Our next step was to abolish the tedium due to the elaborate aiming of the guns, by fixing a time limit for every move.  We made this an outside limit at first, ten minutes, but afterwards we discovered that it made the game much more warlike to cut the time down to a length that would barely permit a slow-moving player to fire all his guns and move all his men.  This led to small bodies of men lagging and “getting left,” to careless exposures, to rapid, less accurate shooting, and just that eventfulness one would expect in the hurry and passion of real fighting.  It also made the game brisker.  We have since also made a limit, sometimes of four minutes, sometimes of five minutes, to the interval for adjustment and deliberation after one move is finished and before the next move begins.  This further removes the game from the chess category, and approximates it to the likeness of active service.  Most of a general’s decisions, once a fight has begun, must be made in such brief intervals of time. (But we leave unlimited time at the outset for the planning.)

As to our time-keeping, we catch a visitor with a stop-watch if we can, and if we cannot, we use a fair-sized clock with a second-hand:  the player not moving says “Go,” and warns at the last two minutes, last minute, and last thirty seconds.  But I think it would not be difficult to procure a cheap clock—­because, of course, no one wants a very accurate agreement with Greenwich as to the length of a second—­that would have minutes instead of hours and seconds instead of minutes, and that would ping at the end of every minute and discharge an alarm note at the end of the move.  That would abolish the rather boring strain of time-keeping.  One could just watch the fighting.

Moreover, in our desire to bring the game to a climax, we decided that instead of a fight to a finish we would fight to some determined point, and we found very good sport in supposing that the arrival of three men of one force upon the back line of the opponent’s side of the country was of such strategic importance as to determine the battle.  But this form of battle we have since largely abandoned in favour of the old fight to a finish again.  We found it led to one type of battle only, a massed rush at the antagonist’s line, and that our arrangements of time-limits and capture and so forth had eliminated most of the concluding drag upon the game.

Our game was now very much in its present form.  We considered at various times the possibility of introducing some complication due to the bringing up of ammunition or supplies generally, and we decided that it would add little to the interest or reality of the game.  Our battles are little brisk fights in which one may suppose that all the ammunition and food needed are carried by the men themselves.