I’ve played hundreds of games, some face to face, a lot on AAA. Obviously the quickest FtoF was with experts, like Gargantua & his crew in Vancouver, while the slowest FtoF was w/novices. Here’s some of the more important lessons I’ve learned about game time, some of these will be repeats, sorry:
1. MOST IMPORTANT: Some one should act as taskmaster, making sure players are planning before their turn, make sure players are “done” with combat moves so that you can start rolling, keep track of battles and battle results, do double count of money, etc. That sounds annoying, but it’s really easy to let large amounts of time slip by when a player is “planning” or whatever when really they are just dithering. The game has to keep good pace with people kept engaged, otherwise the moment there is a break, peoples’ minds start to wander and then they wander and start talking about other stuff, bringing the game to halt.
2. No battle calculator. That is a huge time suck to plug in all the stats and run numbers etc. Plus, it really is a violation of the spirit of a FtoF game where there is some expectation of living with the fog of war.
3. No TV in room. The moment someone says “let’s turn on the game while we play” you know that’s going to spell disaster.
4. Don’t Play with newbies. This sounds mean, but playing with newbies will inevitably slow the game down terribly for obvious reasons. Not only do they suck up time trying to understand what to do, they make mistakes and then you have to rewind the game often to make it at least somewhat competitive. The only thing you can do here is trying to help them by talking their turn through with them… this gets a little absurd to the extent you end up playing against yourself with just a warm body as a stand-in for the hypothetical other side.
5. No beer before noon. A&A isn’t A&A unless there is beer, but once the drinking starts, play does start to suffer, so best at least to try to mitigate it by waiting some. (FtoF games for me usually start at 9am).
6. Do not use income tracker. What a waste of time. It rarely is accurate in my experience. Counting the money on the board can be done quickly and accurately, especially if you do a double count, See Taskmaster up above.
7. Have 2 rolling boxes/areas on the sides of the game. Having to roll dice far away from the battle and/or move pieces off the board to the far side of the play area is painstaking and subject to accidents. Making battle-board battles quick and easy will save time.
8. Set up game night before if can.