With the right mindset and equipment and game type, you can add timers and points for staying X amount in-bounds and let the win-firsts include time taken as a first-class citizen in their evaluation of moves. I believe the best outcome I’ve ever had when doing this was to take two win-firsts (myself and a friend) and reduce our playtime of Mage Knight by a factor of almost 3x. And it was still very fun for both of us! The marginal gain of most of the thinking is small, so adding a small point penalty to “overthinking” is plenty sufficient to pare it down drastically.
With the right mindset and equipment and game type, you can add timers and points for staying X amount in-bounds and let the win-firsts include time taken as a first-class citizen in their evaluation of moves. I believe the best outcome I’ve ever had when doing this was to take two win-firsts (myself and a friend) and reduce our playtime of Mage Knight by a factor of almost 3x. And it was still very fun for both of us! The marginal gain of most of the thinking is small, so adding a small point penalty to “overthinking” is plenty sufficient to pare it down drastically.