by TGCRequiem
I've played this game 6 or 7 times now. It is a great game, but despite all of our plays it is still coming in at about 1 hr per player. Every game but 1 has introduced a new player, but overall I don't see a drop in play time overall. Our last game was 5 players and took just over 5 hours. Some of this is definitely due to a few players who are consistently very thorough in their decision making, but overall I think a lot of the time is idle chit chat causing "Oh I'm up? Hmmm what shall I do?" moments.Now the idle chit chat is part of what makes gaming fun, but I've been considering adding a timer to game...like a phone version of an egg timer, where the phone gets passed after each turn and restarted. Essentially players would be given 2 mins to make and complete their influence action. That means 2 mins to decide to explore, place their sector tile, decide whether or not to spread their influence and use their colony ships...or choose to upgrade, plus select and place their upgrades on their ships. It seems like it's harsh but a lot of this decision making could be done before their turn comes up. Each player would be allotted 1 free pass, but after that each 2 minute ding for not having completed a turn would result in 1 VP being removed from their final score at the end of the game. If the timer goes off during an action they would restart it each time until their action is complete which could potentially cause them a multiple point penalty in a single turn.
Now my goal is not to be punishing, but to keep more focus on the game to try and get a 4 player game down to the 2hrs 30 min range...and if that causes a few rushed actions then I'm okay with that. After all, in war you don't get to pause what's going on until you've come up with the perfect plan, you make the best decision you can in the time you're allotted.
Does this seem reasonable? If so does 2 mins seem like an appropriate amount of time before penalizing?