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Slipspace wrote:

drbored wrote:

 aphyon wrote:
For 5th edition games with random turns of 5-7 at 2k points-

1-1/2 to 2 hours depending on how well each player knows their army (and how many distractions you have)

On an interesting side note-i have started our 5th ed games at around the same time as players playing 9th and we will get through all 7 turns of 5th while they are still on turn 3.

With how much time people are in the books or cards looking for the right stratagem or double-checking the special rules that a unit or weapon has, this doesn't surprise me at all.

Exactly. There's been a massive increase in the number of dice rolled between 5th and 9th, which eats up a lot of extra time. The main time sink, though, is the constant checking of strats, special rules interactions and even stats. I used to be able to memorise the stats of every unit and weapon in my Codex but there's been an increase in those too, especially if you're playing SM. Every bolter is a little bit different, some auras affect Core only, but other affect everyone, or Core and characters, etc. All these factors eat into your time over the course of a game and they're all boring admin-type things rather than things you're doing on the table.

You might notice a difference with someone just getting their head around the game or if there's a new codex, but these are typically non-issues for experienced players.

I'm not referencing a book for weapons. My opponent rolls dice and communicates the final wound count and the AP I need to apply and I validate back my expected successful result and then roll. Likewise I know all my basic stats and I only every reference my book when I need a nice solution to a difficult problem. That said a strat culling couldn't hurt, but I imagine some people with niche lists will feel left out in the cold.

The increase in dice is definitely a factor, but there's also a lot of decision making on objectives now. 5th really didn't have any of that when it's either kill points or objectives with almost all scoring done at the end of the game.

I don't see how you'd get a 2k points game down to an hour (including set up etc) unless there was zero discussion, zero consideration and you just resolved everything ASAP. I mean you've got less than 30 minutes to do 5 turns. Which gives you what, 60 seconds to move every model in your list across the board? 60 seconds to resolve a shooting phase? Might be doable on TTS but I don't see it happening in the flesh unless its Knights on Knights or something.

Tyel wrote:
I don't see how you'd get a 2k points game down to an hour (including set up etc) unless there was zero discussion, zero consideration and you just resolved everything ASAP. I mean you've got less than 30 minutes to do 5 turns. Which gives you what, 60 seconds to move every model in your list across the board? 60 seconds to resolve a shooting phase? Might be doable on TTS but I don't see it happening in the flesh unless its Knights on Knights or something.

Well... Yeah... That's pretty much it - if you and your opponent completely know the ins and outs of both your armies and completely trust each other, you can knock over turns quite quickly - idle chat and non-game related discussion usually extend a game to 2-3 hours - but if you focus entirely on the game, and you aren't trying for every precise millimetre, you'd be quite surprised just how much time you can cut down. Setup time could be excluded from that hour if necessary in order to explore knowledge from both players.

Like the gambling advert says... when the fun stops, stop..... as long as its fun.......

I think the suggestions in the book are pretty valid.

I think a lot of people are answering the question in terms of how much time they want to spend, but the deeper question is: how long does the game take to actually play in terms of set-up, movement and resolution?

One reason I got into the collectible card games was that there was no setup - you just shuffled, dealt, and played.

Factors in these mechanical constraints would be (as noted above) model count, rules references, dice rolling (and re-rolling) etc.

I play 2nd ed., and one of thing things we did to accelerate game play was cut out a lot of the dice rolling (like scatter for each jump pack) as well as resolving hth with a single die roll per engagement. What that did was allow us to play bigger battles in less time.

When 3rd ed. came out, one of its huge strengths was that it was fast. Really fast. Maybe too fast.

But then codex creep set in, etc. and it wasn't so fast. Higher model counts also imposed a hard limit because all those little troopers had to be moved one by one.

I think the poll demonstrates that 2-3 hours is as much time as we WANT to spend on a game, which I agree with.