“Welcome agents. The consortium has deemed you apt to undergo your first transfer. Congratulations.”
The advent of time travel through Tachyon Insertion has changed our entire world. Alternate realities have appeared; time has become flexible and malleable. We have profited from an era of limitless prosperity... and discovered untold dangers. Alterations to the main temporal timeline are constantly putting our entire reality in jeopardy. As a member of the T.I.M.E. (Tachyon Insertion in Major Events) Agency, it's up to you to keep our reality intact by preventing those alterations.
In T.I.M.E. Stories, you and up to three friends travel between the future and past, experiencing alternate realities, solving mysteries, and fixing dangerous temporal faults. Created by the team at Space Cowboys, this cooperative board game challenges you to inhabit the bodies of other beings, discover the secrets of your location, communicate with the rest of your team, and win a race against the clock in order to save the known world.
The T.I.M.E Agency
As a T.I.M.E agent, you start every mission by reporting to the agency’s base, which you open up by spreading the base’s cards out on the board in a panorama. There, your demanding supervisor Bob Lyfen and an A.I. named Laura will brief you on your mission, including where in time and space you are going, what living receptacle your mind will inhabit while you are there, and what you are expected to accomplish. Then, you will step into your caisson: the immense capsule where your body rests as your mind travels.
All parts of your mission—the base, the receptacles, the locations you visit and the items you find there—are contained in the deck of cards constituting the scenario. The game board of T.I.M.E Stories is your caisson’s console, showing your current location and those of your fellow agents, a map of the area, and how many time units (TU) you have left in the mission. You also start your mission knowing about your receptacle’s abilities and equipped with any ammunition, food, or other supplies that you may need. In every mission, you’ll inhabit a different receptacle, perhaps an asylum inmate, news reporter, or priest of an ancient god. Every mission asks you to utilize a different range of skills, from smooth-talking and deftness to ranged combat or wielding magic.
No Time to Waste
During your transfer, the base is swept off of your console and your target location appears. To explore that location, choose one part of it, move your character pawn there, then take and read the back of the card depicting that space. You can also encounter a space with another player or even as an entire group. However, only characters in the space can see that card. The rest of the team is relying on you to tell them what you find—and that could be anything from a helpful ally, to a trap, to a terrifying monster. Some spaces lock you in, so you cannot move on until you’ve resolved whatever threat or problem lies there. Others are locked… until you gain the means to open them.
The Tachyon insertion process is taxing, temporary, and expensive. This means that you only have a limited amount of TU for each trip, or “run,” you make to another reality. The moment your TU expires, your team is pulled back to the reality of your caissons and the agency base, no matter how far into your mission you are. It takes one TU to move between spaces in a location, and one TU to roll the dice and test your receptacle’s characteristics when dealing with an obstacle or engaging in combat. All players act simultaneously, so in a single TU you can explore one space while another player fights an adversary or searches for items. Nevertheless, you’ll have to be very careful about how you spend your time.
Finding and fixing a temporal fault is no easy task. You’re piecing together a mass of clues, but there may also be complex puzzles to solve, codes to break, and enemies to win over. Completing your mission will likely take multiple runs, and you won’t be able to carry over most of the items or tokens you collect. You’ll have to begin in the first location each time, but you’ll be armed with the knowledge you’ve gained in your previous runs. The T.I.M.E Stories box is carefully crafted, enabling you to easily preserve the exact state of your game if you have to stop playing before you've repaired a temporal fault or even if you have to quit mid-run.
The Asylum
The first scenario of T.I.M.E Stories, included in the base set, takes you to the Beauregard Psychiatric Hospital in the suburbs of Paris. Like other asylums of the 1920s, it’s a rather pleasant place with well-lit rooms, comfortable furniture, and green gardens. Except that something is wrong. The inmates, even those whose symptoms do not include paranoia, are filled with fear. Murmurings of monsters, sorcery, and conspiracies abound. Once inside the asylum you, too, are an inmate with an incurable psychological condition. The Asylum offers eight characters for you to choose from, each with their own unique merits and derangements.
Anything you find in any location in T.I.M.E Stories may be a clue that will help you unravel the mysteries around you. There are also, however, red herrings, that will lead you down dangerous and profitless paths, eating up your time. As you learn more about the Beauregard Psychiatric Hospital, you’ll be an active participant in the story as it unfolds its secrets. Throughout The Asylum you’ll encounter things so bizarre that you may begin to doubt your receptacle’s sanity. After all, that person has been committed to a psychiatric hospital. Only through communicating with your teammates can you ensure that all the things you are seeing, hearing, and fighting are actually real.
There is no end to the times and realities in the future of T.I.M.E Stories. Travel into the past, repair the temporal fault, and save the future!
Ages 12+
Players 2 - 4
90 minutes per session
