I want to thank you guys for the feedback and help. Now on to the question.

As I said in the last post, I am a new judge. I also judge to some creative people from all walks of life. HeroClix has a couple of things in common with a few different sports out there. The one thing I am talking about is a time limit. In football a popular play is to stall and let the clock run out to keep your edge and help prevent your oppenet from having a chance to score.

This is my question:
Is is against the rules to stall and run the clock down?

Situation:
My opponent is doing well in this tourney. I am beating him at this point, but then it comes down to the last 5 min of this game. My opponent has a few char.s left on the board and it looks grim for them (they have all taken damage and all are pushed). All I need is one more turn to finish them off. He has one char. with outwit and takes the full five min. of the game time to place where it goes. My guess is that he is running down the clock to keep from loosing anymore pts or to keep me from gainning anymore pts. As you can guess this is a little upsetting and puts a sour taste in my mouth. Did he do anything wrong? Is there a turn time frame that I should know about?

Thanks again for all the help

Yes, this has been addressed many times & someone will come in later and give you the exact quote from the rules. It IS ILLEGAL to stall, but the judge has to rule that there's stalling going on b/c there's no definition of stalling. Unfortunately, what you have to do next time, is have the judge notice the stalling so that it won't happen & if anything the judge will rule that your game gets another turn or two to play it out.

This is very frusterating and has happened to everybody at least once.

I've heard of using a chess timer to limit the amount of time a person has for a round. I'm not sure what the appropriate limits would be, but it sounds reasonable.

With most digital chess timers, you can set an increment for each turn, and a total for the game.

Say you want a 60 minute game, and you want to give each player at least 2 minutes to make their moves. If you think 10 rounds could be completed in those 60 minutes, you'd set the clock like this:

If you play at 10 120, which means "Game in 10 minutes, with a 120 second increment." Now "game in 10" sounds very fast, but the increment ADDS 120 seconds for each move. So a 10 round game will really take 20 minutes + 120*20 = 10 minutes + 2400 seconds = 60 minutes.

Here's the way it works. Say we're using a countdown, digital timer. We set the clocks for 10 minutes. I take 1 minute for the first turn. The clock has counted down the minute--but now it adds back 120 seconds. So at the end of my first move, I have 11:00 on my countdown clock. My opponent takes 3 minutes for his response. So now he has 9:00 showing on his clock, and so on and so forth until time expires for the game. You'll always have at least two minutes for each move, but you also get 10 discretionary minutes that you can use to think in tight situations. By moving quickly, in one round, you can gain time to think in later rounds, but both players end up using the same amount of time.

Again, I'm not sure exactly how the clock should be set for Heroclix...but I think those settings would work fine, as most of my 60 minute games went about 10 rounds and vice versa, unless someone stalled...=P Though, I think setting the clock for a 1 minute increment with a 20 minute time limit (10 + 10 + 40 = 60), thereby only allowing them to "gain" time if they move in less than a minute.

Something to experiment with, anyway! =)

It's in Approved Playand cheating is also defined to includeBut note that playing defensively or running away is not stalling so long as turns are taken in a brisk manner.

Andrew

I was actually the player in this case. My opponent had 3 figures left, all of which were pushed. Captain Britain was in running shot range of Cyclops AND Green Lantern, either one of which would KO him...

And my opponent sat and waited for five minutes deciding who Mysterio should outwit... when his only options were Cyclops' Runningshot and Black Widow's Willpower.

I told him that if he didn't hurry up, I would call foul...

It doesn't matter though, I went 4-0 straight to the final, then lost the final match by like 20 points (#### crit miss!)

all of our judges in my local haunts use a system that woorks pretty good,at the final 5 min mark time is called and each player is then given a final turn.When time is called and it was my turn and I started the game I would finish my turn and my opponent would get his last turn,if it was my opponents turn when time was called he would finish his turn I would get my last turn then he would get his last turn.This is a pretty effective method to stop stalling cause you always get that last turn,it's very simular to the floor rule in magic the gathering when time is called but then get 3 turns each.

I run my Events (Heroclix, Mage Knight, and Pirates when the tourneys actually start) the same way: when time is called players finish the round. My wife runs her MK Events the same way. It has worked wuite well for us and our players don't stall because it's usually pointless.