Board Game Arena

A game that I was in [in an Ark Nova 2 from 4 tournament] timed out.One player was about 7 hours over limit,but the others had roughly 2 days left between them.Shouldn't paramaters be configured so that this doesn't happen ? Otherwise the game could time out even though everyone was within their time limit.

danielvictor wrote: ↑21 March 2026, 18:28 A game that I was in [in an Ark Nova 2 from 4 tournament] timed out.One player was about 7 hours over limit,but the others had roughly 2 days left between them.Shouldn't paramaters be configured so that this doesn't happen ? Otherwise the game could time out even though everyone was within their time limit.

The tournament you were in had playing hours set that work well for North America (8am - 8pm PDT). That means that clocks don't count down outside of these hours. The person that ran out of time was playing from Asia, and it looks like their playing hours were 11pm to 11am, so they were likely asleep during the middle of that time range.

The amount of time each player gets is simply the maximum game duration (1 week here, or 168 hours) divided by the number of players (4), giving 42 hours per player. It’s interesting to note that the existence of playing hours does not appear to factor into this. 1 week is actually only 84 hours of actual clocks-counting-down playing time, so each player should probably only have gotten 21 hours.

It’s long been noted that in games with simultaneous play (like many roll-and-writes) every player could be negative and the game go on, but I at least hadn’t realized playing hours were ignored in the calculations, so now it does appear that every player could be positive and still have the game time out, as nearly happened here.

This has been reported as a bug, possibly as a result of the new tournament framework.

https://boardgamearena.com/bug?id=209956

Thanks.'bit confused,though.People actually do have time left on their clocks - in that their turns can't be skipped [in tournaments where skipping is legal]. However,they're not playing fast enough to stay within the tournament time limits.

To give an example with round numbers, if it's a 7 player game set for a week, everyone should start with 24 hours on their clock.

If you set playing hours to 12 hours a day, everyone should now start with only 12 hours on their clock. For some reason, this isn't happening, and it isn't giving people the correct starting time.

If it's a game where only one person plays at a time, the tournament time should expire only when the sum of everyone's clock equals zero. If it's a game with simultaneous turns, like 7 Wonders, it's possible for the sum of the clocks to be negative.

danielvictor wrote: ↑21 March 2026, 23:48 'bit confused,though.

Your confusion is justified. That's why it was reported as a bug and will probably be fixed so that it becomes less confusing again.