Duel of Meloch Setup and Teardown: Keeping a 45-Minute Game 45 Minutes
In a short game, the box is the bottleneck. How to get from shelf to first turn fast.
Here's a problem short games have that long games don't. If setup and pack-down
take twelve minutes, that's a rounding error on a three-hour epic — and it's
more than a quarter of your evening on a 45-minute duel.
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Quick Answer
Overheads that are invisible in Scythe are painful in Duel of Meloch. The fix is making the box do the sorting for you, so setup is lifting components out rather than separating them.
The Maths of a Short Game
What overhead costs you
Setup + teardown
Share of a 120-min Scythe game
Share of a 45-min duel
5 minutes
4%
10%
10 minutes
8%
18%
15 minutes
11%
25%
A quarter of your session spent handling cardboard is the difference between
"let's play another" and "let's not bother". For games designed to be played
often, friction at the box is the thing that quietly kills the habit.
Where the Time Actually Goes
Duel of Meloch's component load is modest by Scythe standards, but the two
asymmetric sides mean you're separating things rather than just distributing
them:
Two different sets of player components — the Scythe side and the Expeditions side don't share a pile
Faction pieces, including any factions you bring in from your Scythe box
Resource tokens, which are small, numerous and easy to mix
Meloch cards and the Triumph Track, which need to be reachable by both players
The double-sided map, which needs deciding on before anything else is placed
None of that is slow if everything is already separated. All of it is slow if
you're picking tokens out of a communal tray.
Getting It Down to Two Minutes
BIGGEST WIN
Store components already separated
If each side's components live in their own compartment, setup becomes "put this tray in front of you, put that one in front of me". You're distributing, not sorting — and sorting is where the minutes go.
BIGGEST WIN
Lids matter more than compartments
An open tray is only sorted while the box stays flat. Tip it in a bag and you've undone the work. Covered trays are what make a compact box genuinely portable — which for a 45-minute game is most of the point.
EASY WIN
Decide the map side before you unpack
The board is double-sided. Choosing after you've started laying out components means moving things, and it's the most common self-inflicted delay in setup.
EASY WIN
Pack away in setup order
Everything you put away thoughtfully is time you don't spend next session. It costs nothing at the end of a game and pays every time you open the box.
EASY WIN
Keep imported Scythe factions with the duel
If you regularly bring a favourite faction over from your Scythe box, storing it in the Meloch box saves opening two games to play one. Just make a note so it doesn't go missing when Scythe next comes out.
Is an Insert Worth It Here?
For a game you intend to play often, the case is stronger than for a big box.
Counter-intuitive, but it follows from the maths above: the shorter the game,
the larger the proportional gain from removing overhead.
Add the portability angle and it gets clearer still. A compact duel is the
game you take to a café, a holiday or a friend's flat — and that's exactly the
situation where a box full of loose tokens becomes a box full of mixed tokens.