.

I agree with thenmal, the game should have a relatively unexpected ending.

I understand why some players would want to play "without the bag of tiles," so to speak, though I do like the percentage of tiles left. Provides just enough lack of knowledge. I also don't enjoy open scoring, though I know that's also group specific.

In theory, you could give the players the option (open tile count vs. hidden tile count), just as various groups may or may not play with the bag.

Thanks for the thoughtful response! Now I can see both sides of the issue :)

OK - I've got a strong opinions on this! You can be the judge on if they are *good* opinions, though:

1) There is definitely a population who would like to play knowing the exact tile count. This is probably the same population that wants to play with open scoring. While this is decidedly NOT the tabletop feel of T&E, I suspect it is a desired feature. You can make a "perfect information" variant, with both open scoring and tile count.

2) For core T&E, though, even the percentage on the bar deviates from the table feel. I've got three proposals in increasing degree of change for that:

a) Just remove the % label. You can leave it as a tooltip for people who do want to check, but for the average player all they would see is the bar, and it would fall to them to estimate how much game is left (similar to real T&E)

b) Decrease the granularity of the bar. That is, only update it every 10%. So players would see a full bar, then (when the true, hidden percentage drops), it would jump directly to 90%. And 80%. Graphically you could even chunk these deciles into their own boxes, like a circa 1990 windows loading bar, with discrete boxes either disappearing, emptying of color, or changing color.

This captures a bit of the vagueness and our human ability to roughly gauge how much game has past and how much is left, but our inability to put an exact number on it.

c) As I thought about b), I was uncomfortable with that last 10%. Because, as the bag gets nearly empty, our ability to estimate exactly how much game is left gets better and better. At a certain point, you can nearly count the tiles with your fingers. Conversely, when the bag is full, we have no sense of just how full it is when the bag is 95%, or 85%, or 75%. So, the later in the game, the better our estimate grows.

So I though, why not do b) above, but adjust the "gates" (or box size) rather than a fixed 10%? So the slider would first update at 80%. Then 60%. Then 40, 30, 20, 15, 10, 5, 2.5.

I think that would accomplish two things - one, replicate the actual game experience for a human guessing how much game is left, and two, still incite that endgame excitement as you can physically feel the bag getting emptier and emptier.

*
Curious to know your thoughts on this, and also happy to clarify. This would be much easier with a whiteboard.

@Acacia: When you play Tigris & Euphrates on BGA, you can keep the account of victory points for each player, and in the same manner, keep the account of the tiles in the bag.
So, if the victory points are displayed, the number of tiles in the bag may be displayed too.

On the other hand, when victory points are not displayed on a BGA table :
In a real game, the tiles and victory points are hidden behind the screens, and the contents of the bag cannot be checked, except approximately when a player completes his hand by taking from one to 6 tiles in the bag.
The information that this player gets so is not an exact count of the tiles unless there are less than 4 tiles left. This information is not available to other players. If the developer displays a gauge for the contents of the tile bag, this gauge must be specific to each player, since seeing the outside of the bag and getting your hand inside it do not provide equivalent information at all.

Well you can always count the number of tiles near the end of the game when you reach your hand inside the bag. Under ten tiles, figuring out the count by feel is not so difficult and the information gets shared in my real life games.

The percentage does make sense as an obfuscation, but having not played the physical game in a few years I'd forgotten there was a bag and didn't appreciate that the interface was simulating this. I thought the game maybe just happened to have 100 stacked tiles.

Acacia's suggestions make sense, maybe with a tooltip explaining in a little more detail what's going on with the progress bar in general. Could also change the label to say "~5%" or "approx 5%".

Renaming the progress bar "Tiles Left in Bag" would also help for suggesting that players can't "see" them.

I agree with thenmal and Eternal Library


In a tabletop game, we can... a) ... (must!) try to memorize our opponents' scores - as best we can, at least, especially concerning each opponent's weakest colors; b) ... measure by bag weight the approximate quantity of tiles remaining in the bag.

By offering us the %, BGA is already giving us an enormous amount of information (and yes, perhaps a little too much). After all, it's not very difficult to turn a % into a number: 10% of 143 tiles (standard board) is 14.3 tiles. That's “14” or “15” (or a little less/more if the system round up / doesn't round up) tiles left in the bag. I much prefer the uncertainty of the % to the exact number.

The option of being able to see players' scores may unfortunately be necessary for very slow games. I'm regularly involved in games that last a month or two, because when I organize a table, I choose the slowest cadence. I'm very slow myself and regularly take a few days to play my turn. After a few weeks, it can become impossible to remember this crucial information, especially if you're playing several games at the same time.

To sum up: The current situation suits me perfectly.