If the box for "Your Turn in These Games" on the Home tab also included all the rest of the games I'm in (like Warfish), but sortable and showing the games in which its your turn at the top. Then we can get rid of the My Games tab altogether. Simpler, more streamlined, I like it better. I recognize that as more a matter of taste, though, so some more opinions ought to weigh in...

Hmm, the Home tab. Can't say I ever used the Home tab because it's sort of a semantically empty tab name. It tells you where but not what, unless you remember that the 'Home' page contains a list of all your games.

So I actually agree with your idea but backwards. The home page already contains your turn (subset of My Games tab) and Open games (Join Game tab), so why not go all the way.. remove Home, consolidate My Games + Join Game + Create Game into a single unique 'PLAY!' button.

Or maybe not PLAY!, but My Games, or something else that captures the idea of 'this is the main page on the site you always start here and you pretty much always want to go here whenever you want to do something'.

Would require adding a create game functionality into the home page, maybe combine it somehow with the 'Newest Maps' widget?

Well, I was planning on making the home page customisable, so you could set the exact view you wanted. Plus I'd be concerned that as the site start getting busier there is just going to be too much information on the home (or 'Play') page. I think I'd rather have more room to see my game list without having to also see all the open games and vice versa.

Actually the more I think about it the more I think you're right about a Play tab - the problem with the current setup is open games are only visible when you're on that tab or the home tab which means you have to keep clicking around. And the home tab is kind of useless at the moment. So, potentially scrapping all the orange tabs and making everything available from a Play tab makes sense.

The only concern I would have is that if the open games list gets really long then it's going to start getting hard to find games (have a look at Conquer Club or Landgrab.net for an example of how long they can get).

Simple Fix: Only 20 games (or so) show up. Or let people customize how long their list is.

Fixed list for freebies, customizable length for Premium Members?

I picture something like this in my head:

The 'start a brand new' game thing could be either flash or some sort of javascript widget, I know there's a million of them out there for doing scrolly-thingies.  This would give you 6 standard widget-ish things overall for the homepage and give you a start towards customizing your homepage with other widgets.

I know personally if there were options I would remove the Top Ranked Players widget because it's only really interesting once.  [It's part of the reason I never use the WF homepage, ever.  I've already seen 95% of the content on the front page, and the only thing that changes is that scrolly thing for turns (why?) and a movie every 4 months.]

I think a Stats widget would be cooler.  Number of WG players, number of maps, number of games played, number of turns taken, geographic distribution of players, number of forum posts, etc.  It would change every day and give you a good sense of the growing size of the community.  A lot of the numbers would start off small.. but then everyone knows that anyway =]

Oh for the Your turn and Open games tables, I'm against frames on a website but iframes are another story. If you used iframes you could always control the layout while leaving it open how many games you might want to display in each.

You could also then update these tables without reloading the whole page.

I'm also really surprised at Cram's simple fix. The Open Games are the oft-maligned QUEUE on WF, the source of endless cursing and customization requests. This way would be a good chance to let people start as many Open Games as they want, but then limit/sort them on the client side. [In fact you want an overload of Open Games because without them you can almost hear the crickets chirping on the homepage.]

Free play people? All you get is a random sampling of 4 games. You can reload them every 60 seconds to try to get new ones. If you want more options pay up.

Full members? Sort on map, time, players already in, friends, team or non, and whatever else you can think of.

My home page would have Forums info displaying forums with new messages or the new messages themselves!

IRoll11s wrote: I'm also really surprised at Cram's simple fix. ...

Surprised? Hey, I may make a few complicated boards here and there, but in general my design criteria for interfaces are all based on K.I.S,S. and adjustability. If something is simple, its less likely to fail; and if its adjustable, then it can work for anyone.

The New Players thing is interesting, why isn't that a part of everyone's Home page? (Only available if you aren't Logged In)