Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

Ok, so a few things

1.) as a player it is expected that you will finish your tournament games.

2.) if the round times are pre posted you know how much time you have and should expect if needed to be able to play your army in about half the available time. You may not always need to but you should be able to or you should not bring it.

3.). That said it is incumbent on TOs to carefully think about their events and plan the schedules so that they reasonably believe games will finish on time. I.e. don't play 2k at 2:15 rounds, instead play 1500.

I am currently running a gt (2nd round is today) 2k 3 hour rounds. I am also docking players battle points if they do not consistently finish games. This is a far better solution than chess clocks.

Chess clocks fail for all the reasons mentioned above and also because people don't practic with them (because most events don't use them) and they are typically a large expense. Better off just making sure your players are aware of round times, and have ample time to run their armies.

Breng, great points but about cost see my post on the previous page- 2 small, cheap digital egg timers work almost as well as a chess clock for a fraction of the cost. It's what the local warmahordes tournies use.

True but take more time to stop star and even the the cheapest ones are about $1 each which means for an event my size that is an additional $32 + tax which while not large is more money out of pocket for something not really needed I was actually looking into getting one timer for each table but the cheap ones only clock 1.5 hours so whole 2 work 1 won't

Breng77 - that sounds like a good way to handle things. I also like the 3hours for a 2K game. That would solve most issues in my opinion. Here it is around 2-2.15 for a 2K game. This is often with new missions so reading the mission sheet is added to what eats your time. I have asked to go to 1500 pt games but everyone wants to use all their toys so not a chance. Good luck with the tourney!

As someone who spends equal time playing Hordes and 40k at this point:
40k is not really suited to chess timers. There is a significant, large difference between the types of armies, and many are designed around mechanics which necessarily take longer than other armies. Some armies really don't have the option to run small, 'elite' armies (which are tournament competitive).

Say you have an army with lots of models. It is *designed* to need lots of models acting all the time to achieve its goal. This doesn't necessarily need to be a 'horde' army - a Tau army is relatively elite yet relies on volume of shots to get the job done. If the enemy assaults you, acting on your own time, you have the 'option' to chew through your own time to react properly to your opponent; or to not act/act sub-optimally to save time. Eventually this boils down to having only one choice - taking a smaller army.

It also happens that the design of your opponents army can significantly change the amount of time your army spends. Say your opponent is mechanised and presents you with only 6 targets: you make 10 shots during your shooting phase, and that's all you can do. Its not just that shooting WITH 100 pts of Boyz vs Marines takes different amounts of time; its that shooting AT 100pts of Boyz vs Marines takes different amounts of time. Meaning that the time you take for a single turn can change dramatically, regardless of what you personally take.

Hordes is more suited to this style of play. Barring certain relatively rare/unique abilities, each model has a certain amount of actions it can take in a turn. You know when you put the models on the table that you need to move 10 models and will be able to make at most 20 attack rolls, no matter what your opponent plays. Because there is no real interactivity in a turn, it works. But the Hardcore format (7 minute timed turns) still drives people to run more heavy-focussed armies or even Colossals than the Steamroller format (42 minute chess clock).

This is acceptable, because all armies have the option to run competitive armies in either horde or elite forms. In 40k, you don't have that option: there is no competitive elite Tyranids or Orks, and no horde Grey Knights.

The real problem is forcing increasingly large games into too small time frames. When the standard tournament is getting close to 2000pts than 1500, and points costs of most units keep decreasing with each codex release and special rules for every model get more prevalent, we should be increasing the game length to near to 3 hours rather than 2. A Warmahodres 35pt deathclock tournaments get you 42 minutes each when IIRC the maximum fieldable force is 70 models which are activated at most once each per game turn. Equivalently a 1500pt 40k army can field near to 200 models - why would you try to fit both in the same time frame?


So, TL; DR: Not for 40k. The ability for your opponent to affect how much time you take independent of the army style you choose, and the inability of some armies to field competitive elite builds, makes this choice which severely and negatively impacts the game. Don't blame the people with horde armies - blame the person who sets up the tournament.

 erewego86 wrote:


We play every other month at dropzone. Next tournament's in August. You haven't heard of MWC because we don't advertise but there's a meetup group you can google if you feel so inclined. Obviously we don't keep stats about who played what, but I can tell you I played Green Tide for most of the first two years (6 30 ork mobs) and I never ran out of time :-P

We don't tap back and forth. It's just not that big of an issue. People very rarely run out of time, so there's been no need to amend our rules. Nobody has complained in three years about the fairness of the clocks.

The desired effect isn't equal time. The desired effect is to wrap a tournament round in about 2 hours so we can start at ten, lunch at one, and be outta there around dinner.

If you don't tap back and forth, then you are not actually documenting 'equal time' and are not using a chess clock to time the usage of time per player but just as a general 'clock' of how much time is left in the round.

I have never run out of time either, my games correctly end within the time limit, but I can tell you that the game ended naturally, but the turns were not equal in length due to the nature of interactive turns. And it is not always on my side. I have played shooty armies who spend forever shooting simply because that is how it is. And I have to spend minutes rolling cover and invulnerable and LOS on his turn.

I believe the exact same result could be had by putting clocks at every table and constantly announcing the time remaining. That keeps people on-task without trying to force a 'equal time' concept into games. Making sure the time limit is appropriate for the points value and keeping people focused to finish games to natural conclusion is the desired goal, not equal play.

While this thread seems to be geared torwards 40k, I'll put forth that we experimented with using them in Flames of War earlier this year, and the feedback was overwhelmingly positive.

In FoW, you frequently have attacker/defender missions, and in tournaments, it's usually scored that if the attacker takes the objective from the defender, they win. If time runs out, the defender wins. After some accusations of "slow play" on the defenders part to stall out the game, we tried out chess clocks.

Your clock ran down during your turn, although you would switch it back to your opponent when they were conducting lengthly counterassaults on during your turn.

A standard tournament round is 2.5 hours. We have each player 90 minutes on their clock. If your side of the clock runs out, you lose one VP and your opponent gains one VP. (FoW uses a 1-6 scale VP system). If your game hit seven turns, we ignored whatever the clock said, because each player getting seven turns seemed fair enough at that point. (There's no hard turn limit in FoW like their is in 40k).

The results that we saw: The presence of the chess clocks seemed to encourage people to play faster, even those players who never ran out of tie before the use of the clocks. There was certainly an obvious subconscious speed-up of play.

After a few events with the clocks, we started to notice people agreeing not to use them when they knew their opponents - Bob and Tom know each other pretty well, and know one player isn't going to slow down gameplay, and agree just not to go through the hassle. But if two players they'd never met played each, they'd be more likely to use them.

My two cents.

 derek wrote:
I have a chess clock app on my phone. It was free from google play, and these days the likelihood of at least one person at the table not having some sort of phone capable of running that type of app is pretty low I would think.

Think what would happen to your battery, if your screen had to be on for 3 (or 4!) 2+ hour rounds in a given tournament day.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Vaktathi wrote:

One of our local players has been playing horde Tyranids since 3rd edition. And has made up movement bases for his horde bugs that are like the strip Epic bases with each fig slot having a magnet to ensure things don't fall out. They're somewhere in the vicinity of 2"x6" and the fig slots are placed to ensure that two bases back to back or side to side will always be in coherency, as well as maintaining decent dispersal so his little bugs don't get crunched up under templates. It works extremely well, though its rather strange to see him move his units by moving bases from the back of the unit to the front of the stack. If the table surface permits, they can even be slid across the table.

While someone looking purely for expediency may be pleased with this, it removes tactical options open to players not confining themselves to such movement trays. Movement and positioning, especially for CC oriented units, is huge, especially now with wound allocation being the closest model and the existence of Overwatch. Forcing horde players to play like this functionally is giving an edge to their opponent to exploit in many situations. \

I expect that when it's time, he just moves right off the bases. Or at least, that's what I do with my Tyranids.

There are tricks that horde players can use to speed up play - pre-counted dice, multiple colors of dice, putting each complete unit on a single tray to speed up deployment (much faster to move models off a tray into position from a few inches away, instead of having to turn back to your display base), careful formations so that you only have to measure movement for the leading edge of your models & then maintain formation with the rest, dice trays to keep your many, many dice from going all over - I know, and use, pretty much all of them. But they're tricks I developed over 4 years of competitive Tyranid play, and even then, I find that it's rarely my army that is the determinative factor as to whether a game finishes or not; it's how experienced my opponent is, particularly at fighting against Tyranids.

Yakface & I finished a foot-ork vs Tyranid horde game through 7 turns at the BAO in 5e. That's the ONLY game that I played through all 7 turns. Tournaments are just cramming too many points into too few minutes these days. 6e is a slower game, and the new codexii make the problem worse, as most everything is getting cheaper and/or involves extra die rolling.

It would also help to have just a normal timer at each table, so people could see the time remaining at a glance (unless you can actually display the time to all viewpoints in the room at once). Yes, we all have phones/watches, but getting those out & checking is not standard behavior right now.

I will say that I would gladly pay an additional 10 dollars for my ticket to a major event if that meant there was going to be a chess clock at every table-- basic chess clocks can be bought in bulk for 20 dollars or less. Further this would only have to happen once before the event was supplied with a large number of clocks, and while certainly replacement would be an issue I for one would be much more likely to go to events using these rules.

At all the Warmachine tournaments I've seen people have just used their phones or tablets. Chess clock apps are plentiful and cheap or free. I haven't known power to be an issue because there are so many phones to go around (and if your device is dying that fast, consider turning down the brightness).

You going to want your opponent touching your phone 20 times a minute as you clock back and forth for the interactive phases of shooting and assault?

The only way a chessclock can be used is if you only clock back and forth for 'player' turn which is fundamentally unfair due to the way the player turn functions and how specific rules happen on your opponent's turn. So using a chessclock for tracking 'player turns' is a worthless unfair metric, and actually being detailed for the interactive turns becomes an unreasonable exercise wasting far more time than it saves.

I'd rant on and on about why I feel the way I do, but I'll try to sum it up quickly.

Slow play has cheated me out of two tournament wins. I can move and shoot with my army in a reasonable amount of time (and I have played a fairly big Ork army), so why can't you? Yeah, there would be a lot of back-and-forth with the clock, making sure the "active" player (the one moving guys, rolling dice, or picking up casualties- as defined by the TO) was the one being timed, and it admittedly is prone to abuse, but the game has a time limit, and it should be fairly applied to both players. If a player has an army that takes up 60% of the allotted time, that's unfair to their opponent.

To the argument that the game is not designed around a time limit, you're right. In that case why apply time limits to the game in the first place? The game ends when it ends, and the same goes for the tournament. So what if it takes days to complete? At least the players got as much time as needed to finish. My point here is that the time limit is an artificial constraint in the first place, so why should one player be able to eat up the clock while their opponent just sits there and stews? That, in my opinion is unfair, not an even amount of time for both players to get their stuff together and finish their game.

I read a lot of battle reports, and far too many of them (especially those from tournaments) end with "and time ran out so we called the game there". In my own personal experience with these sorts of games it is extremely frustrating when this happens, and downright infuriating when my opponent is such a pro at gaming the clock so that when he/she goes first they get one more turn than I do. If you are going to game the clock, do it by keeping the game moving, not by alpha-striking me and then sitting on the clock in order to keep me from getting the chance to properly retaliate.

If you're taking to long either you should:
A) Lose the game outright
or
B) Give your opponent one last turn/as long as they have left on their clock whichever comes first.

Will this change the meta? Only for those players who are too slow (suffer from analysis paralysis) or too inexperienced (in which case they're entering the tournament with a bigger disadvantage than the clock) to get their butts in gear. For those of us who can play the game at a reasonable pace, it's just plain not an issue.

I'm capable of going on a lot longer than I already have, but let me sum this up. If you're going to introduce the artificial constraint of timed games to 40k, WHFB, whatever, do it FAIRLY, not to favor whichever player "needs" more time. To do otherwise rewards the players who are better at cheating their opponents out of their fair share of the time, and penalizes those of us that actually want to get our 5, 6, however many games, full games, of whichever system we showed up to play.

Re: the cost of chess clocks.
As said by many posters, chess clock apps for X mobile platform are plentiful and free. There are even a few Warmachine specific ones which display army logos and are configured specifically for the time format of Warmachine tournaments. These easily last a full day of tournament play.

I agree that there are some terribly slow players. I got one the slowest 40k players I know (who often stares at the table for ~10 minutes before making his turn) to play a timed game of Warmachine and once he didn't get to move anything before his turn ended . But my Tau army can take anywhere between 1 and 15 minutes for a single shooting phase depending on what targets you present me: and if you assault me, MY time is going to increase as I do my overwatch. Chess clocks aren't fair when you have the ability to charge time to your opponent.

So finished my event and after 65 total games played only 1 did not finish within time. Still went 5 turns and ran over time. So again I say give enough time for players to routinely finish games and an incentive for finishing and in general they finish. Most games finished with time to spare. Too often TOs seem worried about breaks between rounds being log enough but then all the games run into the breaks anyway.

As someone that just got home from a death clock Warmahordes tournament--where I used my phone for 5-6ish hrs (I think 63% left after)--I'm getting a kick, etc. I cannot imagine not playing a tabletop game without a clock-like measure in place now. Main problem I have is wife text messages during the game. Regardless, I get two to three times the number of games in the same amount of gaming time.

That being said, of course 40k is a very different beast than Warmahordes. Main differences being:;

First turn in Warmahordes is usually scripted with little to no dice rolling. If you've unpacked your army on the table a couple of times, it shouldn't take long to complete a turn. 40K models start meaningful activations turn one.

40K has more integrated turns (saving throws, assault being the key mechanics). While Warmahordes does have a few (tough, If an enemy does XYZ actions then)--it's much less than 40k.

Model count. While certain builds in Warmahordes are model intense, it's definitely less.

Rules. 40K rules are inherently sloppy and require discussion, FAQ reference or just a debate leading to a roll off.



So, unless 40Ks rules get a great deal tighter and the other issues above are addressed--I don't see how a death clock can be implemented. Of course, Death Clock is not the end all be all in Warmahordes either--and I do not find a "death clocked" victory satisfying but rather a sign that's in an imperfect system as well. It just happens to be the best worst solution.

Which, really is what is driving this discussion--gamers want a satisfying end to their games. Nothing entertaining about setting up and playing 3 rounds--then rushing players because the "Do not start another turn" is coming. Only fixes I see happening (as I don't foresee the rules getting any better), is either less games in a tournament, longer rounds or some kind of "think clock"--which is only activated when a player is doing the "Cross arms and stare at the board for 10 minutes" schtick.

Why don't they use turn timers?

Because you can't hold Green Tide to the same time limit as Draigowing.

It's that simple.

Why not?

What entitles one player to use more time than the other?

There's already a time limit to a 40K game. What difference does another seperate limit make?
People will adjust their game tactic/strategy and the world will go on just like it has every other time some "major change" in the game occurs.

Leo_the_Rat wrote:
Why not?

What entitles one player to use more time than the other?

The physics of rolling different numbers of dice in multiple repeated actions, the physics of moving one's arm to move 200 models vs 20 models and the rules as written not taking equal time to resolve based upon equal points.

There's already a time limit to a 40K game. What difference does another seperate limit make?

Page number for the Time Limit written into the 40k rule set please.

People will adjust their game tactic/strategy and the world will go on just like it has every other time some "major change" in the game occurs.

They will adjust to 'army comp' imposed upon them. Doesn't mean it isn't arbitrary and unfair.

Leo_the_Rat wrote:
Why not?

What entitles one player to use more time than the other?

There's already a time limit to a 40K game.

There isn't a time limit to the 40k game, there's a time limit to how long the event will allow players to play a game. There's a difference. There is no rule in Warhammer 40,000 pertaining to any sort of time limit. To answer the question "what entitles one player to use more time than the other", besides the obvious physical limitations of playing an army with 60 models vs 170 models, the issue arises "why is time being forced onto a game where it's not taken into consideration in its rules?". Now the answer to that is obvious, events can't start at 6am and end at 11:30pm for a couple games of Warhammer, but at the same time, it's an artificial constraint adapated to the physical needs of the event. Chess clocks and timing both sides is a preventative measure to prevent what amounts to cheating, which is different. We have TO's for a reason, people need to make use of them if that's an issue.

What difference does another seperate limit make?

Different armies take different amounts of times to play, a Draigowing army with 10 minutes to take its turn has all the time in the world it needs to ponder, consider, analyze that it wants. A Green Tide list may need that 10 minutes just to physically move every model, not to mention roll dice, much less actually think about things.

 Reecius wrote:

 RiTides wrote:

 Reecius wrote:
The only real way to do it is for the TOs to buy them, which would cost several thousand dollars for a good sized event, even at wholesale pricing.

I think it makes perfect sense though as both players get an equal amount of time. You get 20 minutes for pregame and then divide the time equally between the players. Any player that goes over on time gets penalized in some way. It is fair and unbiased.

The local press gangers for warmachine/hordes use cheap egg timers. They're a few bucks apiece. That would mean that a 250 person event would need 250 timers (one per player / two per table), and cost somewhere between $500 - $1000.

Note: I'm not necessarily a fan of this idea, just wanted to point that out regarding cost. It works well for warmachine, not sure how well it would translate to 40k. Sorry if the egg timers had already been pointed out, too... but you don't need a chess clock for timed turns / a timed game, there are much cheaper options.

Egg timers for a buck....brilliant! Might have to try this out, thanks for bringing it up, I had not thought of that.

Been there. Done that and can give you a reply. Using egg timers do work fine if the tournament is a lower point level. It did not work so well at the higher point level games simply due to time constraints.

But the people that generally do go to tournaments in a serious manner have decent time management skills, so it still might work as it will depend on the crowd that you get.

nkelsch wrote:

If you don't tap back and forth, then you are not actually documenting 'equal time' and are not using a chess clock to time the usage of time per player but just as a general 'clock' of how much time is left in the round.

I have never run out of time either, my games correctly end within the time limit, but I can tell you that the game ended naturally, but the turns were not equal in length due to the nature of interactive turns. And it is not always on my side. I have played shooty armies who spend forever shooting simply because that is how it is. And I have to spend minutes rolling cover and invulnerable and LOS on his turn.

I believe the exact same result could be had by putting clocks at every table and constantly announcing the time remaining. That keeps people on-task without trying to force a 'equal time' concept into games. Making sure the time limit is appropriate for the points value and keeping people focused to finish games to natural conclusion is the desired goal, not equal play.

Like I said, the goal isn't equal time. The goal is to finish rounds promptly and discourage slow play.

I've played the army you claim would be disadvantaged by this system. True, it can be a slight disadvantage, but not a game-breaking one. Usually the massive assault simplifies dramatically after the initial push either overwhelms its target or peters out. Usually it takes a couple of turns to set up, during which my turns largely comprised of moving and running and finished quickly. Both of these reasons mean that horde time-usage is not as big a deal as several posters are making it out to be.

If you spend 2 minutes per turn rolling cover saves (an eternity during which to roll even 100 saves) then you will have taken your opponent of a whole 10 minutes. In my experience, such an amount of time never matters in the disposition of the game.

I'd also like to note that everyone with firsthand experience using clocks has said it was a positive experience and all of the naysayers so far have had no practical experience with these clocks whatsoever. Why don't you try it or at least time yourself to see how much time you're actually using? It might not be as much as you think it is...

 daedalus wrote:
Why don't they use turn timers?

Because you can't hold Green Tide to the same time limit as Draigowing.

It's that simple.

Then what happens when 2 ork players play each other? That is why you have to play your army in half of the allotted time.

Agree that 2 horde armies may fight so need to be able to play their army in half the time given. The issue for me is that there is enough time for the round at the point level chosen as that will solve most problems. At the last tournament I played my horde nids (no tervigons - just a pile of nids) vs a horde ork player - a 2000pt game with special tournament missions in about 2 hours. We got to turn 4 if I recall correctly. And neither of us slow-played.

If some people want to use chess clocks for 40k (and I have used chess clocks with chess for many years so I'm very familiar with them) as a method to deal with people that play slowly or slow play - I couldn't care less - as long as the first thing fixed is sufficient time for the point level (not a time the Mr Superspeedy veteran can do it - It has to be a reasonable time that the vast majority can complete their games. Or play lower point levels.

Some have indicated that 2000pt games should be 3 hours - if we had that we would have completed the game. Reading anew mission and understanding what needs to happen eats time. The first few turns with 2 horde armies with massive amounts of models to move, shooting and CC slow things down but these turns dramatically reduce the numbers of models for later turns so they go faster.

I'm tempted now to take my chess clock and see how long it takes me to play my horde army at a reasonable pace to get an idea of what the time it takes.

nkelsch wrote:

Leo_the_Rat wrote:
Why not?

What entitles one player to use more time than the other?

The physics of rolling different numbers of dice in multiple repeated actions, the physics of moving one's arm to move 200 models vs 20 models and the rules as written not taking equal time to resolve based upon equal points.

There's already a time limit to a 40K game. What difference does another seperate limit make?

Page number for the Time Limit written into the 40k rule set please.

People will adjust their game tactic/strategy and the world will go on just like it has every other time some "major change" in the game occurs.

They will adjust to 'army comp' imposed upon them. Doesn't mean it isn't arbitrary and unfair.

Entitles is a iffy word to use here. Each player will have a certain amount available, Relying on your opponent playing faster than he needs to is not a sound plan. You are not trying to move the different armies in the same time you are trying to move different armies in the same time limit. This limit must be enough for larger armies.

The time limit is how much time you have to play the game. In tournaments this is likley to be explicit at home it may be for as long as you can ignore the wife/GF at a store it may be closing time.

Slow playing sucks when it happens, It is easy to do either deliberatley (hard to prove) or through low familiarity with a game and nobody wants to lose a game because of it in either case, that is fundamentaly unfair.

Unfortunatly 40k does not lend itself well to chess clocks since as many have previously mentioned to much is done in the opponents turn.

 Ventus wrote:
Agree that 2 horde armies may fight so need to be able to play their army in half the time given. The issue for me is that there is enough time for the round at the point level chosen as that will solve most problems. At the last tournament I played my horde nids (no tervigons - just a pile of nids) vs a horde ork player - a 2000pt game with special tournament missions in about 2 hours. We got to turn 4 if I recall correctly. And neither of us slow-played.

If some people want to use chess clocks for 40k (and I have used chess clocks with chess for many years so I'm very familiar with them) as a method to deal with people that play slowly or slow play - I couldn't care less - as long as the first thing fixed is sufficient time for the point level (not a time the Mr Superspeedy veteran can do it - It has to be a reasonable time that the vast majority can complete their games. Or play lower point levels.

Some have indicated that 2000pt games should be 3 hours - if we had that we would have completed the game. Reading anew mission and understanding what needs to happen eats time. The first few turns with 2 horde armies with massive amounts of models to move, shooting and CC slow things down but these turns dramatically reduce the numbers of models for later turns so they go faster.

I'm tempted now to take my chess clock and see how long it takes me to play my horde army at a reasonable pace to get an idea of what the time it takes.

Completely agree with this (though I don't think chess clocks are the answer) we need to fix round times before we try anything else. Because you can use chess clocks all you want most 2k games won't finish naturally in 2 hours with or without them. Just doing some math, if We suppose that a fair round time for 2000 points is 3 hours (my last event confirms that this allows almost all games to finish on time, the only game not finishing on time did not start on time, it was first round day to and I had to repair these players due to drops.). What this means is essentially that a fair ratio of minutes to points is 0.09 minutes for every point. While things certainly are not 100% linear (pregame rolling for many armies is not hugely different at 1750 than at 2k), what this ratio suggests is that

For 1500 points 2 hours 15 min is a fair round time
For 1750 points 2 hours 37.5 minutes or two and a half hours, is a reasonable round time.
For 1850 points you should run 2 hours 46.5 Min or 2 hours 45 min rounds.

Now I've been as guilty as others with wanting to play a certain point level all the time (usually 2k) but when I host tournies at my LGS I use 2.5 hour rounds because I don't have time for 3 hours. Looking at this I should drop to 1750 or less for those events, so games finish.

What this also suggests is at 2 hours you would play at 1333 points, so probably 1250 point games, more than that and you won't likely finish.

Now this does not mean no one will finish, I had a player at my last event with Paladins and he finished 1.5 hours early a bunch of times, but then I had plenty of people play right up to near the end of the round.

When 2 Ork players clash, there is usually one massive assault phase, which will be 30+ minutes. Of course that is all on one players turn, so the game will not have equal time when comparing 'player turns'.

Of course the game can still end within the alloted time, but the turns will not be equal, whomever gets the assault off first will probably have his player turn use 'more' of the time even though phases are interactive.

Working as Intended.

If the issue really is SLOW PLAY and not equal time, then why is everyone trying to force equal time? Slow play can be addressed by a simple clock and reminding people of how much time is left. If anything, a better indicator would be every table having a 'flag' which shows what turn they are on so Judges can easily see the 'average' turn for the room and if a table is really far behind the average, they can observe if there is an issue.

Slow play cannot be defined by metrics but "I know it when I see it". That is the problem is we are trying to say 'any turn over X minutes' or 'player using Y time' = Slow play and that is not always true. If there was a easy way to track what turn a game is on so judges could see, it would allow judges to focus on slow-play if it actually is happening.


All I see is a bunch of Small model count armies not wanting to reduce point values so they want to strip the META of outliers by imposing unreasonable time restrictions and starving armies who were written and designed to possibly use more than half the time. Equal play doesn't address the core issue of Slow Play.

nkelsch wrote:
When 2 Ork players clash, there is usually one massive assault phase, which will be 30+ minutes. Of course that is all on one players turn, so the game will not have equal time when comparing 'player turns'.

Of course the game can still end within the alloted time, but the turns will not be equal, whomever gets the assault off first will probably have his player turn use 'more' of the time even though phases are interactive.

Working as Intended.

If the issue really is SLOW PLAY and not equal time, then why is everyone trying to force equal time? Slow play can be addressed by a simple clock and reminding people of how much time is left. If anything, a better indicator would be every table having a 'flag' which shows what turn they are on so Judges can easily see the 'average' turn for the room and if a table is really far behind the average, they can observe if there is an issue.

Slow play cannot be defined by metrics but "I know it when I see it". That is the problem is we are trying to say 'any turn over X minutes' or 'player using Y time' = Slow play and that is not always true. If there was a easy way to track what turn a game is on so judges could see, it would allow judges to focus on slow-play if it actually is happening.


All I see is a bunch of Small model count armies not wanting to reduce point values so they want to strip the META of outliers by imposing unreasonable time restrictions and starving armies who were written and designed to possibly use more than half the time. Equal play doesn't address the core issue of Slow Play.

While I agree with you, what you seem to miss is that, if you bring an army that you know will take over half the alloted time to play, and run into an opponent expecting the same what happens? You don't finish. Will 2 ork players use exactly the same ammount of time, of course not, but in say a 3 hour game, it is unreasonable for one to expect to be able to take 2 of those hours.

That is another manner of slow play. I bring an army that I know will most likely win a 3 turn game, and will take long enough that we will only get to 3 or 4 turns, even if I play at a reasonable pace. This is still slow playing because I enter the game expecting not to get past a certain point. Like you say Slow play is not the case in every unfinished game. But IMO if you provide ample game time, and have advertised that game time, any player who brings an army that cannot routinely finish games should be penalized. Is this some form of comp, sure, but so are missions run, chosen terrain etc. They are all part of a tournament.

 daedalus wrote:
Why don't they use turn timers?

Because you can't hold Green Tide to the same time limit as Draigowing.

It's that simple.

Yeah, I'm starting to wonder about this, though. Really, it is a reasonable stance to take that someone should bring a list that they expect to not need to use more than half the allotted game time with to a timed event tourney.

People do it in warmachine all the time. There are viable builds, and units, that are often left out of lists unless the user is very practiced with them... due to the time they take to use.

It's definitely something to consider, and the more I think about it, the more open I am to trying out timed turns (or more like, a total amount of time for each player, a la a chess clock app on a phone) in 40k. You just have to plan for / play to it, just like you do for scenarios and the like. In Warmachine it has become part of tournament culture, even though most casual players don't use it. But it definitely results in being able to get more games in, and finish events on time... but also adds a bit more of a barrier to casual folks playing warmahordes tournaments, because they have to play within the time limits or lose (as opposed to 40k, where you can not play within the time limits... and win!).

Edit: But I agree, for big combats this is not nearly as elegant of a solution for 40k. You need the opponent to make saves, and attack rolls, on your "turn"... which necessitates more of hitting the clock back and forth than in Warmachine/Hordes.

I see people keep saying that using Chess Clocks helps you get more games in. I don't see how this is the case. So I have rounds scheduled for say 3 hours. So each chess clock gets 1.5 hours. I still have the rounds taking 3 hours, the only difference now is that someone will forfiet the game if their time runs out.

Essentially all you have done is institue a sense of pressure and consequence, you have not sped up the overall time table.

I think clocks could be gamed in some instances. Really overall round times have the same effect, as long as there is a penatly for going over.

They can very much be gamed unless you're going to have people hitting the clock for literally every single action they make (rolling dice, checking LoS, etc), and that gets very messy very quickly (you didn't hit the clock for your cover save!) and Emperor help you if a rules dispute erupts or a TO is needed to come over, who's time does it come out of?