Let me elaborate now that I am home.
Nothing even close to this scenario ever happens in a real game. In fact, the only thing slowing down games in the last tournament was people taking to long to think about their turns, not rules questions. Thus the need for clocks. You have set up an extreme edge case scenario that will never happen in order to argue from, and which I politely refuse to accept.
We were all fairly new to the game at that tournament yet had hardly any rules questions. New players Iâve taught usually stop asking a lot of questions after game 2. You seem to have a unrealistic view of what is normal in Codex and act like basic questions are big obstacles. This is why I question if youâve ever actually played the game.
It was actually much less hectic in the early rounds.
The âIdeaâ of using the clock is standard, but you are correct that we were going through growing pains during this tournament. What we eventually stubble upon at the end was very promising. You basically have two minutes to play your turn and are rewarded for quick play. Quite doable with just a little bit of practice.
I think itâs important to understand why having no clock would be a disaster in a real time tournament. I once tried that with a Yomi novice tournament; which was a tournament specifically aimed at pitting new players vs new players with personally assigned mentors to inspire confidence. I said âno timerâ in the rules and one match took 2.5 hours to complete which held up the tournament for so long that I had to split it into two days instead of one! I changed the rule to âslow timerâ and the players adapted without any problems.
Iâve also seen soooooo many other tournaments, which already took 4-5+ hours, get delayed by several hours because of all sorts of OTHER issues besides timers. Running a real time tournament on schedule is a divine feat as is, without timers it would be impossible.