You know how some people will take weeks to play 1 game of chess. Strat every turn 13 turns down; and some people play speed chess, 2 mins a move. Well we are the former. It takes us 3 hours just to play a 100pt game. That's with the squads pre-made squads and all.

Trying to hurry us up, I bought a Game Time, it's like a chess clock but you can set it for Warhammer or what not. I though if a player went overtime during a part of a turn, he'd get 1 damage that he could assign to one of his ships. A delay of game call, essentially.

My question is, with no frame of reference, how fast should we be going through the phases (say 3-4 ships per side):

(1) Planing:

(2) Activation:

Combat:

End:

A fast tournament game is 60 minutes for the game. So that's a frame of reference you can use.

For a 3-4 ship list. I'd say something like the following.

Planning - 2-4 minutes.

Activation - 1-2 minutes per ship.

Combat - 1-2 minutes per ship.

End - maybe 2-3 minutes total.

I think Vanor's numbers are a bit on the high side for the most part, actually. With the exception of Planning, which should take the longest. The only decision to make during Activation is action, which really shouldn't take that long. Likewise in Combat, you generally have one decision - who to attack. And unless Corran is out, the only thing that should happen during the End phase is picking up unused tokens, so it should be more like 10 seconds total.

Rather than trying to time overall phases, I'd try a more fine-grained timer on decision points. 15 seconds, or even 10, to pick an action shouldn't be unreasonable. Same thing for target selection.

Much of X-wing is basically automated processing through the turn, but it's easy to get yourself tied up agonizing over whether you should spend that focus or not. Keep those decision points moving, and you'll keep the game moving.

If you are concerned about games taking too long I'd just start running a 60 minute timer and ending the game after you finish the round during which the time runs out. Whoever has destroyed the most points wins.

If you are concerned about games taking too long I'd just start running a 60 minute timer and ending the game after you finish the round during which the time runs out. Whoever has destroyed the most points wins.

That's how it works in Tournaments, after all