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Timed turns are designed to resolve issues of fairness where one player uses a greater amount of time to complete his or her turn than another player. In chess, for instance, a pair of stop clocks may be used in order to place an upper limit on the game length.

In exchange chess, four players on two teams play on two boards with each team taking one white and one black side. Any taken piece is given to a teammate, and can be placed on his board as a standard move (in any position that does not put his opponent in check). A common strategy is to gain a temporary material advantage, pass it on to a teammate, and then stop playing on one's own board—thereby allowing the teammate to use the advantage for many future moves on his board. To avoid this, players are often limited to ten seconds per move—with their opponent being allowed to remove one of the player's pawns from the board for each additional ten seconds consumed.

Puzzle games such as the Bejeweled series (2001-) often feature time limits that can be extended through skilled play.

The turn-base strategy video game Utopia (1982) featured an early example of timed turns.^[1] The early Ultima series of Role-playing video games were strictly turn-based, but starting with Ultima III: Exodus (1983), if the player waited too long to issue a command, the game would issue a "pass" command automatically, thereby allowing enemies to take their turns while the player character did nothing. A similar timed-turns system was used in Final Fantasy III (1990). Further, many browser-based games allocate a number of turns that can be played within a certain period of time, called a tick.

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