Getting Started With Brettspielwelt: Part 3

As a word of warning here, I’ve never actually used the Spielpartner function in BSW because it was added in after I joined. I already knew how to find games, so why would I worry about learning a new and admittedly scary looking tool? Well, it does do some things you can’t do in any other way, so it’s probably worth learning. I’m going to try to explore what it can do and explain it here. (It doesn’t help that the English help file on the website is half in German…)

Click the Spielpartner button in the menu to open up the window that should look like the screenshot above. In the upper right hand corner is a “Game Manager” button. Clicking this closes the Spielpartner and takes you to the manager. (They really have a lot of ways to get to the manager, eh?) Also of note, there are 4 tabs near the top of the window.

The leftmost one, “Player calls”, shows all the game yells that have been sent out recently. Remember how when you were starting a game you could type in a message and click ok to broadcast it? This is one of the places those messages go. Clicking on a message in this window warps you to that game room. The rectangles themselves seem to contain the same sort of info as the manager, only in a more compressed format. The message entered appears at the bottom of the rectangle. In the case of the screenshot above, the Settlers game at the top entered no message but sent a blank yell to get on this list. Tichu has the message “one more”. Pretty straightforward stuff. The only odd thing here, I think, is that the messages populate at the bottom and scroll upwards. At least I think that’s odd…

The second tab “Game rooms” is blank by default.

The third tab “Filter” allows you to populate the first and second tabs, but it seems to have limited use for the second tab as shown below:

I filtered it to show only San Juan and Puerto Rico, but the problem is the “Game rooms” tab only has room for 9 rectangles and has no scroll bar. So, while the filter is useful in showing me some of the rooms, it can’t show me more than 9. The filter has 3 different things you can filter by and a pretty basic AND/OR/NOT system so you can do some complicated things with it if you’re really versed in it. For example, you can filter by the city the table is in (means nothing to you now, but means a lot to some people) and you can also filter by sets of people you’ve set up. So, you could set the filter up to show people on your friends list for example, and then you’d see at a glance what all your friends were playing. Assuming they’re only playing in at most 9 different games, anyway…

It can certainly help with the “Player Calls” tab, especially when combined with the 4^th tab below. If you don’t care about Tichu, for example, you’ll really want to set your filter up to exclude it from the “Player calls” tab. Otherwise half your game yells will be for Tichu which will waste the limited space in the tool.

Best of all, you can save up to 9 different filters with the green boxes on the filter screen, so you can quickly see where your friends are, and who’s in your town, and then fall back to your no-Tichu filter.

The fourth tab “SpielList” is used to toggle what games you want to see the game yells for. At least, that’s what it says when you click the boxes, but that’s not exactly what it means. You see, one of the options on the filter tab is “BSW-Anderes – inSpielList” which basically lets you add a whole bunch of games at once to your filter. This definitely has some uses when combined with some of the other options.

Finally, down at the very bottom is a quick game yell window. Toggling the sound button gives you an audible clue when your game is ready to start, I think, which could be useful. Beyond that it seems like it just duplicates the functionality inside the game start tool.

Spielpartner is an intimidating looking tool that I can definitely see some uses for now. I don’t think you need to know how to use it to get by since the manager is pretty good but the “Player calls” tab has potential. Join us next time for a discussion of the “meta-game” of BSW.