When we look at the back of a board game box and see a playtime of sixty or ninety minutes, we tend to treat that number as a straightforward description of how demanding the game will be. A thirty-minute game is short, a three-hour game is long, and somewhere in between every player has a personal threshold for what they are willing to tolerate. But the clock measures only how long the game occupies the table. It does not tell us how that time feels to the people sitting around it.
Some games can run for hours while keeping everyone intensely involved, and others begin to drag after twenty minutes. A complex game can feel surprisingly fast, while a mechanically simple game can feel endless. The difference is not only how many minutes pass before the game ends. It is what the game asks players to do during those minutes, how frequently they have meaningful decisions to make, and whether the game continues to involve them when someone else is technically taking a turn.
For me, this makes time less useful as a constraint and more useful as a design space. The question is not simply how long the game lasts. It is how much play the game manages to create inside that time.
Complexity does not make a game long
There is a common assumption that complexity and length naturally belong together. If a rulebook is thick, the explanation takes fifteen minutes and the game contains many interacting systems, we expect to commit an entire evening to it. Yet games such as 7 Wonders and Roll for the Galaxy contain substantial cognitive depth while often finishing in roughly thirty to forty-five minutes.
They are not fast because there is little to think about. They are fast because much of that thinking happens efficiently. Players frequently act at the same time, turns contain consequential choices, and the game does not need to stretch those decisions across a large amount of empty time.
Talisman provides an instructive contrast. At the level of an individual action, it is much simpler: move, roll, draw, resolve. Yet the game can last far longer because those simple actions repeat across many rounds and much of what happens between a player’s turns requires little involvement from that player. The game is not long because every minute is cognitively demanding. It is long because relatively little decision-making is spread across a great deal of time.
This distinction matters because shortening a game by removing complexity can easily solve the wrong problem. If the real issue is repetition, long turn cycles or periods in which players have nothing meaningful to consider, simplifying the decision itself may leave the experience just as slow while making it less interesting. A designer should not automatically be afraid of depth. The more dangerous form of length is time that the game cannot justify.
Downtime begins when the player stops playing
Downtime is usually described as the amount of time a player waits between turns. I think that definition is too mechanical. The real question is whether the player has stopped participating in the game.
If I am watching another player because their decision may change my strategy, considering a trade, preparing a response, evaluating new information or deciding whether to intervene, then I may not be the active player, but I am not necessarily waiting. The game is still asking something from me. By contrast, if I can look at my phone for several minutes, return when my turn begins, scan everything that changed and only then start thinking, I probably stopped playing long before my turn came back.
Catan is a useful example because a player’s involvement does not disappear when the turn passes. Dice rolls change everyone’s resources, trades can involve anyone, another player’s construction can block a route I was planning, and the robber can alter both risk and negotiation. I may spend several turns without placing a piece, but the game keeps changing the context in which my next decision will be made.
Magic: The Gathering can push this even further. Holding instant-speed interaction means my opponent’s turn is also a sequence of decisions for me. Whether I respond, when I respond and even the fact that I might respond can affect the way the opponent plays. Risk can do something similar on a larger scale: losing a territory or watching another player expand may force me to rethink a plan before I get another formal action.
The important distinction is therefore not active turn versus inactive turn. It is active engagement versus disengagement. A game can contain long turns without creating intolerable downtime if those turns continuously matter to everyone else. It can also contain short turns that feel slow if nothing that happens between them requires attention.
Not all waiting is dead time
This also means that not every period without agency is a design failure. Sometimes a player is not acting but is still learning, planning or interpreting what happened. That kind of downtime can remain productive.
Endgame scoring makes the difference easy to see. In Ticket to Ride, part of the final calculation can become largely procedural: routes and tickets are counted and the system is wrapping itself up. There may still be suspense, but little remains for the players to do with the information they receive. In 7 Wonders, the final breakdown can also take time, yet the different scoring categories often reveal how strategies developed, where another player quietly accumulated value, or why a plan that appeared successful did not convert into enough points. There is no agency left, but there can still be understanding.
The same distinction applies during play. Watching another player calculate a complicated personal turn may be alienating if none of their choices affect me until they finish. Watching an opponent make a decision that changes the shared board can be highly engaging even though I cannot act. The clock records both situations as waiting, but the experience is very different.
This is why eliminating every pause is neither realistic nor desirable. Games need moments in which players observe, reassess and understand what other people are doing. The goal is not continuous physical action. The goal is to avoid stretches in which the game continues without giving the player either agency or meaning.
If players cannot act between turns, their turns need to be short
This leads to a practical rule of thumb. If a game does not ask players to make meaningful decisions outside their own turns, those turns need to be short.
The reason is not simply impatience. Attention follows relevance. If everything another player does can safely be processed later, there is little incentive to stay mentally present while they do it. Every additional second then feels like waiting because, from my perspective, that is exactly what it is.
Simultaneous play is one obvious way to address this. 7 Wonders compresses a large number of decisions into a relatively short game because players choose cards at the same time. But simultaneous action is only one solution. Interaction, reactions, negotiation, shared spaces, visible threats and changing incentives can all keep players involved while a turn belongs formally to someone else.
The useful question is not whether everyone is always doing something with their hands. It is whether they have a reason to keep paying attention. A game that gives me nothing to decide for three minutes needs to earn those three minutes in some other way.
Playtime should give the game enough room to become itself
There is another reason why the number printed on the box can be misleading: a game’s length determines how much room its systems have to develop. I sometimes find it useful to think in terms of player-minutes rather than only total minutes. A game that scales from two to five players does not necessarily provide the same experience at each count, because adding players can change how much time and how many opportunities each person receives to develop an idea.
Ticket to Ride illustrates the intuition. If a play takes roughly fifteen minutes per player, adding another player does more than increase the total duration. It gives the shared route network more time to fill, creates more competition over connections and allows each player’s plan to develop within a denser environment. The exact number is less important than the design question behind it: how much room does each player need for this system to produce the experience we want?
This is also why simply lowering an end condition does not necessarily create a shorter version of the same game. If Catan ended at seven victory points instead of ten, there would be less time for trading relationships to develop, fewer opportunities to recover from an early mistake and less space for longer-term plans. The game would not merely finish earlier; the relative importance of its systems would change.
The opposite is equally true. If Splendor continued until thirty points instead of fifteen, players would have far more time after their engines were already functioning. Decisions that are interesting while the engine is being constructed could become repetitive once the main strategic problem has been solved. More time would not necessarily create more game.
The right length is therefore not the shortest duration a design can be compressed into. It is the amount of time its mechanisms need to develop, interact and produce meaningful change before they begin repeating themselves.
A good game earns its minutes
Thinking about time this way changes the design question. Instead of asking whether ninety minutes is too long, I would ask what players are doing during those ninety minutes. How often do they make meaningful decisions? What can they think about when another player acts? Does new information require an immediate response, or can everything safely be ignored until their next turn? Does the game need its full duration for strategies and relationships to develop, or has the central decision already repeated itself several times before the end arrives?
None of this means that every game should be fast. Some experiences need space. Negotiation needs time for relationships to form. Engine building needs enough turns for investment to matter. Strategic games need enough room for early decisions to create later consequences. A long game can justify every minute just as a short game can waste half of them.
For me, the ideal ending comes slightly before the systems have exhausted themselves. The game has given me enough time to build something, test a plan and understand the consequences, but it ends while there is still one more thing I would have liked to try. That unfinished possibility is often what makes me want to play again.
A game is not too long merely because the clock says it lasted two hours. It becomes too long when the players have already stopped playing before the game itself has stopped.