Playing with a two hour time limit

At social meetings, we rarely play with a genuine time limit. We're often too busy bantering, crapping on, making comments about the football games shown on the television and telling crass jokes to ever finish a game on time.

On the flipside, almost all of that banter does drop away when it comes to a tournament.

Usually we call a game when we figure there's a winner and about 2h before a few of the guys have to leave to catch trains (we play at night on a weeknight) to get home.

We play with two hour time limits in Berkeley as well. Sometimes if the game is heads-up at time we may go over slightly just to see who would win. For small play groups, it's also worth considering how much time the first person ousted has to wait before they can play a second game.

All playgroups can play with 2hr time limits and still have a grand old time if they follow this single rule:

A player may not discuss non-game topics if it is his turn.

It solved every problem we ever had in my old gaming group. We could play six-player war simulations in <4hrs. And it's fun to harass the player whose turn it is if he ever breaks the rule.

depends if booze is allowed at casual game tables or not

By trial and error in russia we've desided that 2:15 time limit works better.

The London playgroup plays with 2 hour time limits and VEKN rules (except proxies are allowed).

This allows us to play at least two games from 7 - 9 and 9 - 11...