“The only reason for time is so that everything doesn’t happen at once.”
~ Albert Einstein
Here, where space is endless and time is precious, you face the challenges of a true space commander. From the bustling hub that is your control centre, you coordinate your planet’s production, transport, and demand, and travel to other planets to fulfil orders.
So the basics of Time’n’Space are simple. Create the 4 resources (cubes), create demand for the 4 resources (tokens) and deliver your resources to the other player’s home planet to fulfil their demands.
You return cubes to the supply and take the player’s tokens. At the end of the game, you take the resource tokens you have of one type and multiply it by the number of different players. Do this for all 4 types and that’s your score. Easy, although we did play the tutorial, there is more to the full game.
The game is played around sand timers and is played to an overall time limit. (12 mins in a basic game, 30 in a full game). You put the sand timer on a space, and when it runs out you take the action on that space. You have 2 sand timers so you need to manage both of them. At the same time, negotiate with the other players in your downtime.
There is no point in travelling across the board with your yellow cubes if the planet you travel to isn’t ready for your delivery…
But why would they help you?
Well, before scoring, any demand tokens you haven’t been able to use cancel out a demand token you earned. So not only do you have to make deliveries, you have to ensure people are delivering to you.
Very clever.
Time’n’Space Summary
Would be good if the sand timers were fair, some were a good 5+ seconds quicker than others… Digital timers are required I think, not sure how much that would bump up the price.
It’s frantic and fun. I’d like to play the full game where you upgrade buildings and stuff. But I’m not sure I want to play a tense timed game that lasts 30 minutes.
Jesta ThaRogue