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I knew T.I.M.E Stories would differ from standard board game fare when I sat down to my first play and saw that one of my character choices was a young girl... with a cannibal fetish. In a 1920's French insane asylum. Where a temporal rift was in danger of being opened.

"Kids," I told my two older children as my board gaming group arrived, "better head up to bed."

This was the right call. The included story scenario in the T.I.M.E Stories base set features—not to give too much away—twisted medical experiments, a nude woman, monsters, mental patients, anxiety attacks, sinister nurses, beatings, and even some light cocaine use.

Sound pulpy? You bet. Derivative? Somewhat. Dark? Oh yeah. But T.I.M.E Stories was also a blast to play. Given that it's a $50 game ($38 at Amazon) you will likely play just once, T.I.M.E Stories can only justify its existence by delivering a compelling experience. And despite the inherent limitations of its systems and a few flaws in the narrative, it gave our gaming group one of the year's most unique experiences at the table.

Dare to be different















T.I.M.E Stories wants to be different—heck, it purposely leaves off a period after the final E in T.I.M.E despite the word being an acronym. Think of it as role-playing, video game style (with lots of visual art and a constrained palette of actions), but done with cardboard and cards.

T.I.M.E Stories is not, properly speaking, a "game" at all but a full game system that includes the first episode, called "Asylum." (The team behind the game have produced a designer kit [.zip file] so fans can create their own scenarios.) Other announced modules will tell stories far apart in time and space: a magical fantasy world, ancient Egypt, even 1992 America. In each, you serve as a temporal agent sent to inhabit a local host's body in order to stop a rift in the space-time continuum and thus Save The World (tm).

Traditional role-playing systems like Dungeons & Dragons require a dungeon master to run the scenario, they tell stories that exist only in the mind, and they offer ludicrous amounts of (apparent) choice. If a dark elf in your party wants to deal with an orc attack by curling up into a ball and barking like a dog, she can do that—and the dungeon master has to decide how to handle things. Personally, I find this lack of limits a bit tiring, so T.I.M.E Stories' emphasis on ditching the dungeon master, telling a more directed story with a huge stack of lavishly illustrated cards, and constraining choices and movement into more regulated forms had me intrigued. The system also adds a countdown timer in which actions and movement burn "time units," forcing members of the group to split up tasks and lending urgency to the whole endeavor.

My main concern was whether a stack of cards could really deliver a narrative group experience worth working through. T.I.M.E Stories' "decksploration" model largely succeeds thanks to some nifty mechanics that allow cards to operate as locations, items, maps, and NPCs. Cardboard "state tokens" also track progress throughout the game, allowing a team to (say) acquire a key in one room and then return to a previous room, where they can now open a locked door or chest.

Play is largely built around "locations," which are linked sets of cards that are spread out in order on the game board. The top side of the cards shows a multi-card panoramic view of the entire room or area; each player can choose which card to investigate. Flipping over the card reveals a new image, often a quite different close-up of the view seen on the front. Card text may advance the story, provide a clue, or set a "test" (a fight or a skill check). Players are not allowed to show the back of the card to anyone not currently sharing the space with them, though they can describe what the card says in detail.

This last mechanic struck me as bizarre and fiddly—until we began to play. Say that your party is in one room of the asylum, where you witness someone painting a picture but can't make out what it is. One of your players goes to investigate, while the others spread out to talk to various other oddballs. The flip side of the card shows the painting from a new angle, and it's clear that something about the image on the canvas is significant. But because your party member looking at the painting can't simply show everyone else the card, the effect is much like moving about in a real room. One can only see certain things from certain perspectives.

Exploration really feels like exploring—and it's on you to dig up clues found in images or to describe monsters or to relay gossip to the team. Unlike in some co-op games, where everyone can strategize about every move, this system puts a bit more responsibility on individual shoulders.

Fights and skill checks happen with high-quality custom dice and cardboard shields that represent difficulty or hit points. Small cardboard chits come in different colors and can represent whatever the story needs—bullets, cocaine needles, mana, etc. Items are handled through cards, as are maps and characters and mission objectives and failures. The cards can even provide temporary NPC companions. Everything is modular, designed to work with any conceivable story.

And it's beautiful. If T.I.M.E Stories isn't one of the most attractive games of the year, then I have clearly missed out on some phenomenal artwork. The scenario cards are large enough to pack some visual punch, especially when you need to bring them close to your face before flipping them over (to prevent other players from seeing). Several of the dripping-with-atmosphere scenes actually gave me a start.

As a system, then, it all works well and the production values are high. But the real question is whether the story delivers—because this is a one-shot deal.

Cardboard stories



Forget the default gaming model in which each new play begins from a "fresh start" and aims for infinite replayability. T.I.M.E Stories offers you a single narrative that's essentially a giant puzzle. Once you solve that puzzle, there's little reason to go back.

Completing the Asylum module took our group three to four total hours over two evenings. According to the game's final tally, we were a bit pokey. But no one regretted our approach; given that you're going to play this story once, what's the benefit to speed-running through? Enjoy the scenery, explore the grounds, find the clues, and have a good time.

Whether the length is worth the cost is a personal choice. As someone with kids, a job, and limited free time, I currently value shorter, high-quality experiences that leave an impression over those that might offer more "playtime per buck." For me, T.I.M.E Stories justifies its asking price. As my friend Doug, who owns 150 board games and lives for this kind of thing, put it after pushing back from the table, "That's definitely one of my top ten titles for the year."

That's not to say the story was perfect. As noted above, the Asylum module's pastiche verges almost on parody. Character development is non-existent. The designers love crazy dead ends. (The most difficult fight in the game, by a factor of 10x, led only to a pointless location from which we had to turn around. Boo.) The ending comes absurdly fast. Huge plot questions are never even answered.

Perhaps most critical—and something that one can see only in retrospect—the story is thin. It feels thick and meaty at the beginning, with newspaper clippings and paintings and mysterious whispers and riddles and clues and strange beasts, like you're just settling in with a good novel. But the effect is illusory, and it works only because you really don't need how far from the end you are. And then, at page 25, the story's over. (This seems to be a real limitation of a card-and-art heavy system; you can't actually get much text on these cards, and scaling up the card count to cover more ground would significantly increase total project costs. The game settles instead for copious doses of atmosphere and theme and suggestion, with a few clever puzzles thrown in.)

And yet...

We had so much fun exploring, fighting, and puzzling—right up until the abrupt ending—that no one thought too much about any of this. Despite flaws, T.I.M.E Stories made us feel like temporal agents exploring a strange place in strange bodies, living out a tale that proved to be more short story than novel, and doing so with a simplified system that needs no dungeon master and lavishly illustrates its adult-oriented story.

If it doesn't sound good to you, you're probably better served by non-narrative board games or by narrative-heavy RPGs. But if you're intrigued, pick this one up and prepare for one of the most unique gaming experiences of 2015.

As for me, I've already got the second scenario, The Marcy Case, on my Christmas list.