There’s a piece of advice that circulates in board game spaces that I think is well-meaning and mostly wrong, cap your game night at two hours, respect people’s time, don’t let a session drag past when everyone’s actually still having fun. I understand the impulse behind it, nobody wants to be the group still hunched over a board at midnight while half the table is visibly checked out. But I think the actual effect of that rule, followed strictly, is that it filters out exactly the games that reward the third hour, and those are often the best ones.

Brass: Birmingham is the clearest example I’ve got. The first time our group played it, we were past the two-hour mark and just getting to the point where the resource competition actually started biting, where the choices stopped being “what should I build” and became “what can I afford to let someone else have.” If we’d stuck to a hard two-hour cutoff we’d have packed it up right as the game was becoming what it actually is, and probably walked away thinking it was a solid but unremarkable economic engine instead of one of the sharper things on my shelf.

I get the counterargument, not every night has room for a four-hour commitment, and I’m not saying every session needs to run long. But I’ve started treating “how long is this going to take” as a separate question from “is a two-hour cap the right default,” because for a specific category of heavier games, deep economic engines, the meatier Ameritrash brawlers, a hard cutoff isn’t respecting anyone’s time, it’s guaranteeing you only ever experience the setup and the middle, never the part the whole design was building toward.

My actual rule now, for what it’s worth, is to ask before we start whether tonight is a night that can flex if a game’s clearly heading somewhere good around hour two. Half the time the answer’s no, and that’s fine, we play something shorter instead. But on the nights the answer’s yes, some of the best sessions we’ve had are the ones that would’ve gotten cut off by a rule designed to protect people from exactly the experience they ended up glad they stayed for.

I think part of why the two-hour rule spreads so easily is that it’s genuinely good advice for a specific, common failure mode, someone drags a group through a game nobody’s enjoying because they don’t want to admit it isn’t working, and capping the time protects everyone from that particular flavor of misery. That’s a real problem and the rule solves it. What it doesn’t distinguish is between a bad time that’s dragging and a good time that’s just long, and those feel similar in the moment, both involve looking at a clock and thinking this has been a while, so it’s easy to treat them as the same signal when they aren’t.

The closest thing I’ve got to a fix, beyond just asking upfront, is paying attention to whether people are still leaning into the table around the two-hour mark or leaning back from it. Leaning in, even tired, usually means keep going. Leaning back, even if nobody says anything, usually means the two-hour rule was right about this one. It’s a small distinction and I still get it wrong sometimes, but it’s a better question than just checking the clock.