T.I.M.E Stories (Spoiler Free) First Impressions

In T.I.M.E Stories, go back in time and inhabit the body of someone to prevent a disaster…

Quantum Leap: The Boardgame

The T.I.M.E Agency protects humanity by preventing temporal faults and paradoxes from threatening the fabric of our universe. As temporal agents, you and your team will be sent into the bodies of beings from different worlds or realities to successfully complete the missions given to you. Failure is impossible, as you will be able to go back in time as many times as required.

This will be spoiler-free so I won’t mention anything that isn’t in the rulebook…

The first thing I noticed when I opened the VERY white box is how VERY white everything is. The second thing I noticed was a message on the back of the sealed pack of cards that says “Do not open until you have read the rulebook” on the back.

Don’t ignore this, it’s very important.

So the basics of gameplay are as follows…

Gameplay

You will be given a few cards to give the background of the story you will be going into. You are also given a receptacle or character card of the body you will inhabit as well as a number of Time Units (TUs) you will have to spend during the game.

Players have a plan view map of the area they’re in and you get a starting location. You set up a deck of item cards in numerical order and put the other cards aside.

The area you’re told to start in will reveal a panorama with several different areas.

Each player puts their big chunky token over the location card they want to look at. When you look at the back there are several things that can happen such as you get to take an item and it’ll give you the item number. Maybe you get a bit of story, or you see a picture of something or meet someone etc. Trying to be generic not to give anything away.

Locations

In these cases you can only show people at the same location card as you what you see, you have to describe it to everyone else. By describing I mean to describe, not read the card out.

In T.I.M.E Stories, you as players, are telepathically linked so imagine how you’d describe something you see to everyone in your group. Do that.

Challenges

Some locations involve challenges based on your receptacles stats which involve dice rolls and some have a padlock which means you can’t leave the location until you win (or lose).

Challenges are based on shield tokens put in play and you roll dice, successes eliminate shields, and skulls rolled on the dice may trigger bad things.

Some locations are locked and have a certain symbol on the back of the card. You can enter these locations once you have that matching symbol token that you can get in a variety of ways.

Time Units

Taking action in locations costs a TU, as does moving to a different location. You roll a dice to determine the random number of TU’s lost when changing location.

If you go to 0 TU’s you lose and you read out a little story. Win and you read another card (although I haven’t read that one yet).

If you fail you reset the game (except for some item cards you can carry forward, these are generally items that give you knowledge of something, not something physical you can carry. After all, the world has reset, not your memory) and go again until you win.

T.I.M.E Stories Summary

I LOVE this GAME. (It is a game, just a different take on it. But it is more than an activity and the “Game” part I enjoy) It’s like Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective but you don’t mind failing.

In Sherlock, each scenario can only be played once. But, you also need to be as efficient as possible to get the most points. But if you’re too efficient to the point of not doing enough you ‘fail’ and ruin that scenario for yourself…

In T.I.M.E Stories, you can take all the time you have (literally) to do whatever you want, sometimes with hilarious consequences. Eventually, the ‘Path to Victory’ to will be clear and you can get to the end. (I assume, I haven’t won a scenario yet :))

I didn’t know it until I played it, but this is the game I’ve been waiting for. Also, with a Scenario every 3 months I’ll hopefully get plenty of enjoyment out of this system for quite some time.

You just need 3 people who feel the same!

Jesta ThaRogue