IMHO this would be a much better way to structure your game. You should build it using a server/client architecture. However hosts is running both a server and a client, all other players are just clients.

The servers are just dumb front-ends. They send their moves to the server and visualize the response.

The server runs the game itself and validates all moves that are sent to it (i.e. is the move allowed?). The only time that matters is the servers time, and only the server needs to keep track of this. At the start of a players move the server will record a timestamp and then message the player to say they can move. When the player has finished moving they will message back to the server their move, and the server will know if they are within time by measuring the time difference between it's first instruction to play and the response of the move being carried out.

If a client fails to send it's move to the server within the timelimit, the server sends out an 'out of time' message (or something to that effect) and simply ignores any illegal moves (moves taken when a player can't actually move).

With this structure none of the clients will need to keep track of the time. Only the server will keep track of time and will do this based solely on the timestamps it's recording for the messages it's sending and receiving.


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