How (the hack) do I make my game shorter? This is one of the hardest things to do. Nevertheless, this is one of the questions every designer needs to ask himself in the modern world of board games. I have no idea if it's the attention span of the modern homo sapiens out there that decreases all the time, the need to compete with the satisfaction of video games or something else.
Let me supersize that for you: How (the hacking hack) do I make my game shorter without taking anything away from it?!
Of course the easiest way to make your game shorter is by just taking things out of it. Game too long? Let's play 5 instead of 7 rounds or just take 3 actions every turn instead of 4. Simple, but almost never works just like that. Sometimes a step like that without changing something in the game itself will render some 'long term strategies' useless.
So how do you do it? I have some tricks I am using that can make a game shorter. There are a few fronts to fight this problem:
Start at the middle
Do players start with no resources, no buildings and no units? Are the decisions of the first round or so similar 90% of the time? Can you give the player double the resources and let them choose a building and a unit from the get go? Yes? Great!
You just shortened your game by reducing a whole round!
Reduce phases
Some phases can really just be an action inside another phase. Make this tighter by reducing game phases to a minimum. This will not only make the game shorter, it will also make the game easier to get into and learn for new people that try the game. If your game has 9 phases each round, players will probably find themselves asking "what phase are we in now?!" more often than you want them to (which is 0 times).
Make things show or hide them completely
Do I need to count my victory points or military power all the time? If so, something has gone wrong in the design. Either the game design or the graphic design. Make numbers appear clearly on the board, cards or by using tokens. It slows the game when people need to count every turn to see where they are. More than that I think it makes the game less fun, regardless of the time it takes.
Another way to go is to make some information hidden and by that players can only guess where they stand and won't count things all the time. Make sure that information is completely clear or completely hidden, because anything in between will make the game slow.
Faster mechanisms
Some mechanisms are intrinsically slow and some are quicker. I love drafting, but it is a very slow mechanism in general. Every card is a decision. The only positive thing about (most) drafts is that you make decisions simultaneously. Can you replace drafting with a draw 2 discard 1 kind of thing? That way the player has a decision but it takes less time. Don't change a mechanisms that you use once in the game, they don't matter all that much to the game length. Touch those that repeat themselves. If we look again at the drafting example, Seasons uses drafting once at game start. After that you can draw cards in many cases. So it uses the slow mechanism once and then diverts into a quick mechanism for the rest of the game.
"Less" choices
Give the player less choices or rather make some choices more attractive once they have chosen a certain path in their game. Make choices and their appeal to the players known right away to reduce thinking or "analysis paralysis" time. Totally remove choices that are generally 'not good' to help the player make their minds.
As an end note:
Game length is majorly an audience related thing. I love long games and love playing a game for up to 4 hours even, but I'm not most people (which is a weird realization to have at a young age...) and not even most gamers. Know what your audience wants and you will know what game companies are looking to give those people. Up to 20 minutes or 45 minutes, up to an hour or maybe an hour and a half is what you are shooting for, it doesn't matter. Make the glove fit the hand, don't force the hand to change its size.