Competitive Play and Time

I'm recovering from a 40k tournament in my FLGS. It was a fun day - Halloween costumes a plenty, friends met, and many dice rolled. But I came away with some strong impressions of a particular weakness of 40k as a competitive game. This is a problem with competitive wargaming in general. I've seen the same in Age of Sigmar and Kill Team tournaments I've competed in.

The issue is time.

Time is an intrinsic part of any competitive wargaming tournament. Player packs will lay out clearly how long is allocated for each round. Many will even indicate an expected pace of play for each game. On the day it's common for the TO (Tournament Organizer) to announce to the room how much time is left and what stage of the game players should ideally be at. Everyone is aware that there's a time limit.

But a framing that isn't as common is that time is a resource that is to be spent by the players, and it is a very real part of game proper. Often time is considered an externality that "gets in the way" of the game when it runs out. This time resource can be allocated in various ways. A significant one is thought and planning. Another might be the physical moving models to just the perfect spot, or deciding to run a horde army with twice as many models (and dice).

The consequence of the decisions around time allocation are most keenly felt when games don't come to a natural conclusion. If a 40k game is meant to finish at the end of the 5th round, what happens if the game only reaches the end of the 4th round, or even 2nd?

A very common source of this happening is one player playing significantly slower than the other player. Most event packs allow for (some even require) the use of chess clocks. This fully addresses that source of problem.

However, I have literally never seen a clock in use at events. There is a social stigma around them. People don't like to be seen like they are taking the game too seriously, that they are a try hard. And, yeah, people shouldn't take the game too seriously, but they should be taking the experience of the other person at the table with them seriously.

I've experienced both sides of this. I've been the new player at a tournament whose slow play resulted in the game barely reaching the half way point (I then leave feeling bad for showing up, worrying about it hurting their results). I've been the far more experienced player who barely reached the half way point of the game because my opponent wasn't comfortable with the system (I've felt the frustration of knowing I'm losing out on placing, but not wanting to put that on my opponent).

In both cases I suspect everyone would have been more comfortable with the clock in use. So I'm bringing a clock from now on!

But that's the easy part. From a game design and balance perspective, there are problems caused by running out of time even with equal time use by both players.

Tournaments need a way to rank players. These events can have as few as a handful of players who may only play three rounds total. Ranking players based entirely on wins-draws-losses would result in a very coarse separation of the players. Usually granularity is added by considering the final scores achieved by players during their games on top of whether they won or lost.

This means a player who didn't finish their games would likely rank lower than another player who did finish their games. So, locally to me at least, players often "talk-it-out". They walk through what the rest of the game would likely consist of and register the scores they expect they would have had they had the time to play out the rest of the game. This is done with the goal of having a more apples-to-apples comparison between the scores of different games.

There are some obvious issues. War games are games of chance. Dice can be cruel or kind, and provide for extremely surprising outcomes. But that's not the major issue in my estimation.

The first big issue is the disregard for the resource of time as being a legitimate part of the game as played at tournaments.

Both players could using a roughly equal amount of time (yay, chess clocks). And both players could fully agree on the eventual outcome of the game. Even still the talked-out scores fail to respect the value of time usage compared to another table, playing a similar game, faster. The talked out table had more of a valuable resource to allocate to scoring points.

Lets use Kill Team as an example. If one table agreed amongst themselves to select an extra tac op card, saying they would submit the scores for whichever one they've scored more on, I don't think their score would be validly comparable to another table which only selected the correct one tac op each.

That may seem contrived, and it is. It seems silly to allow one table to select to play a very differently balanced game in a tournament setting. However, since I started thinking of time as one of the core resources of the competitive game, it has starting to seem equally absurd to allow the talking-out of scores.

This second issue relates to game balance and overall game design. Some events run rounds that are just too short for people to easily finish the game. The venue may place time constraints on the TO, so more time simply isn't available for appropriately long rounds. This issue requires input from the base game design, and a chess clock doesn't help.

A game of Age of Sigmar (for example) is balanced around a five round game. You pay the points for models when you build your list assuming that they will contribute to a five round game.

A player could safely assume that most games at the event aren't going to manage to reach their conclusion. Some players can bring lists whose whole goal is to decimate the opponents list in the first couple of turns, hoping to score via "talking it out" once time has elapsed. Others could bring lists with many mobile scoring units that likely couldn't survive a full game, but which can score early and provide enough ambiguity on the eventual scoring of the game.

Too many aspects of the games fall apart when one of the fundamental aspects of the game (the number of rounds in the game) can't be relied upon. These games' balances are very fragile. Small changes to rules or units can completely unbalance the competitive meta.

This is not an issue that can be trivially fixed, outside of just allowing enough time for most games to play out. The root is the same as the other issues - not regarding the time available for a game as part of the core aspects of the game, a resource that needs to be considered and balanced around like any other. Game design changes that could help - rebalancing points for shorter game, different scoring systems for shorter games, etc. would be far from easy.

And the last issue is one of the most significant in my eyes. That above example, where everyone agrees to the whole talking-it-out process, is itself idealized. At the very high levels of any game, opponents can likely to be trusted to negotiate the outcome in good faith on the basis that their high skill levels will catch any issues. Most players will fall elsewhere on the skill bell curve.

They may not know how their opponents army works. They may not have an intuitive grasp of what the numbers being considered mean. (Does ten chainswords kill a dreadnought most of the time? Who knows. But the guy across the table is telling me it's a sure thing) They may know but not have the social skills needed to advocate for themselves. There is incentive to be socially forceful in this interaction.

We all want more people playing the games we love. And it's easy to forget how intimidating the first few at tournaments can be. The rules need to work for those those players as much as for the experienced ones, and we can't assume like-minded players are always playing each other.

Overall, players and designers alike should place more emphasis on time as being a core part of the game. Players can make their lives better by embracing the clock. Designers of competitive games can help players by trying to take in to account what happens when time runs out.