Timer and votes

Both controls live in the facilitator dock at the bottom of the board, and both are visible only to the facilitator. Their effects are visible to everyone.

Start a timer

Select Timer in the dock.
Pick a preset: 3 min, 5 min, 10 min, or 15 min.

The countdown appears immediately in every participant’s top bar. It ticks from the moment you started it, so everyone sees the same remaining time — including someone who joins halfway through.

Under the last minute the chip turns red. At zero it changes to Time’s up with a struck-through timer icon, and screen readers are told once.

The timer never does anything else. It does not advance the phase, lock the board, or stop anyone typing — expiry is a signal to the room, and what happens next is your call.

Stop or restart

Select Timer again while one is running, then Stop. The chip disappears for everyone.

To change the length mid-run, stop the current timer and start a new one. There’s no extend action; a running timer’s duration is fixed.

Set the vote budget

Select Settings in the dock.
Use the − and + controls next to Votes per person.

The range is 0 to 99, and the default on a new board is 5. Each step saves immediately and reaches every participant.

Choosing a number

Roughly a third of the number of distinct issues on the board, rounded down. In practice:

Board	Budget
Under 15 cards	3
15–25 cards	5
Over 25 cards	7, or cluster first

Cluster before raising the budget. A big number on a duplicate-heavy board buys you ties, not clarity — see AI theme clustering.

Changing it mid-vote

Raising the budget gives everyone more votes to spend right away, including people who have already spent out.

Lowering it does not retract votes already cast. Someone who spent five before you lowered the budget to three keeps their five on the board; they simply have nothing left. If the number was clearly wrong, say so out loud rather than quietly correcting it — the totals are already skewed towards whoever voted first.

Setting a budget of zero

Setting Votes per person to 0 removes voting from the session: nobody can cast, and the budget pill disappears.

This turns the Review list into a plain board-order list rather than a ranked one, so it’s only sensible when the board is small enough to work through completely, or when the discussion order is being decided some other way.

What participants see

Control	Facilitator	Participant
Timer presets / Stop	Yes	No
Running countdown	Yes	Yes
Votes-per-person stepper	Yes	No
Remaining-budget pill	Yes	Yes
Vote and un-vote controls on cards	Yes	Yes

The budget pill is shown only while votes can be cast — the Vote phase on a guided board, any time on a Live board — and never on a closed board.