How long are your 800 point games taking? The couple of games I have played seem to go 3 hours plus. Not complaining. Just trying to see if my buddy and I are slow or this is normal. Can't even imagine a Grand Army battle.

Our first full game was yesterday. Took us around 3.5 hours to complete. The first round took an hour and a half. The second took an hour. Every round after that was 15-20 minutes. The first couple rounds we had to refer to the rules a lot. I figure once we get it down to a science games will take under 2 hours. I’m thinking the tournament rules will be 2 hour time limits.

Edit: I’m instituting a chess timer because my roommate likes to think about the battlefield for 10 minutes before he’ll pull a RANDOM order token from the pool even if there aren’t any other orders issued on the field.

Yeah its taking a while bit a lot of that is rules referring, setup takes forever and newness to the game.

I hope they institute a rotation for OP where we know in advance which scenario we're playing etc to speed that part up and vary things a bit

I have played 5 first games with new people, the initial setup and first round takes a long while. Couple hours in it’s own. But every round gets faster. I think getting 2.5 should be easier now, lessnlooking up rules on which dice the throw for this or that.

I played my first full rules, 800 point game last week and it took us about 2.5 from setup to finish. Once we got the table ready and our battlefield chosen, it was about 2 hours to do the 6 rounds. Some rules referencing, mostly to do with terrain.

I'm an old hand at miniature wargames, though, and had played through a handful of the single-box learning games and vehicle duels over the launch weekend to get accustomed to movement and attacks. I suspect it'll speed up a little more as I get used to the decision-making going on behind working through and dishing out suppression.

Most of 800p. games I played took less then 2 hours - but the terrain was pre-set in FLGS, and usually both me and my opponent had prior wargame and/or FFG game experience. The longest game I played took a little over 3 hours, but me and my girlfriend were showing the game to a couple of friends, there was wine, snacks and lot of talking

Now I am quite a few 800 point games in we complete in no longer than 2 hours. There is a lot of opportunity for slower players to pontificate for ages in the mechanics though, which card, which order, to pull from bag or not etc etc. Need BB8 or R2 with an electric prod in wait for some opponents LOL.

When playing at the club or FLGS I am finding a lot of time is spent answering onlooker questions as well which will pass I suppose.

All in all rambling post to say under 2 hours will be the norm I think.

Our group is banking on getting games down to 1.5 hours if possible. The hope is that OP will have the TOs set up terrain as they do for other wargames. And of course the more we play the faster it goes. X-wing really has spoiled us - getting in 2-3 games on a weeknight has been key to the game's longevity and we're hoping we can get something similar working for legion

Anyone else have some thoughts on how to cut down on game time once you've got the core rules under your belt?

6 minutes ago, Simonsays3 said:

Anyone else have some thoughts on how to cut down on game time once you've got the core rules under your belt?

Chess clocks.

The game plays quickly if you stay focused on playing it quickly. The only time its taken me 3ish hours is when we're wasting a lot of time between activations.

13 minutes ago, LunarSol said:

Chess clocks.

^That. I believe the only time your activation is interrupted is in case of Standby token (easy, just flip the clock) or when an opponent chooses whether or not spend the Dodge (short enough to do it on your own time). The cleanup at the end of the round and picking a command card can be tricky though, maybe but both player's clocks on hold for that?

14 minutes ago, Shanturin said:

^That. I believe the only time your activation is interrupted is in case of Standby token (easy, just flip the clock) or when an opponent chooses whether or not spend the Dodge (short enough to do it on your own time). The cleanup at the end of the round and picking a command card can be tricky though, maybe but both player's clocks on hold for that?

End of round can be on whoever's clock has the round counter and they can flip it to the opponent as soon as they play their command card.

Once I got to where I had the attack sequence memorized and could "read" dice quickly, the games go by fast...although my opponents keep asking me to slow down as most haven't picked it up this fast.

I will say, once you can just glance at a roll and call out how many saves the other player needs or vice versa, it goes by super fast. That's hands down what people seem to be getting bogged down by.

The more you play the game, the faster it can go. The buddy I mostly play with can zip through a game with me pretty quickly, unless we get to chatting then we slow down quite a bit. But the newer a player is, the longer they will usually take and some people just move faster than others (I play all my games slow from Xwing to IA...I'm working on speeding up, lol)

Usually though, cutting out distractions will speed a game up quicker than anything.

I usually have terrain placed when my buddy shows up so we get to playing right away. Our games are around 2 hours long but as we play more they are going faster. The actual game play is super fast, the only thing slowing it down is how long it takes a player to make a decision. I've watched a few games at one of our local stores and seen players take 10 minutes to pick a card in the Command Phase alone. Then each player was debating a good 5 minutes every time they had to pick a unit to activate, and that was 5 minutes before actually activating! I stopped playing 40K at tournaments because of the amount of "slow-play" many of the players exhibited. Some seemed intentional but others just take way too long analyzing every possible option. I guess that may be unavoidable in organized play and tournaments, but these days I only play with my gaming group because we would rather get in a couple of games then take all day for a single game.

These threads are almost identical to all of the Armada threads on the matter, it seems...

My opinion is:

Its a longer game.

2 Hours is likely to be tournament.

You only get faster by playing more.

Theres no point in judging the time yet because everyone is still learning .

A bit over 3hours here; surprised how long it’s taking actually. Nobody is trying to play either fast or slow I’d say. One thing that immediately took our games down about a half hour though was organizing all the tokens and dice. To have them all in a tray and organized for each player sped things up noticeably.

Wow,

My 3 games so far (800pts)

First 1h 15min

Second 1h 30min

Third 1h 30min

I have no idea how you guys are taking 3h+ all 3 of my games were with people playing for the first time and we all agreed once we got the rules figured out (we referenced the rules alot) that a game could be about an hour.

1 minute ago, Icelom said:

Wow,

My 3 games so far (800pts)

First 1h 15min

Second 1h 30min

Third 1h 30min

I have no idea how you guys are taking 3h+ all 3 of my games were with people playing for the first time and we all agreed once we got the rules figured out (we referenced the rules alot) that a game could be about an hour.

I'm guessing you didn't collaboratively set terrain? How about mission/deployment etc did you actually go through that process? Your time claim feels dubious.

I'm about a dozen games in so far and like others have said the time to play a game is going down on average.

Things that I've noticed that can slow down the action:

1) Player doesn't have an activation plan for the round or some idea of if this/then that kind of activation logic. People are people. \_(ツ)_/

2) Terrain placement (interactively) takes time especially as the table gets more complicated, but I think is a fun aspect of the game. Walking up to set tabletop terrain that can't be change is kind of a drag. I suspect that locally we are still using too much terrain, OTOH table .... so .... pretty.

3) Math involving cover/impact/pierce/etc that eliminate/reroll/convert dice. It's important and you don't want to cheat yourself out of a crit or whatever that someone should have to roll a defense die for.

Our FLGS has our first tournament scheduled already and I do wonder what organized play is going to select for a time limit. At six turns and say 2 hour rounds, it's not enough, you'd have a lot of games that didn't complete and I think unhappy gamers. 3 hours OTOH is a long time and that limits the number of rounds you can realistically get in in a day. Personally I'd like to see something like runewars where you can do a 4 round tournament because you really can realistically get that many games in. Legion feels more like Armada this way, sure a game might play fast, but that's not normal.

1 minute ago, tgall said:

I'm guessing you didn't collaboratively set terrain? How about mission/deployment etc did you actually go through that process? Your time claim feels dubious.

I'm about a dozen games in so far and like others have said the time to play a game is going down on average.

Things that I've noticed that can slow down the action:

1) Player doesn't have an activation plan for the round or some idea of if this/then that kind of activation logic. People are people. \_(ツ)_/

2) Terrain placement (interactively) takes time especially as the table gets more complicated, but I think is a fun aspect of the game. Walking up to set tabletop terrain that can't be change is kind of a drag. I suspect that locally we are still using too much terrain, OTOH table .... so .... pretty.

3) Math involving cover/impact/pierce/etc that eliminate/reroll/convert dice. It's important and you don't want to cheat yourself out of a crit or whatever that someone should have to roll a defense die for.

Our FLGS has our first tournament scheduled already and I do wonder what organized play is going to select for a time limit. At six turns and say 2 hour rounds, it's not enough, you'd have a lot of games that didn't complete and I think unhappy gamers. 3 hours OTOH is a long time and that limits the number of rounds you can realistically get in in a day. Personally I'd like to see something like runewars where you can do a 4 round tournament because you really can realistically get that many games in. Legion feels more like Armada this way, sure a game might play fast, but that's not normal.

Yes we set everything up. In a 4h stretch we set up a learning game played it, built 2 armies and then setup the full 800pt game, played it, and chit chatted a bunch.

Maybe we are just coming from an x-wing background where playing fast is fairly normal.

We use terrain heavy tables so set up happens beforehand. Our games "start" when the low-point player decides if they are red or blue.

My first game was 3.5 hours and my second 3.0, so I belong to the crowd that believes it to be getting faster. That second game was with a friend that had moved interstate and was returning to Sydney, so we were not entirely focused on the game 100% too.

At tournaments where both players are focused that too will speed up the game as compared to at home.

My 2 full games this past weekend both ran around 2.5 hours or so. It'll get faster with less rule referencing and analysis-paralysis.

Learning game ran some two and a half hours, but I see myself around the hour and a half mark, depending on opponent. But then I play lightning fast, even in Armada.... And I'm old school and don't care if the game last longer.

My last game was a little under 2 hours... me and my opponant had both played several full games before and we only had to refer to rules a few times. Each game I've played agaijnst others seems to go quicker the more everyone learns