Turn timers for family game night

Every family that plays games has one. The player who picks up their hand, puts it down, picks it up again, and asks what the rules say about something that has not happened yet. Nobody minds once. By the fourth round, the eight year old has left the table and the game is effectively over.

The fix is not a rule about how fast people have to play. It is putting a clock where everyone can see it, so the game does the asking instead of a person having to.

Timing a round, not a turn

Party games are the easy case, because the timing is already part of the game. Charades, Taboo, Articulate, Pictionary, a trivia round, the spymaster in Codenames working out a clue: all of them are one team against a fixed slice of time.

What those need from a timer is boring and specific. It has to be legible from the other side of a room by someone who is standing up and gesticulating. It has to make a noise, because nobody is looking at it. And it must not fall asleep mid-round, which is what a phone does if you leave it alone.

Party games mostly come with their own answer, printed in the rules. All the timer has to do is be visible from the far side of the room.

Timing a turn

This is the one that saves game nights. In Ticket to Ride, Catan, Carcassonne, Azul or Monopoly, a turn is a small decision, and the time it takes has almost nothing to do with how important it is. Some players are just slower, and some positions invite an unreasonable amount of staring.

Start somewhere around a minute and adjust from there. Longer for a game where a turn involves real planning, and generous to begin with either way, because a clock that feels tight on the first evening gets switched off and never comes back. What happens when it runs out is up to the table, and in practice the noise on its own tends to be enough: nobody needs a penalty, they just need to notice.

Timing a whole player

The third shape is the one chess uses: each player gets a budget for the entire game and spends it how they like. Someone who wants to agonise over one critical turn can, as long as they zip through the rest.

Games Night does this with per-player clocks, and with bonuses that can be a fixed number of seconds or a percentage. For anything strictly turn-based and competitive, the increment schemes are worth understanding properly, and there is a whole post on those.

Playing with children

The unexpected benefit is that a visible countdown is impersonal. "Your turn is nearly up" from a parent is a telling-off. The same information from a clock in the middle of the table is just the state of the world, and children argue with it far less than you would expect.

It also makes waiting legible. A lot of the "it's not fair" at a family table is really "I do not know how long this will last". A clock answers that.

Be prepared for it to backfire with a child who is already anxious about losing, though. Start generous, and treat the noise as a joke rather than a buzzer. You can always tighten it.

Not for every game

Some games are slow because the thinking is the point, and a clock on those is not an improvement. Timers earn their place in light games, party games, anything with more than four players, and anywhere someone at the table is bored.

Setting it up so it actually gets used

The screen stays awake, which sounds like the least interesting feature in the app until you have spent an evening asking Aunty Brenda to unlock her phone so somebody can start the next round. A timer that has gone dark is worse than no timer at all, because now the game has stopped and it is nobody's fault.

Past that, two things make the difference. AirPlay it to the TV and the table gets its surface back while everybody can see the clock without leaning, which matters more the more players there are. And turn the sound and the haptics on, because the whole point is that nobody has to watch it.

The controls fade out once a game is running, mostly so that there is nothing on screen for a child to press. Themes are decoration and I would not pretend otherwise, but a dark one at 9pm with the lights down does read better.

Games Night is on the App Store for iPhone and iPad, free to try, with the full set behind a one-off purchase. No ads, no subscription, and nothing collected about you or your family.

Common questions