I've been running into a few complaints with my playgroup on the longevity of quests and the actual time it takes to actually play through a quest. The Box says 1-2 hours, but in my experience it takes several hours longer then that to even play an encounter. This might be due to the players actually discussing their movement actions and what have you, but really I;m not sure. Unfortunately, due to the time constraints I've probably even lost a player.

Anyway, How long does it take for people on here to play through quests generally? Also, I'd like to hear some tips on how perhaps we can speed up the game a little.

We usually start playing around 19:30 on our Descent nights, and we usually finish around or just after midnight when its a double encounter quest.

Seconded- most of our descent nights take between 3-5 hours including setup and cleanup.

Mine doesnt include setup or cleanup though. (Unless I play at a friends place).

I usually set it up the day before we play.

I'd say on average it takes my group about 3-4 hours to get through an encounter. Granted, that's with us eating pizza and being mostly focused. We could probably get through it more quickly but we like to talk and laugh a lot.

One encounter is usually about 1-1.5 hours including set-up. 3-4 hours for a full quest.

I have all the cards separated in individual bags:

Hero sheets/figures bagged by archetype, classes bagged separately inside.

Act I & II monsters, Act I & II shop cards and relic cards bagged separately.

Travel cards.

Rumour quests.

Lieutenants/plot cards bagged by character.

Conditions bagged separately with their tokens.

Health, fatigue, npc, special search and threat tokens all separated.

Search cards & tokens bagged together.

Overlord cards bagged by class.

This means you can quickly lay out/find what you need for each encounter.

Also, if you are only playing one campaign with the same group, then you can bag up each player's current cards, figure, etc to save on set-up time.

I never played 2nd edition with people until now. But considering the time I spent to play alone, being the overlord and 4 players, took me more than 2 hours to finish a single encounter. But, I think it's just a matter of learning and focus. If people keep the focus on the game and have good knowledge of the rules, it will take less. In another hand, I can remember finishing 'into the dark' of 1st edition, it was kinda 6 hours of play, with real people.

Mhh usually it takes us around 3-4 hours to finish one scene. Rarely we manage to play an entire quest on the same evening.

This is somewhat of a sore topic in my group. We have a regular Descent night but it's only once a month, so we're always torn between being quick and focused (in order to complete the most quests) and relaxed and conversational. When choosing quests, we tend to base the decision on how long they look like they'll take rather than how interesting or rewarding they are, which always feels antithetical to the experience. I don't think we've ever ended the night without finishing a quest, but it always takes 3-5 hours. That's with me setting up before the other players arrive. We also do most of the Campaign Phase at the end, up to Step 5. (We usually complete Step 6: "Choose Next Quest," via social media later.)

Having played with other people, too, I can say that I think Descent runs smoother when you worry less about getting every little thing right. Also, if you can possibly play more frequently, there will be less need for any sort of reacquainting with heroes/skills. I'm not a fan of house rules and do keep a copy of the FAQ/Errata handy, but I have had to overcome the need to overanalyze my turns or to retrace/redo steps that were overlooked. It used to be that if someone ended their turn, then said, "Oh, I forgot to apply x effect to my roll!" or whatever, we'd allow it. We were more worried about continuity than anything else. Now, someone inevitably shouts "Rigidity!" and we move on.

And I suppose if it gets really bad, you could always bring a chess clock!

I would say that it entirely comes down to the people you play with.

One playgroup I play with manages to beat two quests under 2-2.5 hours. My other playgroup does the same in 4-4.5 hours. Decision-making, experience and preparation are the main causes of this difference. Even the standard 1 hour per quest could be further improved. It depends on the quest too, because quests where you have a limited amount of turns/time tend to have a quicker clock. There are the rare quests where you win very quickly too.

Some suggestions to speed up your games:

1- Have everything prepared for the next two quests - and only for these quests. That includes selectng the tiles, choosing the monsters and your OL deck. I initially had everything on the table when we started playing this game, but this was a mistake - even with everything prepared I had to fight through a pile of components to get what I needed.

2- Have a plastic bag for each hero and all cards owned by that hero (skills+items). Open, deploy and you´re set. No need to look for cards in any deck. Obviously this is more complicated if you happen to run multiple campaigns in parallel, but you can still get close to that.

3- Help each other during the game. As the OL I can sometimes give a small piece of advice or information to help the heroes making a decision, if I feel that they´re stuck due to inexperience or if they´re being ridiculously careful/slow for something that should be obvious to them. You don't lose much from keeping the players rolling, at best it increases their knowledge of the game and their capacity to make decisions which makes the game more competitive and interesting for everybody in the end.

4- If a player is taking unreasonable amount of time to carry out an action after making the actual decision of what to do, then just remind him/her to roll the dices or say things like "so how did you want to move" to put the person back into focus. I had some players tell me that it actually helped them to remind them, as brains can sometimes freeze as they overcomplicate a situation and lead the person to confusion.

5- Be flexible in case of conflicts whenever the rules can be interpreted in different ways. Give yourself 5 mins to google up an answer then go for what seems to make more sense and check for a definite answer later. We have been stuck 30 mins or so a couple of times and I feel in retrospective that it was plain wasted time as people argued over something that sounded like the obvious thing to do.

6- Stop players trying to plan for the next 10 turns or so. Having an overall strategy for a quest is necessary, but planning every single action and counting spaces for the next 15 moves is completely pointless.

7- Have people check rules/read cards/look at the minis when it's not their turn, unless it affects a decision they need to make now. Again, it's all about focus.

8- Brief new/unexperienced players about the rules outside of the game session, preferably right before the game starts. People also tend to learn more efficiently when they face ONE single person explaining the rules instead of a whole group of people trying to help out.

9- Also playing with the "right" people helps a lot. It's hard to qualify but we had one session with a newer player one day and this guy was effectively working against the group (he played a hero). Stuborness and bad attitude are always going to cripple your experience and make the game drag longer than it should. And I would encourage alpha players to play as the OL.

Man, those are all good points of advice. So far I have attempted to make setup go a bit faster. Now everything has it's own separate bag, so I will only use it when I need it. I will also "prep" for game times by putting all heroes, classe cards and equipment cards in one bag for the campaign and ask the hero players to set themselves up while I set things up.

Wow some of you guys are fast. 3 hours for a whole 2 encounter quest? Most of my single encounters take us 3-5 hours, but I guess this is partly because most of the time we have big breaks between sessions.

Of course there are the occasional 2 hours encounters in my groups, but those are most of the time one sided games.

My last game, I played the one encounter quest "The incident" from Nerekhall and we played for around 8 hours (the whole 12 turns), which was very exhausting (maybe it had to do with the fact that I played 4 heroes at once and the OL drawed a card each time he knocked down the biblopthecary, because she was "treated as a hero figure", which I'm not sure that it's correct). However I think this quest is kind of an excemption, because this is the highest turn count I've seen so far.

Wow, I really don't know what's taking you so much time, especially when I compare your figues with my slowest playgroup. These guys take ages to make decisions and are overly cautious about everything. Is it the decision making? Is it that people leave or are unavailable so you are waiting on somebody all the time? Or is it that you need to check the rules all game long? Man, 8 hours is not human Maybe points 4- (people just freeze in the middle of an action, and even sometimes consider reverting an obvious move) and 6- (people plan for the next 35 rounds) that I wrote in my earlier post are the ones that are making your games drag so long?

I like strategy games but had Descent taken longer to play encounters (in the lines of what you said) then I´m not sure it would have hit the table very often. Our sessions need to be able to cope with the length of the games we play, as interrupting an encounter can be a pain to resume afterwards. It happens from time to time but we really try to avoid that situation.

Mind you, I´ve found there are a few categories of people when taking playtime into focus. I don't know if people would agree with this.

1- People who just take the time they are supposed to take to make decisions and execute their moves. Hopefully most people are in that category. Then depending on experience you can narrow down that time, as newbies for instance need time to review rules and so on. But once you get up to speed with all that you just take time to analyze decisions that are tricky, otherwise you play reasonably fast when making straight forward decisions (like getting that search token when there is nothing else to do).

2- People who are just blasting through the game in order to get most sessions down. For good or bad, just trying to maximize their amount of experience and try to make fast decisions to see what's next. Not overanalyzing situations, just following the game flow and hope game balance somehow supports intuitive decisions made on the fly.

3- Strategists who try to process/beat the whole game by analyzing every single factor in it. This is how deep you can get. That is possibily the most comprehensive playtesting of the game, it's interesting as well to try to include every mechanism in the game into one big equation, however you never reach the end of the game because it's just not practical to play like this. In a game like Descent there is a certain reasonable amount of time ahead you can plan for, but past that point you are probably wasting your time.

My group usually burns through an encounter in around 45 minutes to an hour. We've got a lot of practice and experience with the game, so decisions are made fairly quickly.

It helps that most of us play speed chess as well =p.

Whenever things get long we do "timer". Usually the heroes play together so then it's 10 minutes to finish the turn. Everyone knows it's getting long long so either the heroes or the OL says timer (after a like 20 minutes pass) and every one hurries up. Descent often does end up with a bunch of "paralysis by over analysis"

Whenever things get long we do "timer". Usually the heroes play together so then it's 10 minutes to finish the turn. Everyone knows it's getting long long so either the heroes or the OL says timer (after a like 20 minutes pass) and every one hurries up. Descent often does end up with a bunch of "paralysis by over analysis"

We´ve tried that with other games but it did not really work with us. The group ended up being stressed, the clock ticking was causing more AP than without, and it lead to bad play eventually. This being said YOU can be the clock by reminding players to speed up their turn in the most gentle/smooth manner, or whatever works best with your group. It's very individual though, some players like being reminded, some other players are craving that time otherwise they would get grumpy and deliberateley making bad decisions in response of a player trying to cut that time they think they own. It's everybody's time actually, even if it's technically that player's turn.

Wow, I really don't know what's taking you so much time, especially when I compare your figues with my slowest playgroup. These guys take ages to make decisions and are overly cautious about everything. Is it the decision making? Is it that people leave or are unavailable so you are waiting on somebody all the time? Or is it that you need to check the rules all game long? Man, 8 hours is not human Maybe points 4- (people just freeze in the middle of an action, and even sometimes consider reverting an obvious move) and 6- (people plan for the next 35 rounds) that I wrote in my earlier post are the ones that are making your games drag so long?

I like strategy games but had Descent taken longer to play encounters (in the lines of what you said) then I´m not sure it would have hit the table very often. Our sessions need to be able to cope with the length of the games we play, as interrupting an encounter can be a pain to resume afterwards. It happens from time to time but we really try to avoid that situation.

Mind you, I´ve found there are a few categories of people when taking playtime into focus. I don't know if people would agree with this.

1- People who just take the time they are supposed to take to make decisions and execute their moves. Hopefully most people are in that category. Then depending on experience you can narrow down that time, as newbies for instance need time to review rules and so on. But once you get up to speed with all that you just take time to analyze decisions that are tricky, otherwise you play reasonably fast when making straight forward decisions (like getting that search token when there is nothing else to do).

2- People who are just blasting through the game in order to get most sessions down. For good or bad, just trying to maximize their amount of experience and try to make fast decisions to see what's next. Not overanalyzing situations, just following the game flow and hope game balance somehow supports intuitive decisions made on the fly.

3- Strategists who try to process/beat the whole game by analyzing every single factor in it. This is how deep you can get. That is possibily the most comprehensive playtesting of the game, it's interesting as well to try to include every mechanism in the game into one big equation, however you never reach the end of the game because it's just not practical to play like this. In a game like Descent there is a certain reasonable amount of time ahead you can plan for, but past that point you are probably wasting your time.

I guess this 8 hours quest was kind of the extreme. First of all, the OL needed to last for 12 turns (without the ability to shorten that time by killing heroes).

Secondly the heroes get another quest character that needs to be activated after a hero, but has to run around the map and search tokens as an action to complete the quest. I guess this really caught us offguard, because this "figure treated as a hero" had no fatigue, so we played that it cannot move, if it is adjacant to a master spider (a hero has to spend 1 fatigue if he wants to move out of a space adjacent to the masterspider and since this is voluntary, we ruled that this figure can't just pay one life to move). Then we were also unsure of what happens if the OL knocks out this quest-figure treated as a hero, but since the rulebook only said that the figure is treated as a hero that cannot attack and search, we ruled that the OL gets to draw a card if he knocks out this figure, just like he would for normal heroes.

So all in all the hero-player had to control 5 heroes whereas one of them had to be moved through the map as quickly as possible (opening doors before she moves, so that she doesn't waste an action), one hero was the shadow-walker (with an familiar that boosts attacks if adjacent to the attacked monster) and the game lastet for 12 turns.

I guess the OL and the heroplayer each took roughly 5 minutes of figuring out what he wanted to do, before finally starting moving the pieces. I think around 5 minutes is reasonable, especially concerning this quest where pretty much everything can change within one turn, but that took us more than 2 hours alone for the whole quest. The OL got a ton of OL cards from knocking out the quest-figure, so his turns weren't superfast and the hero player had to re-evaluate how he continues his actions when his attacks started to miss (and there were some turns with 3 misses on the heroes that deal the most damage, which completely changed the hero's capabilities).

So I guess its fair to say that each turn (hero-turn and OL-turn) took around 10-15minutes, which is another 4-5 hours with the occasional long turn where the dice-gods destroy your plans. This is pretty close to the 8 hours it took us in total to play this quest.

The thing is, it didn't feel like anyone of us two really took a long time for anything. Sure we both weren't in a hurry and we didn't constantly stress ourselves, to a point where I don't really understand how this quest can be played significantly faster, without missing out on one of the imo most fun parts of the game: Lay out a plan to outsmart your oponent (we only ever planned one turn in semi-detail and had a basic plan for the quest, but nothing rediculously like a 3 turn and above detailed plan).

We both really enjoy the game, but man it's hard to find time for these kind of drawn out sessions. What do you guys do to get the game-time down by that much? Is it because everyone knows what he wants to do before his turn starts and everyone basically just moves and rolls dice? The OLs decide within seconds if their OL-cards make sense to be played on this particular enemy-move or attack? (We introduced a small pause between announcing an action and playing it out, so the OL has time to react).

How long do you typically think before moving pieces?

When the group i play with comes together we usually plan a weekend for it and go through an entire campaign in 2 full days.

Two days and a half if we incorperate the rumor cards. But yeah, we`re probably crazy