A game of time

Wow. these are good questions. I, too have seen the occasional small rule change completely change the game is major ways, including game length. In the case of the last rule change you made, by the way, I'd recommend going back to the "fun and quick' version, and ditch the rule change you made.

As for game length in general, it depends on the type of game. For abstract games, anywhere from fifteen minutes to an hour is about right. Longer games imply a particularly entangled situation, but just last night I had to add an additional victory conditon to one of my games, since my wife was killing me, but I was hanging on in a way that was just prolonging the agony.

For board games, I shoot for a playing time of fifteen minutes per player, plus twenty minutes. So if it's a four-player game, I try for a playing time of around 1 hour twenty minutes. But I also try to eliminate downtime as much as possible, keeping the players involved when it isn't their turn. This isn't always possible, of course, but if not the play of the person whose turn it is should be entertaining enough for everyone, rather than just watching someone move resources around. Interaction keeps the gameplay alive longer. Drier games need to head to a climax pretty quickly. As for downtime, if there's no way for players to affect the gameplay of the active player, I'd say each turn should take no more than five minutes, and two is better.

But generally, I'd advise against being too aggressive in changing rules during playtesting. After ever change, play the game a few times before making another, and don't hesitate to undo a change, if it has immediate negative consequences, like you last change did. In general, changes that make gameplay faster as always better, unless they eliminate much of the engaging complexity. But with four players in a game, their interactions will provide a lot of complexity you can't foresee with the rules, making the game longer than you foresee. Simpler is usually better, I say.

Hello

Long games can be as fun as short game. It depend on the type of people you are marketting at. Still even in long games, if you could make some speed optimisation/simplification, it would be appreciated.

The main important thing with long games is to make sure that the players are always in the game. If the players must wait after others to play, it can be boring for them so you should avoid this. You can also ask other players to plan their turn in advance if they have no choice. Or make sure that there is some elements in the game that will always keep the player active.

I remember playing a WW2 game call "bells of Wars" which is a much more detailled "axis & allies" game. We played the game for more than a month and it was interesting. Each saturday night we gathered together and played the game for around 5 hours. Then we covered the game with a plastic board and leave it there until next week. What was cool, is that during the week, I could look at the board and start planing my strategy for next saturday. I even realised that it could be more fun just to have a free day of thinking between each turn. Like some sort of long term strategy game.

sayonara(^_^)

I would like to gently contradict the idea that downtime is a bad thing; I would say that a more accurate statement is that a game needs exactly the right amount of downtime, and no more. I can give a simple example from a game I recently tested: I have whittled the turn sequence down to very short, punchy actions. The only problem is that the actions are so punchy, that people weren't prepared when their turns came up -- "It's my turn already?" The result is that the game took much longer to play than it should have, because there was effective downtime associated with people planning their moves.

This founders an important point, that a little bit of downtime is a good thing, as it gives players time to plan their moves. In that sense, what I think David is objecting to with games like Tikal is that if the board situation changes dramatically between turns, then this downtime is useless: you can't be planning your moves between turns, because things change too much for you to plan effectively.

Addressing Johan's question more specifically, though, it is indeed a tough thing to gauge how long a game will take. As David notes, it's sometimes tough to separate "first time playing" length from actual game length. (And as a general note, it's often hard to separate player effects like poor play from actual game flaws -- I've had some games pronounced "broken" by new players, and I think it's common for players to assume that any flaws in a prototype are due to the game itself, and not their own sub-optimal play).

I try to assign a reasonable length of time for each decision, and a useful guideline is perhaps 1 minute. Unfortunately, even if an action is very quick -- "draw a card", eg, if the player must choose it among several alternative actions, it will still take a minute for them to reach that decision. For deciding whether to make a bid or not, perhaps 20-30 seconds; for deal-making, perhaps 1-2 minutes. These are very crude, and highly variable, but I think that they roughly give the effect that deal-making games are time consuming, and phases like auctions can be time-consuming, particularly if the auctions goes around the table multiple times, because it involves many decisions being made in serial.

I generally try to think in terms of how quickly experienced players will be able to play, and so I think I tend to underestimate game lengths, but I think that actual lengths tend to converge to my estimates as players get more experienced.

In my experience, solo testing is an abysmal gauge for game length. It's just too hard to keep track of four different positions and the strategies that you're adopting for each position, and to be able to go back and forth between them and take actions as quickly as someone who was worrying exclusively about that position. (Of course, solo tests are great for other things).

I realize I haven't shared anything definitive, but I think the best strategy is to form a reasonable guesstimate of the length each action/decision will take, and then just multiply. Obviously, factor in peculiarities of your own group -- "Joe the human turtle" will take longer to make decisions, "Frank the human CPU" will take less time. But to be safe, you shouldn't really factor unusually fast players into your analysis, as the estimates you'll derive won't be as universal.

Hope this helps,

Jeff

One technique I've been using lately, and failed to mention, is playing "solo" playtest games and keeping notation of what I do in each turn. This way, I get a good feel not of how long each turn takes, necessarily (since I'm writing notation for the turns, as well as learning the gameplay details), but to come to grips with how long the game plays in turns. This number will remain somewhat constant, even after players speed up gameplay by learning the rules. Then it becomes a matter of how long each individual turn takes. EDIT: Some of this was discusses in the post above mine... need to read those other posts after a week of absence! /EDIT

This is an easy way to do pre-playtest breaking of your games. First, try to break your game in the simpler way: have one of your "player personas" dedicate all their efforts to hindering advancement of anyone, in order to keep the game prepetual. If your game lasts a hundred turns without noticable gains in the player's situation, it doesn't matter how short the turns are. The game can be brought to a screetching, boring halt by an obstructioninst player.

The second break-test is trying to find perfect strategies, and thus outside the play time concern. But keeping notation may help you discover these as well.

I once designed a starship combat card game, but it was a disaster. When I had the rules for regenerating shields, the game never got anywhere, it could have gone on forever. When I got rid of the regenerating shields it completely changed the game (And it still took over 2 hours to play my game).

Since then I have worked on other games, trying to avoid this mistake as much as possible.