Time control

A time control is a mechanism in the tournament play of almost all two-player board games so that each round of the match can finish in a timely way and the tournament can proceed.

For turn-based games such as chess, shogi or go, time controls are typically enforced by means of a game clock, which counts time spent on each player's turn separately. A player that spends more time than the time control allows is penalized, usually by the loss of the game. Time pressure (or time trouble or Zeitnot) is the situation where one player has very little time on their clock to complete their remaining moves.