Timeout

[Matthias M.]

Would it be possible to significantly decrease the timeout per round in every game?
It's really annoying to wait for the slow opponents nearly the whole 2 minutes before they "fall awake"...

My suggestion: Give 4 minutes timeout in the beginning of the game and 30 seconds on top for every new round.
Maybe additional 5 seconds for the faster one every round.
Finally, use min(50 seconds, remaining time) each round.

The games are not that overwhelmingly hard (quite the contrary) to justify wasting 1++ minute each turn. That's absolutely demotivating!

[Huggable T.]

At the start especially for newbies to Cartographers, it takes a while for each card to sink in.  I must admit I find Circle the Wagons very difficult in getting use to the three cards and what they mean, so I take ages on my first turn.  I can see the extra time for the Spring season maybe useful to some players

I think this situation has been brought up before so I leave it to the admins to respond but your idea is a good one Matthias.  It reminds me a bit of Chess when you were given so long on the clock for the complete match and after each turn you stopped the clock.  If you ran out of time then you forfeited the match !!!!

[Marlene H.]

I have an alternate view of this.

If someone much prefers fast playing games, (for most games) there already exists a solution.
Play with bots.   They play extremely fast.

 
When a human plays, many things might interfere with their ability to play quickly.  Maybe they got a phone call.  Maybe a pot came to a boil in the kitchen.  Maybe their cat or dog just knocked over something that must be attended to.  Maybe they had to go to the bathroom.  Maybe food was just delivered - or a package had to be signed for.  Maybe a child or other family member needed attending.  There are probably many, many other things that can interfere with the ability to play quickly.

My point is - humans are not bots. 
Life is happens around us that is not visible to an online opponent.

Any time we play with a human opponent we have to accept the fact that they might not play as quickly as we would prefer.  As things stand now, if someone absolutely must have a fast playing opponent, then they should take a bot as an opponent.

I don't know how difficult it would be from a structural point of view, but another alternative might be for the site to be redesigned to allow different kinds of human games.  When setting up a table, a person could chose to have games that started with a variety of time settings - such as choosing to have a game with 1 min, 2 min or 3 minute limits on time settings for turns.   

I suspect this might be a monumental restructuring of the site.  So I don't know if this would be a realistic possibility.

For the mean time, if slow turns are upsetting, just choose to play with a bot.

[Matthias M.]

If I play such a game and somebody rings at the door, I would have lost anyway, no matter whether I have 2 minutes or slightly less than 1. Furthermore this is a unique happening and not like the groundhog every round.
But if I'm a slowpoke or a super perfectionist, THEN I should play with bots and not bother other players and steal them a lot of time.

The main (but not only) problem is the Cartographers game. There are not even bots. And games against humans last from 5 to nearly 30 minutes of play time, depending on the respective opponent.
And here, the main problem are neither newbies nor occasional everyday happenings. The really annoying opponents mostly have at least the 4th or 5th meeple (if not already the 3rd, 4th or 5th black one) and need about 50-90 seconds each turn. In other words, a match takes noticeable longer than 20 minutes in average. A normal turn with normal opponents will take like 30-45 seconds at max for every turn (well, for complicated tiles in complicated circumstances, it may take around a minute or slightly longer, but that is rare) and that is still enough time reflecting about everything essential.

It's not that single matches or single rounds take that long, it's really irksome that in average every 2nd game is of that kind.