I'm curious why some games can't be played with bots in the web client, but work just fine in the Windows application. These include Go, Reversi, and Connect 4. I know Go downloads some kind of engine, but why does it have to run on your local machine? I thought everything ran on the server anyway. Do you do it to save server resources? I could understand if the server goto verloaded trying to handle multiple simultaneous games with programs like that. Still, I'm a little confused.

Hello,
it's exactly what you said.

For card and dice games, they are indeed server bots, because there are no millions of moves to analyze and process.
For complex strategy games (Chess, Go, Reversi, Connect 4), the bots need much more processing power the server wouldn't be able to handle, especially for multiple people playing at the same time. The bots that run locally currently can't work on the Web client.

That's what I thought, but I wasn't entirely sure. I thought the client didn't do anything other than pass commands and messages back and forth between you and the server, while the server itself did most of the heavy lifting, but apparently that's not always the case?

That is the case except for the games with the local bots as you've already pointed out, and also arcade games.

speaking of arcade games, how do you find out how to play them?

Hello,
the same way as in other games, i.e. ctrl+f1 once you create a table to open its rules.

That being said, this is unfortunately broken in Magic Blocks due to a small oversight.
Either way, you can find the Magic Blocks rules here
and the 2048 rules here.

Currently, this covers the only arcade games available at the moment.