Setup time in games is overrated by most players

Everyone I play with insists on sorting tokens and shuffling for at least 15 minutes before starting a board game. I started just pulling pieces out as we go and letting the first few turns be slow. It saved us 20 minutes last Saturday when we played through a heavy euro game. Has anyone else tried skipping the full setup and just jumping in?

2 comments

2 Comments

the_wyatt19d ago

If it takes 15 minutes to set up a heavy euro game, you're probably punching out new sheets or sorting a zillion tiny cubes for the first time. Most of us have played these games enough to know where the cardboard goes. You're saving 20 minutes but risking a mess when someone realizes halfway through that nobody grabbed the red player tokens or that the resource pile is short a few wood. That's gonna take longer to fix than just sorting things upfront. Some games are designed around having everything visible and organized, like Viticulture with its seasons track. Skipping setup in that game would just confuse everyone and slow down the first few rounds even more. It's not a huge deal either way, but acting like it's a genius time hack feels like overthinking a minor inconvenience.

the_thomas19d ago

You're making it sound like a bigger risk than it is, @the_wyatt. Most groups I play with know their games well enough to spot a missing token in the first minute and just grab it, way faster than sorting every single piece from scratch. Would you rather spend 15 minutes on setup or five minutes fixing a hiccup midgame?