The topic pretty much says it all - how long should be allowed for each tournament round?

Niranth said:

Can't answer that till we have a tournament format.

Since there is no official tournament document for this, my knee-jerk reaction would be to suggest you use Netrunner's guidelines as a starting point.

I'd imagine the offical tournament rules for Star Wars will be a similar format, where you bring a Light and Dark deck, and you and your opponent play each other twice, switching sides.

Swiss Format

65 minute rounds

Match play consists of two games

Where you'll run into a hitch is when you have to resolve matches going to time out, rather than a proper victory.  There's no simple yardstick to score it, like with Netrunner where you're racing to get to a certain agenda score.  Light Side needs to defeat 3 Dark objectives, the Dark Side needs to get a dial to 12.  You could score it and have each defeated objective count as "4 points" and each tick on the Death Star dial count as "1 point", and when time is called, players finish the current round, and resolve it that way.

If you adopt that, then you can pretty much run with the Netrunner document.

Ultimately, this won't be an "official" tournament, so as the organizer, you'll really need to communicate these rules to your players.

I would personally like to see longer rounds for this game, and also for AGoT. I think that they should be around 120 minutes, and, if a game is particularly intense, let it go on until its conclusion. 

On the flip side of that, it would be fun to have a separate "speed tournament" using chess timers, and only allowing a few seconds for each game movement/action window. 

I say 90 minute round, playing each opponent on each side of the Force.

How is the order in which you and your opponent play LS and DS determined?

 Roll a die, paper-rock-scissors-lizard-spock, or some other agreed upon method, winner chooses. 

divinityofnumber said:

I disagree. Two hours for a single round in a tournament setting is way too long for any game, except Warhammer/40K. I've been playing Game of Thrones for 9 years, have won games in 10 minutes, and people don't want to wait close to two hours for the next round to start. Having a time limit forces players to play faster, and make their decks tighter. If you can't win in 60 minutes (even a dual match, like Netrunner) then you suffer the consequences for not getting a full victory.

Playoff rounds are different. There generally is no time limit for these rounds, as the states are (usually) high. But for the swiss rounds there should be a reasonable amount of time, and 60 miutes is more than enough.

Back to the original topic, I do think that Star Wars will follow the Netrunner pattern of playing both sides, but that is no guarantee this will be the case. But with two opposing sides that play (slightly) differently, they might throw us for a loop and create a same-side based rule for tournament play.

I sincerely hope that we use both sides.  In addition to the time question, I also wonder how to score split matches.  So far, I think we will be doing 90 minutes rounds.  Oh, and this is for the Organized Play.  

Niranth said:

Why would you need so much time to play both sides ? This game is a lot faster than Netrunner and Netrunner has 65 minute rounds.

Considering FFG is getting the Organised Play stuff ready and expect it to be all out by the end of Feb we'd have to be receiving tournament rules and possibly an FAQ in the next few weeks