Board Game Arena

I don't know about other games, but in Hex (which is for two players) I get three options for a time control in a real time game: slow, medium, and fast. There is a main time for all your moves in the game, and an increment added per move. Even in the fast time contol, the increment is large, 1 minute 51 seconds per move.

I would like to be allowed to specify the main time and the increment myself, by typing the values in, or at least allow me to choose these values separately. For example, increment of 10 sec, 20 sec, 30 sec, 45 sec, 60 sec, 90 sec, or 120 sec?

When creating a real time tournament, there is NO increment per move, nor any delay. It's sudden death time control only. You have X minutes to make all your moves. If you run out of time, your opponent can make you skip your turn. This is surprising to me, since I would think you would want tournament games to be high quality. SD time controls make for worse quality games, since a player with just 3 seconds on his clock or with negative time is less likely to play well. Also, after playing lots of regular games with a big increment, zero increment may be difficult to get used to.

I hope you will allow more choices for the time control in both tournament games and regular games. Thanks for your attention!

I am with this idea. +1

At least able to see the values of starting time and added time per turn would be nice.
More choices to select them would be great.

Thanks BGA

This has been asked for many times, and would be very welcome.

Certainly there needs to be more choices, as I often find myself in a game with someone on 'fast' mode who hounds me to play faster constantly even though I am nowhere near going over time. I don't think it is necessary to give players absolute control over the time, but more options are needed, perhaps adding a short 'bathroom break' time joker for the faster speeds.

What I would like to see is an option to do timing by differential, where you are considered over time if you have taken X minutes longer than your opponent over the course of the whole game. This way you can play at your natural pace and use the time to pressure your opponent to play faster if you want, instead of them just getting their whole clock back every turn.

While I see the point of most of this, I just can't comprehend the idea of being "over time" because of the difference between your time and someone else's. When going into a game, there isn't any way to know how fast or slow other players might be, and if you don't happen to be as fast as them, you're now "over time"? I don't think that should be done as a comparison to other people who happen to end up in the game with you.

Maybe they could just solve some of these other issues instead. There's probably plenty of people who would be happy with just adding another, faster, category to each game.

Yes, I agree that a faster option is the main thing.

A differential based system is nice for 2P competitive play because you can pressure with speed, or slow down to think when necessary, or bank time by playing fast at certain times, etc. It adds a layer of strategy and lets players force their opponent to hurry up if they are impatient. The same 'under pressure' feeling can be generated by a hard cap (limit of X minutes for each player to use for the whole game), but that removes the potential for slowing down if the complexity of the game ramps up. I realize it is not for everyone, but I very much enjoy playing in this manner, especially abstracts.

And I realize you wouldn't know how fast the player was going to be, but you would know what the timing rules were. I suppose it would maybe be unfair to give out penalties under these rules though, if that is what you mean, so you'd probably want to enforce the timing as a real part of the rules and just make it an instant loss to go over.

Anyway, I guess I would just like to see more competition oriented timings. Not that I think it will happen anytime soon, despite competition being included as part of their #2 priority for the year. But I figured I would throw it out there

veme wrote:And I realize you wouldn't know how fast the player was going to be, but you would know what the timing rules were. I suppose it would maybe be unfair to give out penalties under these rules though, if that is what you mean, so you'd probably want to enforce the timing as a real part of the rules and just make it an instant loss to go over.

Yes, I was thinking of the penalties.

But I was also thinking you meant this as a replacement for the turn limits, and as you said, not all of us would be into this. In fact, I detest being pressured. I'm semi-competitive as in, I like to win, and some games I take more seriously than others, but I also like to enjoy myself and not have a speed contest. If I wanted a case of the jitters, I could just drink coffee.