T.I.M.E. Management

There will be no spoilers for the first part of this!

T.I.M.E. Stories had me hooked from the first time a friend at my local game shop started spewing nothing but good things about it. Of course, that sort of hype also had me a little skeptical, and I definitely gave it my best over-critical eye. But overall, I walked away from the table quite pleased with my experience, and very excited to have had the pleasure of playing through what clearly was a work of love from the developers.

The key thing to understand about T.I.M.E. stories is written within the first couple paragraphs of the rulebook. The developers specifically tell you their feel, which is that their number one goal was to capture all the goodness of an old school dungeon crawl.  And they did.

Unfortunately, my group had a rough start.  The rulebook is very confusing; not that there were difficult mechanics, but because the rules don't actually explain anything about what the purpose of the game's mechanics are.  The book was trying to be vague and hidden, shrouded in mystery and wonder, but ended up leaving us having to read it a couple times over when our questions were not answered.  Throughout the game, a large amount of questions came up that required looking on the internet for answers. Luckily, we weren't the only ones, and there's a few places online that explain things in more detail (and people are very generous about spoiler warnings, which was awesome).

Past the lack of explanations, though, lies a wonderful team game.  The core "mechanic" revolves around a "time" count, which is more or less the number of actions the players get each turn.  The idea is to solve the mystery before time runs out, so that means it's a game of efficiency.  What makes it a great 'team' game is that there's two simple dynamics to exploring.  First, you want to spread out in order to cover as much ground as you can in one turn.  But second, you want to stick together on the same spots in order to overcome challenges more quickly.  This creates the engine for all of the discussion and planning that the game brings.

As a co-op game, however, it is just as prone to "Quarterbacking" as all of the rest.  QBing is the term used to describe a single player dominating and directing the game play.  Luckily, the game, it's story, and it's design are just complex enough that I doubt that too many groups will have a problem. It happens though, especially with the puzzle-like nature of the design.  It wouldn't feel very much like a team win if one person consistently blasts through each challenge on their own.

To their credit, the game attempts to mitigate QBing, by calling on classic roleplaying character "roles". There's the fighters, the talkers, and the doers, each with their own unique abilities that at least let the person in control feel like their helping in the way they should.  Even then, almost everyone can contribute to any challenge, meaning when the group's stuck doing a single task, no one is useless (almost).  And, during basic exploration, everyone is encouraged not just to read directly from their secret cards, but to tell the party as they would coming back from a scouting trip.

Let's jump back to the main mechanic: time. Unlike other games that use some sort of time-tracker as a co-op show-stopper (such as Shadows of Brimstone or Mice & Mystics), T.I.M.E. Stories doesn't feel cheap.  With the other mentioned games, the randomness of that timer always feels random and uncontrollable.  This means some games end up in a loss simply because luck would have it that way. But T.I.M.E. Stories is much more predictable. Yes, it has a random die roll as well, but the average is a HUGE bell curve around "2".  This lets the team plan exactly what they can do in the amount of time given.  Of course, just a little bit of random that their die gives actually shakes up the planning quite beautifully. Since there's multiple choices of paths in the dungeon, it can vary just enough to not be certain of failure or success.

The core difference about the time tracker is really that it isn't just an immediate loss.  Instead, you just lose out on going further on your current run.  But the game isn't over! Simply head back, resupply your team, and prepare to go on another run!  Of course, the goal is to beat the game in the fewest runs as possible, but there's no staggering defeat if you fail.  In fact, the game pretty much expects you to go through at least two runs.

Unfortunately, the game's other dice are not great.  Even though I love 3-2-1 dice, the action dice in T.I.M.E. Stories actually boils down to about 50/50 chance of success for any given die.  For scraping away at challenges, this means there's a huge factor in the dice.  While it tends to even out, when it doesn't, it feels like a very cheap way of losing to an otherwise pure puzzle/economic management game.

The game does a good job of minimizing randomness in other ways, however, and often provides you with multiple choices on how to proceed: some risky, some not.  Though the exploration portion of the game is also widely random, all of the outcomes make some sort of logical sense, and the game rarely if ever breaks immersion.  Choosing which space to explore just by looking at the beautiful artwork is actually a very compelling part of the game!

There's two main things I've taken away.  First, is good dungeon design (see more below in the spoilers section).  Second, that to get a really good feel for a "team" game, you have to both have situations where everyone is helping by doing their own thing (spread out), but then also scenarios where you're together (e.g. combat).  I believe Shadowrun actually does this very well, and I have a new respect for it due to the perspective T.I.M.E. Stories has given me.

Overall 9/10

***SPOILERS AHEAD***
DO NOT READ IF YOU HAVE NOT PLAYED T.I.M.E. STORIES

Welcome, fellow T.I.M.E. agents. I hope you had a successful first adventure (or more if you've continued to play)! No one stood on the pentacle, right?  Please tell me you didn't help summon the demon from hell!  Okay good, that's a relief.

I loved this dungeon.  It brought back the best of memories, while continuing to provide a unique challenge all the way through.  Taking a step back from it after the dust settled, I realized how brilliant the design actually was.  They had all the goodness:

* Multiple clues leading to multiple paths
From the very start, you get clues about the final puzzle, and they're with you all the way through. That type of foreshadowing is excellent in keeping the players hooked and engaged, even when presented with totally new challenges.

* Didn't get overwhelming
At the same time, nothing ever got so drawn out or side-tracked that the players lost sight of their original goal, or the clues that they've gathered so far.  A lot of the rooms had usually ~1 piece of excellent information, 1-2 extra fluff, and 1-2 ways forward (through items).

* Multiple paths that could be accessed from different points
Okay, it was very weird to have the situation markers determine when/where you've been, especially because they aren't very rememberable, but there wasn't that many, so it wasn't a huge issue.  But it was very neat to arrive at the final pentacle two different ways, and seeing how, if you didn't know, you could wander right back into the doc's office!

* Multiple paths leading to the final location
This was so excellent.  On our final run, we had all of the pieces, we had solved the puzzle, we just needed to get there.  But there's options, and they aren't for sure.  First, you can fight your way through the catacombs, but that's risky.  Or, you can follow the path through the doc's office, get the trap door key, and finally make your way down into the tomb, but that's a lot of location switches. Finally, there's the rare but very neat chance of pick-pocketing the key to the front gate off the cooks, allowing you to convince the guards at the gate and let you out into the gardens.  I don't think the last option is actually very viable, but it's at least a very entertaining thought.  We eventually opted to go to the kitchen anyway, getting the meat, so that we could just fight our way down the catacombs (we brought the heavy fighters for our last run).

* False leads, but making them sort of obvious
That guy with the plunger.  Whooooo boy we argued about him for a while.  Thank goodness we decided to write him off haha!  Love it.  Unfortunately, we wasted the end of a run fighting our way through the deepest tunnel, only to come out the other end and... FUCK.

* One of the most straight forward yet incredibly tricky super-side quests.
Taking some theories from the recent "legacy" games, the fact that you could have gotten a next-game-bonus item is extremely compelling, even though it's a little wishy-washy.  Unfortunately, the question of whether we were cheating or not came up a lot, and this is one area were we went: but but but... we could just go back for one more run, no?

The dungeon design was excellent, the story was fun, the clues were great and the puzzles challenging.  The only thing that erked me at the end was that the final puzzle was extremely meta-gaming (read item 19), which broke the immersion of actually figuring out something that the evil characters in the game were trying to figure out.  On the bonus side, they can't (or shouldn't) use that trick again, so we can hopefully look forward to the other stories being more "in fiction".

I'm happy to hear your thoughts and experiences, just please remember to post SPOILER warnings if your posts contain them.  Cheers!