Any comments on the length of time to play it? Based on the description/pictures/FFG history I would guess it falls in the 3 hour range. Usually on the product page it would show the game length, but that is not the case for this game.

3 hpur range? I haven't played a big box game from FFG that lasted only this long!

Greekgeek said:

Hehe, I, on the other have not played a FFG big box that took more than 3 hours (barring first game). Heck, 2.5h is rare(ish). My FFG games are those in my favourites, plus Marvel Heroes and War of the Ring.

Wow, Dam, you must play with some focused gamers, that's all I got to say.

bigmac said:

Well, to be fair, all but Talisman only see 2-player games (or solo). Talisman's mostly 3-player, rarely going past the 1.5h mark. War of the Ring, that's a pretty standard 2 hours. Doom we play with me as Invader, my friend running 2 Marines, 2.5h if things get tense, 2h if the dice are going my way. LotR TBG and Confrontation, well, those are fairly short games to begin with. Fury of Dracula, even our first game didn't take 2.5h. Marvel Heroes, 2-player, if the game goes over 1h (for 3-4 turn scenarios, 5 turn one naturally takes a bit longer), something funky is going on. That leaves Arkham Horror, which sees most of its action as solo (running 4 investigators), 2-2.5h is the norm (1h 15min being the fastest seal-win).

When we start a round of arkham it normaly takes us round about 4-5 hours ... on the other hand we are four to five players and some of us really takes their time

Fury of Dracula and Marvel Heroes are both rather short and the war of the ring lies somewhere in the middle...

I would prefer if Middle-Earth Quest isn´t tooooooo long... For that we got runebound and ofcourse arkham ... our group needs some more of the shorter games ...

OldUrmel said:

I keep reading about people saying FoD takes nigh 3 hours (or even longer for them). Don't know how they stretch things that long. Unless Drac gets both really lucky and unlucky (doesn't get found, but keeps getting his Vamps staked).

OldUrmel said:

This is another game people regularly mention taking 3+ hours.

Hey, I love FFG but if I want a shorter game, FFG is about the last place I'd look, I always assume an FFG game will take about three hours if not more. They can be shorter, especially if you've got a group of players that are familiar with the game, but for shorter games, I would look at other companies(Days of Wonder has really good games with simple, straightforward mechanics and no real clashing of rules on cards that you tend to get with FFG) NOT dissing FFG, I love their depth, variety and richness of theme, just a reality of their games.

I completly agree with Dam. A veteran crew of players can finish a session of dracula in an hour. That´s another reason why I like this game a lot. Don´t get me wrong I love long games ... but then sometimes they got to be short

I just got myself a copy of battlestar galactica ... Wondering how long a session of this game last...

By the way. Another game which takes nearly too long is Talisman using all of it´s expansions ...

bigmac said:

My thoughts exactly!!

FFG games with my group don't usually go past the two hour mark except for Descent which we're all still learning really. I've known Arkham Horror to take as little as five minutes to play Needless to say it wasn't a win for the good guys

I'm hoping that playtime will be less than 2 or 3 hours for two/three-player games. Anything longer than that is probably too much for getting your wife or casual friends interested in playing.

Well, our first game took a whopping eight hours. There's was lots of looking up rules, though.

Later games typically took four to five hours, with an occasional three hour game.

Interestingly the play time doesn't increase much with larger number of players.

If everyone has played it and knows what to do it takes about 90 minutes tops to play the game.

Baenre said:

Do you only measure actual playtime?

Because I don't see any way to ever play this game in 90 minutes even if everyone knows all the cards from memory.

Even setting up the game takes at least 15 minutes _if_ everything has been sorted beforehand and the cards don't need to be shuffled.

Then during the game: Don't other players ever discuss tactics?! That's the No.1 reason in our games why game time increases.

Game length also varies quite a bit depending on the number of combats in the game.

The fastest game I've every played (two players) took about 2h 30min.

I would even go lower. Unless the game hangs on the knife's edge for the last turn(s), 75 minutes is about the usual timeframe. Must note that my games are 2-player, either 1-Hero or 2-Hero, so there is less time "wasted" on discussions. If one side (usually Sauron) runs rampant, meaning gets out the perfect Plots all running one token up the Story track and Heroes struggle, game can end in under an hour.

Greekgeek said:

Sounds like you haven't played "Twilight Imperium III"

TK

Our games are usually a full group affair but to be honest MEQ doesn't really require all that much in the tactics department. On average we have at most maybe a half dozen combats in a game. I have actually played games where we have had as alittle as 3 combats to win. The game is very much centered around your movement and positioning. Collecting tokens and knocking out Suron plots or just ramping up one character to showdown the RW's is a pretty common tactic.

My feelings on the game tell me that an expansion needs to bring more combat into the game and get people more involved with Sauron instead of avoiding combat and just knocking out his plots. There also needs to be some balance that helps the sauron allies later on once a hero or two gets leveled up and auto defeats enemies.

Baenre said:

Frog said:

I did have a chance to play this and after 4 hours we were only half way through the game. Definitely in the Arkham horror ballpark of insanely long games.

I'd much rather spend 7 hours playing Descent then this. (And I am a Tolkien fanatic)

Frog said:

To me it seems utterly unfathomable that anybody could take 4 hours for 5 turns (since the normal game is max 10 turns, barring one Shadow Card, which could add a turn). Even reading the rules + learning while playing, people should get an idea of what they are supposed to be doing after a couple of turns.

Then again, as a ballpark figure for my play speed, Arkham Horror is an under 2-hour game, probably 90-100 minutes on average (14 turns), on rare occasions goes above 2 hours. MEQ is 75 minutes, 90 max for me.

Dam said:

Our Arkham games are friggan 6-8 hours. This is with people who played the game 20 times already.

I love Lovecraft and Tolkien. Own all of their fiction in nice hardcover editions. But I really don't like either of these games.

Our games are usually really long, too...lots of looking up rules at first, but I don't think it's going to get THAT much faster. With Talisman (a game I actually love dawdling through), if we're in any kind of hurry, we pump the stats to begin with to keep a game under two hours. Arkham: played three or four times now, none under four hours. Descent....don't get me started. FoD we only played once, but it seems much more reasonable - going to try again next week and see how that goes. Usually there's some way to house-rule a way to make things drag out less....you could require fewer seals in Arkham, for example. I personally like how the long games play out in terms of narrative, but it's not always possible to take the time.