I have LOVED anything to do with this HP Lovecraft story so far, but i havent played this game yet. How long does a typical game take, and what makes it take a long time or go by pretty fast?

Hawknight said:

and what makes it take a long time or go by pretty fast?

At the end of a game, folks are often surprised so much time has elapsed.

As to why it takes so long: There are just a lot of things to do. Most things only take a few seconds though, but reading long encounters and fighting tough monsters can eat up minutes. They are also the most fun. As you get more experience, you may lose some time in negotiations during the upkeep phase.

We shorten the game a little bit by blending each player's turn. We do Upkeep simultaneously, then the first player goes through his Movement (including monster encounter), Arkham encounter and Other World Encounter. Then back to Mythos simultaneously. You'll probably want to play it by the book though for your first few games, otherwise the blended method might get a little confusing. We we've found it saves almost an hour for a four investigator game, which means it must have taken us nearly 1 hour per player before.

From my experience, the game takes about two to four hours if you win, and about an hour less if you lose; with final battle victories taking about as long as a loss. To me and my group, this is becuase of the amount of planning that goes into every turn's movement. The actual execution of the turn takes only a few minutes, but when everyone has different ideas of what makes a good move, and what our priorities should be at this moment, the debate as to what should be done goes on for some time. Also, with as much stuff and flavor as there is in the game, it's easy to get overwhelmed trying to keep track of the different threats. Although this is less of an issue with just the base game, tryin to handle multiple things at once drasticly slows down the rate at which you close and seal the gates, resulting in more turns and a longer game.

it's all about how fast you're dying no serously for the first games i would say up to 6 hours

depends on the numbers of players and boards, but we're def talking hours here. what takes the most time is looking up all the rules in the beginning, and explaining them over and over again! Once you all know what you're doing it can go a lot faster. It also has a long set up/take down time, especially if you use seperate bags for all the counters like we do.

My rule of thumb is an average of 45 minutes per investigator in play. A bit more if some are inexperienced with the rules.

I have had fairly random timeframes for some of my games, such as a 4 player/4 Investigator game lasting about half an hour, with a spectacularly brutal loss thanks to 3 different encounters spawning gates within two turns, and a 1 player/1 Investigator game last 5 hours, mainly dragged out so long because "The Terrible Experiment" had 2 monsters I just could not defeat, so my time was spent keeping down the others that were appearing on it since I couldn't allow the Terror Track to hit 10 as a solo Investigator with a fairly ordinary selection of gear, and then having "Good Work Undone" come out while there were no clues on the board and I had none to trade in, so my 5 sealed gates were then unsealed, and finally, just before Yig came out, the most annoying thing happened, I was Cursed, so Yig had me for lunch.

But usually most games with 4 or 5 of us takes about an hour and a half to two and a half, depending on the luck of the draw and when we get to the stage where we give up trying to close/seal gates and instead stock up for the final battle.

After ~35 games played with 3 to 5 investigators and 0 to 4 expansions the time for a game has always been in the time band 2 to 6 hours. This is without accounting for setup and 'cleanup' time, though (which can easily add 30 minutes or an hour if you're removing/adding cards from different expansions).

Another snappy game for me, 1h 15min to 7-seal Shudde M'ell, with 0 Elder Signs. Yeah, I know, 6 seals is a win, but I was using KiY Herald and drew "The Dean" Blight which forces a seal removed (or could just be Gate Burst, Good Work Undone, etc.), so had to put down 7 seals total.

I don't know how you guys manage to play in such a short time. Different style I guess. When I play I tend to relax and enjoy as much as possible. Fastest is probably 3 hours and that was against Yig.

That was a solo game with 4 investigators. Playing solo tends to cut down on the negotiation of which investigator does what.

note: cut down, not negate

Side note: Last time my friend and I played vs Yig (2+2 investigators), 2 hours definately didn't get filled.

Style of play affects time, though not in how one might suspect. For instance, when we were doing scenario 3 (vs. Tsathoggua), we lost 5 or 6 times, but we were able to play several times each night because, when we knew that we were about to lose, we just gave up and started over, in order to try to get more games in.

Also, once you get to know the encounters better, and especially know to look for the bold or italic text, you can go "blah blah make a will (-2) check or lose a sanity", if times is a concern. Me? I prefer to read the encounters in my horror narration voice. I'm also the designated mythos card drawer and reader (since it's not like it matters if the first player draws it, it's the same card), so it happens there, too, at least when time isn't a concern.

Time can also be saved by allocating different jobs during relevant phases. For instance, whoever's next to the AO (across from me) places the doom token when a new gate opens in the mythos phase, and grabs the seal during the arkham encounters phase if a seal is going up. I also do the math during a monster surge while the lucky guy (definitely not me) mixes up the monsters in the cup in preparation for drawing, and I call out the monster movement, then let someone else move the monsters while I look at the special text, discard the old environment if it's being replaced, etc. When we're playing casually (i.e., not league), we also tend to blend upkeep with the beginning of each investigator's movement, which speeds things up because we're not having lengthy discussions to get the best tactical option.

So, yeah, once you get familiar with the game, you'll get your own little quirks that speed things up, speeding you into the maw of Great Cthulhu.

Most of our games have been from 4 to 6 players. We've found we can count on nearly 5 hours including set-up and teardown time. Not a short game by any means, but loads of fun!

Depends on expansions imo, when I played with the base game, some games were over in 1-2 hours, either to final combat or we surprised the AO with sealing him by closing gates. And other times, it was an agonising time just trying to keep him from not waking up, or he would devours us all...sometimes he did, some times he didnt...most of the times he did.

It's mostly about how you play or how the game goes on, things could look favorable and end it fast, things could be on a gray line or the game has this remarcable abillity to just "screw" around with you and your mind...you'd almost say its planing it out just to piss you off.

Our 8 player league games typically take about 3-4 hours to set-up, play, and put away. This includes time wasted with side conversations etc. Early on we did have a loss in less than an hour when we drew 2 "a gate and a monster appear" encounters on the first turn, but that is very atypical and IIRC that included the time spent fighting the AO..

Had my longest game in quite a while today, 2 hours to seal off Glaaki + KiY Herald (my first seal/close win over Glaaki, this was the 6th game against him). Another fixed deck moment, Witch House and Unvisited Isle were both sealed, drew a gate burst for Isle, Jacqueline nerfed it, drew Gate Burst for WH . Once again it was on the turn WH had just been sealed. Finally, Vincent Lee (making his first appearance in probably 30 games) jumped into a gate to Lost Carcosa to avoid stupid Funnel Clouds (Luck +1 check if you end your movement in the street or be devoured, holy crap!) and got funky popping encounters: 1st hopped him to R'lyeh for an encounter, returned to Carcosa, 2nd encounter hopped him to Abyss, where he drew a Blue card with no Abyss section that allowed him to seal the gate he entered through, at the cost of getting devoured. Talk about taking one for mankind (it was the 6th seal).

My games with four to eight people with one expantion usually takes about four hours. That does not include setup or take down. Since we usually play at a store on game day I do the card seperation at home to save time.

It really depends which expansions you use since they tend to increase downtime between turns to discuss strategies. Most games run about an hour per player, so a 3 player game lasts about 3 hours.

Carrion Prince said:

Yeah, it depends on the number of players. One player playing 4 investigators won't be discussing strategy nearly as much as two or four players playing the same number of investigators.