Chrononauts: the Card Game of Time Travel

Complexity Medium Cost £17 Duration Medium Players 1-6 Producer Looney Labs Size Medium

Premise

Change the timeline so you can go home

Review

This clever card game has players skipping through time attempting to manipulate the timeline (indicated as an array of cards), collecting historical artifacts and trying to get to their home timeline.

This large card game (136 cards) has four main card types, identity cards, mission cards, 32 timeline cards and the main playing cards. Each player has a secret identity and mission allocated at the beginning of the game. The identity card specifies which timeline state will win the player the game. The mission card specifies various artefacts that the player must collect to win. Any player can also win if they end up with ten cards in their hand at any point.

The timeline reflects US oriented events from the time of Lincoln to present day. The timeline is composed of linchpins and ripplepoints. A typical lynchpin is the assasination of JFK. You can alter history by stopping his assassination, but this has knock on effects and can cause various ripplepoints to become paradoxes, i.e. the events fail to happen. So for example, the US may fail to get to the moon in 1969 because they are no longer inspired by the late JFK's dream. In order for history to be stable, these paradoxes have to be patched. Patching history gives the player a bonus card and potentially gets them closer to their target timeline. Some events cause massive changes (such as the assassination of Hitler) and the game ends with no winners if there are 13 active paradoxes on the table.

The game plays quite quickly and is reasonably quick to setup. Players of Fluxx may recognise some aspects, but it is more complex than Fluxx to play. The rulebooklet is slightly confusing and hinders initial learning, but the game is quite straightforward to play so this is not too serious. There are also rules for a simpler introductory game, as well as a solitaire version.

I've played the game with two, three and six players, and it seems slightly dull for small numbers. This game really comes into its own with at least four players, three was quite acceptable. At least the game duration seems reasonably predictable since eventually someone will get to 10 cards.

The game is slightly pricey for a card game, although you do get a lot of cards, but the quality of the cards is very good, and better than Fluxx. The game also lends itself to future expansion, by substituting a new timeline for example, athough it would be a complete deck replacement potentially.

Rating

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