Suggestion: bid for max. turn limit

[Kamikaze28]

Let's do a little napkin math, shall we?

You come home from work, let's say you're free to play Outwitters at 19:00 after eating and such things. Now you start a "Blitz Outwitters" match with a 2 minute timeout for turns, let's assume for the sake of argument that an average turn will take you 1 minute to plan, execute and submit. Estimating an average length of games in terms of turns is difficult, but we can look at different scenarios at once:

• The short game (20 turns): 20 minutes, that's doable.
• The medium game (60 turns): 1 hour. You need to go to the toilet after drinking your well-deserved soda? Well better take your iDevice with you or else you lose the game.
• The long game (100 turns): 1:40 hours. You wanted to watch that movie you just streamed from Netflix while playing Outwitters? Well too bad you missed half of it because every minute your iDevice required your attention.
  

Looking at the potential problems above, you think to yourself: okay, maybe 2 minutes is a bit harsh, but I'd still like to finish the game before going to bed. Let's say 5 minutes, that should be enough to do stuff between turns, right? For the sake of argument we again estimate the length of an average turn to be 2.5 minutes. Let's look at our scenarios again:

• The short game (20 turns): 50 minutes, okay.
• The medium game (60 turns): 2:30 hours. Phew, that was beginning to feel like a chore.
• The long game (100 turns): 4:10 hours. I started this game at 19:00 and it's now 23:00 and we're close to the end. Since my iDevice bugged me every 2-4 minutes I haven't been able to do much of anything else and the evening is almost over.
  

After estimating this, I think it should be obvious that any longer timeout would result in the loss of the first player who needs to go to bed. The alternative being you explaining to your boss that you had to stay up until 3:00 in the morning to finish that Outwitters game and that you are not really fit for work today.

My main point: you cannot know how long a game will last beforehand and seeing that we all need to sleep for roughly 6-8 hours every 16-18 hours this is bound to be problematic. Patience is a virtue.