In Chrononauts you travel through time, helping or hindering as you go…
Might as well grab a few priceless artefacts while you’re there!
In Chrononauts, each player becomes a time traveler, with a unique identity and a secret mission. During the game, players travel backwards and forwards through history, doing all those things people have always dreamed of using a time machine to do: Visiting the great moments of the past, peeking into the future, collecting up impossible artifacts and priceless works of art (at the moment just before history records their destruction), coming to grips with the paradoxes of time travel, and of course, changing pivotal events and altering the course of history itself.
This is a brief overview of the rules followed by my final summary.
Chrononauts Summary
Time travel, done well, makes for a great game. Shadow of Memories on Playstation 2 is a game I’ll always remember because it did it really well. You needed to go back in time to change things to help you in the present.
T.I.M.E Stories kinda does it. You get to replay the game several times with more and more information. This helps you during future playthroughs. You know locations, you know people, you know item locations etc
One mind-bending game is Legacy: Gears of Time. Here you need to play and try and control technologies through history. But for technologies to score you need to have their prerequisites filled. For example, the Internet wouldn’t be invented if computers haven’t been. Computers need electricity… etc It gets complicated!
Chrononauts is a ‘proper’ time travel game. You’re actually travelling through our real timeline changing actual events. Most people have had the “What if they’d killed Hitler?” conversation and this simulates that quite well.
It’s not great to have these events there, especially if you need to make them happen so you can win a game. But I always say we shouldn’t forget our history so we don’t make the same mistakes.
But as a game, it’s good fun. Similar to Fluxx in a way where things happen and hopefully they happen in your favour. But still good.
Jesta ThaRogue