How I learned to stop worrying and learned to love the clock - a reflection by MrFishopolis
- Jeff Mitchell
- Sep 9
- 7 min read
Hello Champions. MrFishopolis, of discord server fame won the first online Godtear tournament where we used clocks. Given that she won and had 2 games along the way hit turn five I, Gearbox, asked her to write up an article for all of us about the clock and how it impacted her play. Any notes from me will be in italics. Enjoy!
The Beginning
Let’s start at the beginning, for Godtear at least. I usually play Godtear twice a week with Diced_Ham (also of discord server fame). We play Sunday and Wednesday nights, and have with astonishing consistency (given that he had a one year old at the time and my work schedule is frenetic at best) since late 2020 when he taught me the game. These game nights are wonderful eddies in time in my week. I get to catch up with an old friend and then we splash around in Godtear exploring all the corners of the sandbox we can think of. We play truly weird teams, we draft the worst team possible for each other, we have played the color purple (only blues and reds), we have played only 1 hex attack characters on Death, we have written love triangles among characters and then played those teams, not looking for the best synergies just exploring the capacities of the game. One of the reasons I look forward to these nights is that they are such a tempo change from my job. Ham and I just wander around, usually drinking whiskey or sometimes edibles, through the mind labyrinth looking for cool things to do with the game like two kids walking the shoreline showing each other neat shells or poking sea creatures with sticks. I sometimes get sucked into thinking about the PERFECT move, can I do something weird enough to throw him off, should I drag Raith through my own Rangosh banner for that extra point, use an ult at an offbeat time etc. This means I walk down and play the turn out through all the different variations ( usually going around in a circle until landing on the second move I thought of) of moves. This takes a while, it is hypnotic and the deep focus is kind of a rush in itself, the opposite of how your brain feels after a doomscrolling session.
(An xkcd toon Ham sent me after one of our play dates)
And while Ham is on his own mental Odyssey of a turn, after the requisite buyer’s remorse where I invariably find a better move than I just committed to, I run that same program from his perspective trying to predict what confounding puzzle he will strand me in next. The slow tempo of these evenings being a feature not a bug. So when Gearbox introduced the idea of a clock to his tournament, I felt that it would be antithetical to one of the tenants of the game I love so much. I also have a complicated relationship with clocks.
The Clock as a presence
Growing up my dad taught chess at the local library after work so my sister, Libby and I as his biological pupils were trained in chess and eventually subjected to chess tournaments. I remember Saturdays of being dragged into various church basements around Broome County and after a while they all sort of seem similar, the drop ceilings, the cracked checkered tile floors, the old coffee smells leftover from the night before’s AA meeting and of course, the swarming ticking sounds of twenty chess clocks in a contained space. We were young. I was probably about 7 or 8 with Libs being a year and a half younger than me. Those folding metal chairs were hard and cold on my legs and as a terribly shy little girl the pressure of being in a room with so many people was uncomfortable and intimidating. I was expected to perform and worse out in the open with so many people who could just… see me. Yuck. These tournaments were always paid for in pizza and ice cream, regardless of our results. As a kid it wasn’t such a bad deal, just something to be endured in the eternal quest for more sugar sources. I stopped competing in chess tournaments long before I got my driver’s license and haven’t looked back so when Gearbox introduced his format involving clocks I was pretty sure I knew what that was going to feel like from the inside and it wasn’t wandering around on the beach.
I lost the first five games in a row Ham and I practice played in the run up to the tournament. If you have ever played chess with a clock you know the strategy is to move through the first moves as quickly as possible, banking that time for later turns. The openings fly by at a staccato’ed pace. I would get trapped in a mental loop of thinking about how I was wasting time thinking about that mental loop and off down the self recrimination rabbithole I’d fall. I lost each of those games with quite a bit of time on the clock, meaning my fear of the clock was stronger than my fear of losing to my opponent. I was prioritizing time over strategy. Eventually I figured out a phase tempo that gave me some breathing room for thinking but was chronologically responsible. It became more like juggling, a very familiar mental pace for me at my job producing independent movies, where it is a constant onslaught of weird situations (Fish, the police are here. Fish, the axle of the gear truck just broke on its way to the stage. Fish, we have caught the hospital ceiling on fire.) and triage is the name of the game. I love my job, it is never boring but it is extremely taxing. Once I figured out how to approach the game from the opposite temporal expectation it helped tremendously now it was time to actually play the tournament.
My first game of the tournament was against the man himself, Gearbox. And as we were chatting post game and I was mentioning the pressure that I felt he said that the time actually made him feel less pressure not more. What? Insanity. “It frees me from having to play a perfect game and gives me a chance to just play a good one.” As a dyed in the wool perfectionist who really does let perfect be the enemy of good this was an alien concept to me but as I looked it over from that perspective it did feel freeing. Wow. I tried that viewpoint on like a hat and found it oddly reassuring. It’s not one I can live in because that perfectionism is just part of who I am but it did act as a pressure valve for some of the mental beatings I was giving myself. Neat. Throughout the rest of the tournament I played newer players, Matthias Maccebeth, and long time discord stalwarts, Diced_Ham and Enigma_818 (it’s our whole team from the old three person tournament) and got to discuss with all of them how the clock impacted not just their play but the feeling of the game. Then in the finals I played TeacozyOD who is a very experienced table top gamer, if newer to Godtear, meaning his fundamental concepts of control, tempo, strategy are all very strong even if he doesn’t have all the champions and traits memorized. He doomed himself in the finals by saying he had not yet had time be a factor and then ran out of time in round 5. The Chrono-Gods are not to be scoffed at. Though I refuse to feel bad for him because his Treekin must be juiced up on Miracle-Gro as they hit exact dodge three times in the game, one shotting Raith, Fenra and a Splashing. THREE TIMES out of five rounds, while I sat there with Lorsann missing Raith with her ult by rolling a 1 on six die. I definitely need to convert to his pantheon. The game pretty much came down to the Rangosh, Finvarr lane and if you’ve read the truly excellent short story you know how that turned out. Rangosh blundered through with 2 health and me with 5 minutes still on the clock. We both survived.
When to use a Clock, and conclusion
I think that the clock is probably best inserted into Godtear “life” at different stages in a player’s evolution. When teaching a brand new person obviously you would not want to put them under time pressure as they are trying to figure out how banners work. At the next stage in GT development (intermediate) you probably want to just play around with all the champions and their crews. The clock helps you cover more ground here, play all the champs, play all the scenarios etc. Once you are there, I think untimed play becomes more useful as it lets you really explore the depths and wrinkles that make this such a replayable game. If you are aspiring to find the perfect move it means you are running all the permutations AND during the longer opponents turns you can be playing the moves from the other side of the board. These habits and explorations help when you have to make quick decisions in timed play because you have done that intellectual mining in your three hour games and found little quirky maneuvers that maybe be hyper-specific. You don’t have to discover them with the clock running, you can recall them when frantically rifling around in your mental junk drawer for your next move. As for its use in the competitive format I think there is room for both depending on what your aim is with the game. Though I do think that clocked play benefits the more experienced player exponentially.
In conclusion regarding timed play I think that it adds a facet that allows you to mediate what the game is to you. I read from Grumpysarn once that Godtear is fun because you keep getting to make interesting choices, the clock lets you decide how you want the process of making those choices to feel. Do you want to wander around in a mental funhouse or do you want to feel like an Ironman montage? I think both are fun and the clock means you can get in a game without the long stretches of down time or you can overthink yourself into another dimension. In the end, as it is with any game or any leisure activity you do in life, it's about what you want the flavor of the time you spend in it to taste like and just like the ice cream pot at the end of the chess tournament, that choice is a fun one.
