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Well, sure – but it's never too early to get a jump on what's coming in the year ahead, especially if that's, y'know, your job. So for those who find all the talk about Spiel 2014 releases old hat, here's an advance look at a title that should see release — for real, finally! — at Gen Con 2015 in August from French designer Manuel Rozoy and French publisher Space Cowboys. The game's title is Time Stories, and it's a quasi-role-playing game with a Eurogame feel, a puzzle-solving aspect, and a choose-your-own-adventure heart – at least in one game scenario.
The gist of the game is that you and your fellow players are agents at a time-management bureau of some sort, not because you're teaching business executives how to better manage their time at the office, but because you're managing the flow of time itself. You need to spot potential rifts, whether accidental or caused purposefully, and keep time flowing as it should.
In the scenario I played with three others at Spiel 2014, we were sent back to ancient Egypt, with us inhabiting the shells of people alive during that time, which gave us particular strengths and weaknesses. Throughout the four playings of this scenario, I was an ex-soldier who had certain connections that he could make use of depending on where he traveled, and while I had combat ability to spare compared with everyone else in our group, my other abilities were feeble, leading everyone to despair whenever I had to do something other than, say, placing one foot in front of another. Another player shifted bodies multiple times throughout the night, inhabiting a nursemaid, a princess, and several other shells. Sure, you could think of them as people, but you're only going to be inhabiting them a few hours at a time, so you don't want to get too close, y'know?
Everything you do, though – entering a new location, moving within the location, using certain tools, attempting to take some physical action – takes time, and if you run out of time, your team pops out of their shells and returns to the present day. (In other words, you lose. You can also lose if you all die, as death sends you back to the present day.) The cool thing about the game is that you really feel like a time traveler in the sense that you can play again immediately (which we did for a total of four games over four hours), returning to the exact same starting point, while also remembering all the information that you discovered previously. It's a board game version of Groundhog Day or 12 Monkeys – i.e., time travel done right, with you carrying over information and reacting to what you already know while everyone else is repeating the same things they did previously (because, of course, they're not repeating these same things from their perspective but rather doing the thing they're supposed to do at that time). When you return to a world, you can explore new paths, revisit familiar locations to see what you missed previously, and (ideally) do things faster and more efficiently because you know which paths might prove fruitless.
As you might expect, the game system is tailor-made for expansions as all you need for a new scenario is a new set of location and character cards and rules for anything else that changes in the game. (Well, that and an incredible amount of playtesting time.) Bam! We're in the U.S. Wild West ensuring the transcontinental railway gets finished. Bam! We're aiding Magellan on his circumnavigation of the globe. Bam! We're in 2014 and are strong-arming Eric to focus on the games released at Spiel and all the other stuff in the more immediate future. Okay, this last one might not represent a development that threatens the world with temporal rifts, but you never know. Guess I'll keep going with the game demonstration videos from Spiel 2014 in the next few posts in order to keep the universe functioning smoothly. You'll thank me some day!
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