer if I feel my post is substantially different; for smaller stuff I think it's better to improve the existing answer.

Nothing to disagree with here.  I guess it's probably more trouble than it's worth to put "expanding on userx's excellent answer" in a subsequent answer (after all, what if userx goes on to delete their post?).  But a bit of "credit where it's due" might not go amiss as a comment, perhaps?

Actually, I've seen the "expanding on X's answer" pattern work well (where the expansion is enough to warrant its own anwwer).  If X deletes or heavily revises his answer the original is still recoverable, so at worst the other answer gets edited.  What I meant about credit is: X posts an answer, Y says something helpful, X edits something helpful into his answer and says something like "thanks to Y" or "h/t Y" as part of that.  It seems polite to me (crediting your source), but it's by no means universal.  The main point is to get Y's info into the answer.

I'm just sore about doing that because I got stung once: I did an answer that said "actually, I disagree with X's answer"; they agreed and changed the part that was wrong; their now-correct answer went on to get a ton of upvotes; and my answer started to attract downvotes for not making any sense! ("What does he mean, he disagrees with X's answer? X's answer is right.")  Never write an answer depends on context from outside the answer, is what I learned from that...

Ouch.  I'm sorry to hear that, and if I'd been stung that way I think I'd feel the same way. :-(

@thesunnevrrsets, why not say I disagree with X's answer that [blah]. If X changes their answer, just change your answer I disagree with X's previous answer before their edit that, [blah]. Anyone who would downvote you without looking into the edit isn't worth worrying about.

If you're referring specifically to Magic questions, this has been a debate for a while.
Having two answers, one with comp rules as an authoritative source and one without the citations and near as much background as a more beginner friendly answer, is much better than having one big answer. It lets the beginners drift to the answer that is easier to read, and lets the experts drift to the one with citations because they can understand it.

I do like the one brief answer plus one very, very complete answer format for answers to Magic questions.  In this case I was thinking more of near-identical correct answers.  An answer that really delves into the ins and outs of the Comprehensive rules following a correct but brief response is definitely an addition of value to the previous answer.


text:
Is "boardgames.stackexchange.com" a suitable url for a board and CARD games site?
I was telling some friends about boardgames.stackexchange.com (plug, plug) and how my #1 question here is about the strong no trump in Bridge.  I complained that "not enough British people have come to defend the honour of the weak no trump!"
Without missing a beat, one of my friends replied in a humorously scornful tone "that's because we don't like to go and discuss Bridge on a site called boardgames.stackexchange.com".
Of course I protested that the full name of the site was "Board and Card Games", but he's got a point. Shouldn't the url for this site be a bit less misleading?  If the original stackoverflow was at the address cplusplusandjava.com, people might be a lot less comfortable about asking questions about Python and PHP there, even if these were explicitly allowed in the remit.  Has this problem been previously noted, and is there anything that could be done?  (Though I imagine it might be a bit late now...)

It's a bit late into the game to change the URL. That said, if it were possible to change it, what should it be changed to? It's a bulky name as is, but I can't think of anything that would not sacrifice either brevity or clarity - the name needs to be meaningful while also being something people can understand and recall easier. "boardandcardgames" or "boardcardgames", while not exceptionally long, people have to remember which one comes first, as an example, and to with the presence or lack of an "and" in there.
I can agree that it is a misleading name, but unless we have a better alternative, it is nothing but unwise to alter a URL which people have thus far become accustomed to.

Agree totally that "boardgames" is better than any of the clunky alternatives you give.  With hindsight, something more colourful (like "stackoverflow" itself) might have been fun.  "Games" is probably sacrosanct.  "analoggames" sadly suffers slightly from the "whorepresents.com" unfortunate url syndrome.  I'm pretty sure there is no possibility of changing the url now that we're all used to it anyway, but you're certainly right that it's also hard to think of a great alternative!

"if it were possible to change it, what should it be changed to?" — Tabletop Games

games.SE is appropriate

@Stephen, I don't think we would get games.SE given that gaming.SE is a separate site. URLs should be distinct; if anything, games.SE should probably redirect to gaming.SE.

When AskDifferent came out of beta, a new domain askdifferent.com was pointed to apple.stackexchange.com— I don't see why this couldn't happen again.

@ghoppe AskDifferent had the name suggested and it was identified as extremely excellent (apparently, as it is some Apple thing). I haven't heard any stellar suggestions here. Even Tabletop, I could only see as replacing boardgames in the current domain name. I note that it's not guaranteed that we will change the domain name (there isn't really a case that we've done this so late in the game), but we need a solid idea before we can even consider it.

@GraceNote I've expanded my thoughts in another answer. I think there's lots of creative possibilities…

I personally think "Table Top Games" is the most inclusive and strictly correct term that covers the scope of the site. It could easily include board games, card games, dice games*, and miniatures games. I believe that the best chance of getting out of beta may include a merger with rpg.stackexchange.com. I'm not sure how that community feels about it, but really, the latest edition of D&D goes back to its miniatures roots more strongly than ever. Roleplay is certainly in flavour with some Collectible Card games, even if it isn't typical for the players to actually "role-play".
There are certainly a wide variety of different games that are played on top of a table, generally seated, and many players of older and revered "thinking" games may chafe at the thought of casting a wider net, as might the casual card players, or hardcore rpg-ers… but I think the tent can be wide like Stack Overflow was.
If "Board and Card Games" or "Table Top Games" sounds clunky perhaps we can come up something evocative? There are several stack exchange sites that grew up to have their own name: superuser.com, serverfault.com, askdifferent.com, seasonedadvice.com
I was thinking that the majority of the games we talk about are basically turn-based, be they cards or board games. A phrase like "itsyourmove.com" or "itsyourplay.com" would sound evocative and be fairly instantly memorable. Alas, those domains were taken when I searched. Maybe a variation on that could be discovered?
Inspired by the granddaddy of these sites, stackoverflow.com, I thought something like tableoverflow.com might work. I'm imagining a logo with a table with two chairs, overflowing with game boxes, pieces, cards, poker chips, and so forth…
I took the liberty of squatting the domain, lest someone dastardly took it. If there is no interest in this idea, I'll just use it to host warnings of bad HTML table design or something… guffaw
* I've often wondered about this. Obviously questions about Yahtzee, Roll through the Ages, and even Poker Dice belong here. Are they, strictly speaking, board games? What about Mah Jong? Or Dominoes? Clearly they're of the same genre…

+1 for "Table Top Games" and merger with RPG.SE.

As a web application developer, I probably approach these things much differently than the average person does, but to be honest, I couldn't tell you what the URLs of most of my favorite sites are, including "this" one. ("This" meaning the main site - I don't have meta bookmarked.)
Given what Grace has said, why not ask your friends to do this?

Bookmark the site.
Name the bookmark "Card Games" or "Bridge" or "Foolish Americans who need to be taught lessons". :)

You could also just send them links ... "Here, click this and defend me!" Or make sure they're using Chrome or Safari or some other browser that saves recent/most-visited sites so you can return to them with a simple click.
Don't let them get hung up on the URL, humorously or not. Get them to the site, show them around, and encourage them to start contributing. Who knows? Maybe someday there will be a different URL for the main site ... and it would be a shame if your friends only then came around to visit, while you got to traipse around with your 20K* rep and privileges.
*because it would be a live site by then, you see, so 4K wouldn't be enough ...

I think that tablegames.SE has some merit ... tabletopgames.SE seems a bit clunky ...
I think that just games.SE is just fine.
As long as we don't end up with something like BRCCCGMWMRPGRRPGTTAOMG (Board, Regular Card, Collectable Card, War Miniatures, RPG Miniatures, Regular RPG, Table Top and Other Miscellaneous Games ... it's just a nice co-incindence that it ends in OMG) :-)

You better fit miniatures in there somewhere too.  I guess they're feeling a bit left out as well.

I stand by "tablegames.SE has some merit" :)  "tabletopgames" misreads to tablet op games confusing the iPad war game players maybe

"tablet op" games? Uh. What is that? I don't think it would ever be read that way. :)

Just picking nits :)

tabletop sounds good as well - it's a shame that the general "gaming" got swiped by a specific subset. (Yes Mario, there is more types of gaming than video games).


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Elder-Dragon-Highlander versus Commander tags
This is probably an easy question, but it gave me pause.
We currently have questions on the site relating to both EDH and Commander - which are synonyms for the same Magic format.  EDH has been "officially rebranded" as Commander, but it's still fine to call it EDH if you're a traditionalist.
It would be nice to merge these tags together, but neither of them is obviously the wrong tag.  Should we go with "Commander" because it's the more up-to-date term?

Make a tag synonym ... also add edh as a synonym.
I lack sufficient rep for synonym creation, but you should be able to.

Considering the name Elder Dragon Highlander is not mentioned even once in the Magic comprehensive rules, and the official EDH/Commander website mentions that Commander is the modern name for the format, Commander should definitely be the actual tag, and Elder Dragon Highlander a synonym of it.


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Should we accept edits of a subjective nature to other people's answers (or questions)?
I'm finding this is happening a lot - people are editing questions and answers, not with objectively necessary improvements (fixing typos etc) but subjective amendments.
e.g. I've just got one where a sentence beginning with "One of the most important differences..." has been edited to "One difference..."  Accepted that the editor thinks that the difference is actually not a very important difference; surely this type of edit alters the tone of the answer to the point where it's not the answer that the answerer originally intended to make?
I'm particularly interested in this because I've had my questions edited with "helpful clarifications" to the point where they're no longer the questions I wanted to ask!  It seems very easy for people to edit stuff almost beyond the point of recognition in this way, and I was wondering if there were any guidelines to how far edits of this type should be allowed to go, or if anyone else had any strong opinions on the subject?

If it changes the tone of the answer, my opinion is no.  The OP's emphasis should be respected, and if people disagree with the emphasis they can indicate that with their voting.
You have the ability to roll back or re-edit if you're not happy with the edits, and I have done precisely that on some of my questions elsewhere.
If you're referring to the question I think you are, I edited that question myself, strictly to remove text that was struck out, since the revision history provides precisely the same functionality.

Oh, okay!  I misunderstood what was going on there - didn't notice that it was the OP who'd made the key change!  Sorry, your edit was beyond reproach.  My meta question can still stand though, on the basis that I've definitely seen other edits that add too much new stuff to the mix to make me feel entirely comfortable...


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How about a blog and some Jeopardy questions?
I occasionally drop in on B&CG SE for a look around as its something that I enjoy reading, but I'm a bit of a fringe user in the real world so don't have anything worthwhile to ask.
However, I've seen a few people mention in comments etc. that this site is not doing well in Beta etc.
From what I've seen in the past the SE folks only close down proposals if visitors don't get good quality answers for their questions. Which I think this site definitely checks the box.
I've watched two other beta sites: fitness and onstartups slowly build up to good quality sites with good traffic. They were both in similar circumstances to this site with low level traffic and questions per day. But they have managed to increase their traffic to decent levels by the hard work of core members and persistence by providing quality answers to the few questions they were getting per day.
Your average user can help by giving a pat on the back to the core group by regularly voting.
But I'd also like to suggest that this site would do well with a blog like some of the other sites (e.g. fitness). It's something that I'd definitely be interested to read. You could cover rules, reviews and recommendations etc.
Jeopardy style questions can also be a boost if chosen carefully and if they are full of solid advice. This is something worth considering.
Keep persisting, I think this site provides great answers and has a good standard.


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Using BCG as an Official Support Site
I'm seeing a trend on other stack exchange sites to using Stack Exchange as an official website for user questions (e.g. StackOverflow for RestSharp, or Drupal for Drupal)
Is this something that is sanctioned by the community (and the owners)?
In particular, I'm working on a mobile version of an existing board game.  I expect many users will have questions about the game itself.  For those types of questions, is it okay to post on the web site that such questions should be asked here, and will be answered here.
To be clear, I'm not talking about reporting defects, but rather using this site instead of creating something like a google group for community support.
Benefits I see are that the questions will be public, and since they may relate to either the print version or the iOS/Android versions, anyone can answer.
The downside is possibly pollution of the questions on this site, when they are not related to gameplay, but really are "Why doesn't it load?!" or the like.

No. Going by the pattern on Stack Overflow, Web Apps, and other similar sites, using an SE site as the official, primary support channel for a product is strongly discouraged. None of the other SE sites that focus on specific products are official support sites for those products. (There are occasional specific exceptions, such as Ask Ubuntu and the Facebook tag on Stack Overflow, for a time, but those arrangements were set up by the SE team in cooperation with the leaders of those particular projects on a case-by-case basis. Besides, the Facebook experiment didn't really work out well, and Ask Ubuntu is still one of several officially recognized support sites.)
If you want to post on your game's website that BC&G is a resource (among others) that clients can use to ask questions about game play, that's fine. If people ask questions about the game here of their own accord, that's fine. Even if it gets to the point where far more questions are asked about your game on BC&G than on your own forum or mailing list or whatever you want to set up, that's fine. But it has to happen organically. This site shouldn't be the single canonical reference for questions and answers about your game.
Of course, again, that's the way things typically work on other sites. Perhaps the BC&G community would like to adopt a different policy on this matter, in which case none of the above applies.

I'd be curious to hear what others think about trying this out. We sure could use a little more traffic... I'd be okay with a trial run as an official gameplay-related question site as long as technical issues remained off-topic.

BGG supports games on they forum without being a official way. Why not support indie games or new games here, that of course are on site (not computer games). In the case of OP, his game is out of this site (is a computer game, I don't care if the game is like a table one).

I like the idea of becoming a support channel. Lots of exposure, and you can always just ignore the tag if you're not interested

You should ask on Gaming.StackExchange.  Computer versions of board games are on-topic there, as are tech support questions, so as long as you are going to watch the site to help make sure that questions don't go unanswered, I think it would be fine.  Its even something that I've brought up on meta in the past and seems to have gotten support there.
https://gaming.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2096/have-we-considered-trying-to-get-game-developers-to-use-gaming-se-as-their-qa-f


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Are dice games suitable for discussion here? Eg Dudo / liar dice?
I regularly play Dudo (peruvian liar dice, maybe branded as "Perudo" in the US?) with friends, especially at the pub, (as with no stakes, it's allowed in a UK pub, and because dice are waterproof, the game can't get ruined).
Are dice games fair for discussion here? There aren't any cards or boards, but it's a social, strategic game, very much of the ilk discussed here. And it seems to me it would be better incorporated into this site, than any other Stack exchange site.
What about other predominately dice based games? Poker dice for instance? (which is a dice game based on a card game)
Thoughts?

Yes, Perudo is the US-branded version of liar's dice.

Yes,
Simplified, our definition of a "boardgame" is

Normally you play it while sitting at a table
A computer is not necessary
There are winning/losing conditions

Dice games fit those criteria.

Oh! I thought they were not allowed, and refrained from asking them. Shouldn't the title be clarified to "Human strategy games" or something like it (or is it too late)?

@ghosts_in_the_code - if the site ever escapes beta there may be a name change involved, but not likely before then.

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


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Rename tag [marvel-dice-masters] to [dice-masters]
We currently have two questions with the tag marvel-dice-masters. Since this game came out, it's been expanded beyond Marvel's properties to include DC and D&D properties too. All properties are compatible and share rules, and game is commonly referred to as "Dice Masters". Thus we should update our tag and the questions.

I should point out that, unlike the recent rename of Coup, this one does have a tag wiki, and the OP doesn't have the reputation to edit the tag wiki of a new tag (or to edit questions). Regardless, I think that proposing a tag rename on meta before executing it is a good idea.

Since this has reached +5 with no downvotes or dissenting comments in the next day or two I was going to add a dice-masters tag to the 2 questions, remove the marvel-dice-masters tag, and copy/paste the tag wiki.

I added dice-masters to both of the questions that previously had marvel-dice-masters and removed that tag from the. I also copied the tag wiki over to the new tag.


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Are questions about statistics, math, analysis, simulations, numbers, chance, etc discouraged?
Deep strategical analysis certainly fits within the realm of "Board and Card Games" but these questions and their resulting discussions tend to drift into a different style of Q/A. Is there an unofficial line that defines how far into this realm we should be going?
Topics I consider relevant to this question:
Statistics/Math/Chance

Data gathering/mining (Where/how do I get X?)
Turn/game format discussion (What/how should I store X?, What turn formats are available for X?)
Probability (What are the odds of X occurring?)
Player strength terminology/format (ELO, TrueSkill)

Simulations

Specific strategies (How do I simulate opening X?)
Specific games (How do I simulate games for X?)
AI development (How do I create an AI that plays X?)
AI competition (Where can my AI compete at X?)
Help with specific AI (How do I beat X?, How do I get X to work?)
General AI discussion (What type of AI would be best for X?)

And so on. The main question here: Are people interested in analyzing game-theory, AI and the mathematics of board games encouraged to post those questions here? Or in a more relevant area of stackexchange? Or... ?

The general rule of thumb is this

What happens when you ask these questions on the site?

In other words, it's easier to proceed based on data from "we tried this, and ..." compared to asking what ifs.

I am more asking from a "What is our intended audience/voice?" standpoint. Are we looking for an informal collection of questions about games? Are we looking for a place to ask very specific questions that only the deep geeks would care about? If your answer still applies, cool. I am just double-checking. :)

@MrHen - I think what Jeff is saying is - "Ask Questions, see what happens, then discuss if necessary"  The community definitely has some leeway to define the audience/voice.  We're still in Beta and need to stretch and find our boundaries.  Trying to reach a consensus in meta is difficult and not necessarily representative of what the actual users will do when presented with a question that would seem to be on a topic previously OK'd in meta.

All the topics you mention in your question sound potentially interesting to me.  I think questions on all of those should be allowed/encouraged, but if particular questions are very [maths/programming/stats] oriented then it would be worth suggesting the questioner also posts on the relevant stack exchange site.

FWIW, I am exceptionally happy to see quantitative questions and responses here.  Of course, having the ability to cross post a thread about boardgames and statistics to both a boardgames and a statistics stackexchange would be very interesting (to me).

I do play board and card games for the social aspect but I cannot turn off that part of my mind that loves AI. My primary question during and after a game is: "How must an AI be designed to solve the problems involved". I also love to find simple algorithms that I can use to find better solutions during the game.
So yes, I would love to see more discussion about the mathematical aspects, algorithms and AI.


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Can we get auto conversion of mana and tap symbols?
For example, convert the text {1}{G}{U}{B}{R}{W}{T} to
If we can't use the actual symbols, then maybe just the letter/number on a colored background (preferably a circle)?

Don't forget the rest of the possible symbols while you are at it. You have multi-color symbols, generic/split colored symbols, 1-20 generic symbols, phyrexian symbols, the untap symbol, and probably a few others I'm missing.

This is another of those 'important' requests. It's possible the symbols themselves can't be used due to copyright issues, but surely alternative placeholders can be found. If there were support from a dev on this, I'm confident the community could provide a complete list of required conversions.

Is this actually needed? Anyone have a list of questions that would have actually benefited from this feature?

@ColinD an answer I recently wrote (for http://boardgames.stackexchange.com/questions/13520/underworld-connections-tapping-the-land-for-mana-and-ability) would be much more readable with this feature

Here's a question where mana symbols were so essential, multiple answers used images:  https://boardgames.stackexchange.com/q/45595/9999 .  Dedicated support would make this much easier

If we can use the actual symbols, I can see this as being helpful for some questions.
If we cannot use the actual symbols, I see no point in this feature. Why make people learn another symbol? The text representation of mana symbols { {B}, {U}, {W}, {R}, {G}, {1} } are used in the comprehensive rules.
Further, would we want to do this for all mana/tap symbols or just the basic ones? The list of mana symbols will quickly grow when we start to include the 1-15+ colorless mana symbols, dual mana symbols, phyrexian mana symbols, ect... What do we do when WotC decides to add more symbols to the game? Can we commit to updating our MTG symbols every couple months?  I do not know how the script/icons are implemented on SE sites, but my guess is no.

It makes questions with Mana symbols easier to read. For example {U} is blue, but some people may not know that. Also it would standardize the way it is written. It may be in the comprehensive rules, but still not obvious to everyone.

How would the Blue mana symbol re represented if we created our own icons? a Blue ciricle with a B, or a Blue circle with a U?

The colorless mana symbols should be easy to render without having a separate icon for every single one. Here, I generated one for you. Admittedly, it looks poor for 2 digit numbers, but Stack Exchange doesn't pay me to fix that.

@Rainbolt: That looks kind of broken for me (Firefox 31 / Linux). Here's my attempt at basic iconless CSS mana symbols. It should even be possible to do hybrid mana symbols that way, although it gets a bit trickier. And of course the symbols themselves could be added by various means.

Ps. Here's an improved version that supports hybrid mana, phyrexian mana, half mana (from Unhinged) and has a fancy Unicode tap symbol. All that with just pure HTML + CSS, no images!

Pps. ...and here's yet another version with webfont support and a JS routine to convert {1}{G}{U}{B}{R}{W} shorthand to icons.

There's also untap ({Q})


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I seem to have two different accounts here; how do I merge them?
I've joined a few other SE sites and my original identity migrated just fine.  Here I can log in with either of my two openID accounts but it's not the same account -- contrast with my account on judaism.stackexchange.com, which knows about both openIDs.  I'm not sure how I ended up with different identities (with different histories and reputations) here but not on any other SE site; how do I fix it?

So far as I can tell, you've only got one overall Stack Exchange account (as seen here). Some of your SE site accounts have different information (such as Open IDs, as you noticed) but that doesn't mean you have multiple accounts.
If you want the same info everywhere:

Pick one site that has your information just the way you want it
On that site, go to your user page.
On your user page, click the "Accounts" tab.
Scroll to the bottom, and click the button that says "Copy <site name> Profile to Related Accounts"
Things should now work the way you expect them to.

So if you, for instance, like the way your account looks on judaism.stackexchange.com, go here, scroll down, and click.
If this doesn't work for you, just add a comment here describing what happened.

Checked things out, was ready to write an answer and found Dori beat me to it. :)  She wrote it better than I was going to anyways!

This doesn't seem to have changed anything.  judaism.SE shows two openIDs, Google (primary) and LiveJournal (secondary).  If I look in to boardgames.SE with Google it shows no responses and a rep of 101; if I log in using LJ it shows a response and a rep of 121.  (And the badges are different.)  In neither case does the profile page display any OpenID associations like it does on judaism.SE.  Both are beta sites, so I would have expected them to behave the same way.  So it's not like the 20 rep points are all that big a deal or anything, but I'd rather not have two identities running around.

Correction: apparently I was looking at the profile page while logged out.  Depending on how I log in, I see a profile with either the Google OpenID or the LJ one, but not both like on judaism.SE.  I'm willing to collapse everything on Google and forget about LJ if I can figure out how.

Thank you!  Much appreciated.


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Do we need all these number-of-player tags?
We currently have: multi-player, two-players, extra-players, and player-number.  These tags have 6-11 questions per at present.  Two of them have no wikis, and the wiki for multi-player says "more than two players", which is not the definition of "multi" I am familiar with.
What should we do with these tags?

I've posted my preferred approach as one answer.  Please post others and vote.

Nuke them all.
They add nothing, in my opinion (besides opportunities for people to go tagging everything in sight).
For me, nearly any tag that groups multiple unrelated games together is probably a meta-tag, and we shouldn't use it.

How long is it appropriate to wait before acting?  (This seems the clear winner so far.)  And can we delete the tags wholesale without bumping all the questions, or will we have to do this in batches to not flood the main page?

@MonicaCellio - it should be cool to just blast through these during a lull.  Maybe Friday night?  We're still working the rules/strategy tags.

Ok, I'll find a lull and blow them away.  I've been trying to delete the rules tag when editing the post anyway; that and strategy are much bigger piles so bulk-editing won't work.

I think we should do something with the magic questions, as the tag there has a clear and useful meaning.  A magic specific tag would make sense.

I created mtg-multiplayer for the subset of multiplayer that were about MtG.

I can only see one valid use for multi-player. That would be with mtg. The rules differ in some respects, and the answers differ too when offering advice about about a duel deck versus a multi-player deck. As for a tag, mtg-free-for-all would be better.
I suppose in most situations, the OP could/would specify the environment that the deck is being played in. We only have 3 or so mtg-ffa questions right now anyway.

I think we should merge all of these into player-number and write a wiki for it.  This tag should almost always be accompanied by a game-specific tag.  (The exception there would be questions of the form "what games work well for seven players?".)
Nobody would ever search for extra-players without also searching for a specific game (what does it mean in isolation?), so searching for game + player-number works just as well.  All non-solitaire games are multi-player, so that tag isn't particularly meaningful.  As for two-player, why distinguish that if we don't distinguish one-player and other specific numbers of players?  What's special about two?

It seems that questions of the form "what games work well for seven players?" are considered off-topic. Not a criticism, but it makes it seem unlikely that the case "not accompanied by a game-specific tag" will occur with an on-topic questions.

@ErikP., thanks -- I remembered having seen questions like that, but didn't remember them being closed.  In that case yeah, I can't think of a case where a game-specific tag wouldn't apply.


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Do we really need edition-specific tags for Twilight Imperium?
Tonight I found a question about Twilight Imperium 2nd edition in the "untagged" bucket.  When I went to tag it twilight-imperium-3rd-edn came up, but nothing else.  So I created twlight-imperium-2nd-edn, but the former only has 11 questions.  Can we just collapse on twilight-imperium, or are the editions sufficiently different that we need the separation?

Thanks for spotting this. For now, we are trying hard to avoid the can of worms that is version tags, because it adds lots of complexity to tagging. We can revisit this question in due course if the pressure for versions mounts, and discuss the tradeoffs again then. But this example is not sufficient.
Both tags should be collapsed to twilight-imperium.


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Let's clean up these very-specific Go tags
I just came across computer-go, having already noted a not-overly-populated computer.  Should computer-go be eliminated, with those questions being tagged with both computer and go?  If not, aren't we setting ourselves up for other game-specific computer tags?
I then came across 9x9, which has three questions, all also tagged go.  Should we eliminate this tag?  I assume we don't want to also use it for Tafl variants played on a 9x9 board.
(I suspect there are many more tags that assume the question is about Go.  I have already proposed a tag-wiki revision for handicap to make it not just about Go.  I haven't reviewed every tag by any means.)

I've created a [tag:computer-AI] tag to replace some of these [tag:computer-go] tags, my logic being one of the main topics is beating/playing computers and that can be shared by many board games.

I think the 9x9 tag is a good tag, maybe it should be renamed [go-9x9]

Adding to your list, [tag:invasion] and [tag:extension]

I think the edits you made for handicap are very good. Other tags (e.g. invasion, extension, 9x9) are, I think, tags that should be kept, but perhaps with a "go-" prefix added on. There are also Japanese Go term tags (e.g. joseki) that are probably fine as is.

If they're meaningful sub-divisions of the "Go" space then I'm fine with keeping them, but they should have "go" in their names as you propose.  Other games have extensions, handicaps, and different board sizes, after all.

The biggest reason I would see for a prefix is if there's risk of another game having that as a name (Invasion seems particularly prone). I think the handicap tag is good being general, but I don't foresee the extension tag really causing difficulty. Stack Overflow has tags such as "gui" or "plot" which are used almost exclusively in language-specific questions. If another game with extensions wants to use the extensions tag, then we should generalize the tag wiki rather than create new game-extension tags.

When I saw "extension" in the tag list I assumed it was a synonym for "expansion" (and briefly wondered why it was singular).  Since I am not a Go player I had no idea it was a Go term.

@MonicaCellio But that is easily fixed by a tag wiki, rather than a tag prefix.

Ok.  The wiki excerpt should probably start with "In Go, ..."; you want it to be easy to notice when people are typing tag names.

@MonicaCellio Yeah, I'm trying to hit all the Go tags to make sure that's the case.


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Are incremental tag-wiki edits valuable?
I've been reviewing our tags, as you may have noticed from some of the "is this tag really necessary?" questions I've asked.  Along the way I've been editing tag excerpts and wikis where I can fill in something.  In many cases I can't make the complete, excellent wiki that ought to exist, but I can add something so I do. One thing in particular that I've been doing is to cross-reference related tags (and "use this instead" xrefs, like the civilization (Sid Meier) tag pointing to advanced-civ), because I've seen that kind of tag confusion on every SE site I participate on.
I've just noticed that some of my edits were rejected as "too minor" or "not following the wiki guidelines" (which, ironically, seems to advocate an incremental approach).
I don't want to waste reviewers' time with unwanted changes.  I thought changes like this would be useful, but I haven't asked anybody.  So I'll ask now: what are our expectations for wiki edits?  What's the minimum useful?  What's noise?

Perhaps ironically, I don't see a tag here to cover tag wikis, so I used "tags" instead.

Suggested Edits to my knowledge need to be Approved or Rejected by two votes in agreement. Looking over the History, less than 2% of edits are rejected. I wouldn't worry about it too much. I have rejected edits that were too minor in my mind. They were just small edits that didn't add any new information or clarity. Other edits like Alt text for images for the vision impared were quickly approved.


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How should we tag Rex: Last Days of an Empire questions?
I've got a Rex question, but rex-final-days-of-an-empire is too long - what should we use as the tag?
Some possibilites would be rex-final-days, rex-final-days-empire, and rex-fdoae. I used rex-final-days-empire for the moment, for the sake of more recognizable words.
What's the verdict?

I can't actually think of any reason not to use rex, as there's nothing else out there similar enough to confuse with the tag at the moment.
rex-final-days or rex-final-days-empire are OK but prolix; they don't actually add to the clarity of the game description.  twilight-imperium-rex isn't discoverable enough.  (Although there might be an argument for rex-twilight-imperium.  A similar issue could arise with the Android games at some point.)
Failing that, we could always use dune. ;)

Aside: We can always synonym in the longer forms if there're signs of confusion.

Wait, so this is the republished Dune game? AWESOME!

@AlexP: Yep.  Those who don't know the Dune universe are unlikely to see anything in it, but the retheming to Twilight Imperium is really obvious if you do.  Even if you didn't play the original Dune game, for example, you can easily guess which TI faction represents which Dune unit.


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What Does It Mean That Reputation (Its Increase, Actually) Is Capped at 200 Per Day?
Suppose a person starts out with say, a 1000 reputation, and earns 210 in one day. My understanding is that at the end of the day, the reputation is 1200 (based on the 200 cap).
What happens to the extra 10 points? Are they carried over to the FOLLOWING day, so that reputation is 1210 as of the "second" day? (That's assuming no cap on the second day's reputation.) Or are the extra 10 points just "lost?"

From the main meta site, the points are lost:
What happens when you hit 200 reputation by upvotes for one day?
It's worth noting that the 200 point limit is only for upvotes.  Accepted answers and awarded bounties are not limited.

Basically, it means that you have to space out your questions (as I have started to do) so you don't get more than 200 upvotes a day. (In the "early days" I was exceeding 100 on certain days.) Was this the intent?


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What is the Proper Use of "Polls" on This Site?
On one hand, we are discouraged from asking questions of a "polling," nature, just to find out the balance of opinions.
On the other hand, people sometimes use the results of polls taken ELSEWHERE in support of their conclusions.
Given these constraints, what is a proper way to use polls/polling data when asking or answering questions?

In one sense you could say that every question here is a poll.  After all, people vote for the answers they feel are helpful.
I tend to use the term "polling" in a different manner though.  For me, the difference is in whether the question is looking for answers or items.
A question like Recommendations for 6-player board game is explicitly urging folks to answer with one game per answer.  That ends up with people voting on individual games and awarding reputation for being the first person to mention a popular game.  I call these questions polls and now actively discourage them.
A more recent question, Recommendation for D&D players who want a faster dungeon/questing game after dinner? has garnered a couple good answers.  The answers by aramis and gomad contain multiple games each with some explanation about why they feel that game meets the questioners need.  The extra detail allows the voters to be better informed as to whether the answer might be useful (and deserves an upvote).
The number one item on the famous Good Subjective, Bad Subjective blog post is to encourage answers that explain themselves. I think the whole list is worth republishing here.

Great subjective questions inspire answers that explain “why” and “how”
Great subjective questions tend to have long, not short, answers
Great subjective questions have a constructive, fair, and impartial tone.
Great subjective questions invite sharing experiences over opinions.
Great subjective questions insist that opinion be backed up with facts and references.
Great subjective questions are more than just mindless social fun.

The second aspect of your question is also answered here.  Using a poll from another site to back up an answer is encouraged.  Which of these two statements would you prefer seeing in a question or answer?

"Everyone knows Russia has an advantage in Axis & Allies"
"According to a recent poll on Axis-allies-experts.com, the top players feel that Russia has a significant advantage by a 2-1 margin"