Thank you for teaching me the phrase byo-yomi today! I want to start by saying I’d be delighted to hear people try variations on troll timers and report back how that worked. My confidence here is closer to “how to spice a recipe” than “how to do a math problem.”
The very first iteration of troll timers gave people one time-out a game, where time-outs lasted as long as you wanted. The problem I encountered was one side almost always used their time-out by the fourth turn right as the first non-obvious choice came up, and they only took a long enough time-out to make their decisions for that turn. The eventual fix to that resulted in the current version: fast turns long enough to get used to making moves that quickly, slow turns that presented you with all this extra time you might as well use productively. In hindsight, I never thought to reintroduce control of time tokens or time-outs once people had the concept down. I’ll give that a try in the future, and if you beat me to it let me know how that worked!
Thank you for teaching me the phrase byo-yomi today! I want to start by saying I’d be delighted to hear people try variations on troll timers and report back how that worked. My confidence here is closer to “how to spice a recipe” than “how to do a math problem.”
The very first iteration of troll timers gave people one time-out a game, where time-outs lasted as long as you wanted. The problem I encountered was one side almost always used their time-out by the fourth turn right as the first non-obvious choice came up, and they only took a long enough time-out to make their decisions for that turn. The eventual fix to that resulted in the current version: fast turns long enough to get used to making moves that quickly, slow turns that presented you with all this extra time you might as well use productively. In hindsight, I never thought to reintroduce control of time tokens or time-outs once people had the concept down. I’ll give that a try in the future, and if you beat me to it let me know how that worked!