🕐 Game Night Duration Estimator
Add each game you're planning for the night with its typical playtime to see your total game night duration, including a setup/teardown buffer for each game.
Playtime plus a buffer for every game
The buffer is charged once per game, not once for the night, because every title on the list has to come out of the box and go back into it:
total = sum of playtimes + (number of games × buffer)
hours = total / 60The default evening - Catan 90, Codenames 30, Splendor 30 - is 150 minutes of play plus 3 × 10 minutes of setup, so 180 minutes, or 3.0 hours. Add a fourth game at the 45-minute placeholder and it becomes 235 minutes, shown as 3.9 hours - that is 3 hours 55 minutes, not 3 hours 90 minutes. The hours figure is decimal, so multiply the part after the point by 60.
Making the estimate hold
- Box playtimes assume everyone knows the rules. A first teach adds 10 to 45 minutes depending on weight, so either raise the buffer for that game or give the teach its own row.
- Put the long game first. A 90-minute game started at 10pm rarely finishes.
- The buffer is per game, so it scales. Six short games at 10 minutes each is an hour of shuffling and packing.
- Zero is not accepted as a playtime. An empty or 0 box falls back to 1 minute rather than dropping the game from the total.
Frequently asked questions
How long should a board game night be?
Three hours covers a heavy game and two fillers with setup, which is what the default list works out to. Work backwards from when people have to leave, not forwards from when they arrive.
How much setup time should I allow per game?
Ten minutes is a fair average and the default here. A card game is nearer five, while a heavy game with a modular board, decks to sort and player boards to fill can take twenty before anyone plays a turn.
Does box playtime include setup and teaching?
No. The box figure is the play itself, for people who already know the game. That is exactly the gap the buffer on this page is there to close.