Might it make more sense to allow players control over when their long turns are (via something vaguely resembling byo-yomi timing?)
I’m envisioning ‘you have 3 Time Tokens to start the game. You have 5 seconds per move. Spending a Time Token raises that to 5 minutes.’
This seems like it would keep the property of ‘learning to operate with both long and short turn times’, but also like it would encourage thinking about when to think about things.
For normal use, chess clocks (time per game, allocated however the player likes) are probably the best answer. In poker, it’s unofficial, but common for players to get antsy if someone’s taking a long time, and for players to call “time, please” verbally when they’re facing a thoughtful decicision. Very occasionally, the floor personnel will actually put a clock on the player and give them 2 minutes or they fold.
For this excercise, part of the purpose is teaching the players what it’s like to have shorter or longer periods for thinking, outside of their control. This develops the habits of acting when it’s obvious and thinking/planning when necessary. So the lack of control is intentional.
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!
Might it make more sense to allow players control over when their long turns are (via something vaguely resembling byo-yomi timing?)
I’m envisioning ‘you have 3 Time Tokens to start the game. You have 5 seconds per move. Spending a Time Token raises that to 5 minutes.’
This seems like it would keep the property of ‘learning to operate with both long and short turn times’, but also like it would encourage thinking about when to think about things.
For normal use, chess clocks (time per game, allocated however the player likes) are probably the best answer. In poker, it’s unofficial, but common for players to get antsy if someone’s taking a long time, and for players to call “time, please” verbally when they’re facing a thoughtful decicision. Very occasionally, the floor personnel will actually put a clock on the player and give them 2 minutes or they fold.
For this excercise, part of the purpose is teaching the players what it’s like to have shorter or longer periods for thinking, outside of their control. This develops the habits of acting when it’s obvious and thinking/planning when necessary. So the lack of control is intentional.
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!