Over the last several years, Time Travel Nexus has delivered hundreds of articles about time travel in TV, movies, books and comics. Today, though, we break new ground into an area that we have never covered – time travel in the world of gaming.
Within that term “gaming”, we’re including video games, roleplaying games (RPGs), board games and card games. Most of our readers are probably aware of the huge footprint video games have in the entertainment industry, and many may be aware of the niche gaming culture revolving around Dungeons & Dragons and other RPGs. As we take TTN into the gaming space, though, we’ll be focusing initially on “tabletop” games (board games and card games) in a new column called Tabletop Time Travel.
Tabletop Time Travel
Over the last fifteen years, the board and card game segments of the gaming world have really exploded. There were more than 2,000 new tabletop games produced in 2018 alone, with over a thousand being released in a single October weekend at the Essen Game Fair in Germany.
If your mental image of tabletop games revolves around Monopoly or Yatzee or Uno (released in 1935, 1956 and 1971 respectively), then it may be hard to imagine the richness and variety of tabletop gaming experiences that have become available in the decades since those older titles entered the public consciousness. Games have come a long way from simply moving a token around a board, using game mechanics that are more engaging, more imaginative and more fun.
As with other forms of entertainment, games that focus on a time travel theme make up a fraction of the overall selection. However, even given that niche status, there are well over a hundred games that we would like to explore in our new Tabletop Time Travel column. We’ll look at some that are winners, some that are outright clunkers, and some that were good tries but didn’t quite hit the mark. Ideally, this column will help tabletop gamers find more of those time travel “gems” and introduce some non-gamer time travel fans to the world of tabletop gaming.
We also aim to make these articles a resource for game designers, encouraging them to incorporate time travel themes and mechanics into their future efforts. For each game we discuss, we’ll be looking at how well they evoke the elements of good time travel fiction. Some games may provide great entertainment but not really deliver on the time travel theme. Conversely, there may be some lackluster games with good ideas at their core just waiting for the right game designer to reinvent or re-implement those ideas in a more successful way.
Share Your Time Travel Gaming Knowledge and Passion
While our new column will be discussing tabletop games, we’d certainly like to cover time travel video games and RPGs as well. If you’re an avid gamer in any of those three areas, we’re looking for new contributors who would like to bring their enthusiasm for gaming to our readers. Perhaps you love gaming but haven’t really explored games with a time travel theme, or you’re a huge time travel fan who wants to check out where that overlaps with gaming. Better yet, maybe you’ve been playing time travel games for years and this is an opportunity to share the love.
However you come to it, if you fancy writing about time travel games, drop us a line at contribute@timetravelnexus.com.
Sneak Peak – Time Breaker
We’ll be bringing you our first tabletop game review in the next day or two – a look at a new card game called Time Breaker, which publisher Looney Labs just delivered to game stores last week.
Here’s a quick look at the contents in the box. Stay tuned for more details!
Latest posts by Craig Richardson (see all)
- Josh Gad Organizes BTTF Reunion to Benefit Project Hope - May 19, 2020
- Contributor Spotlight: C.R. Berry and his new novel Million Eyes - March 9, 2020
- The time travel connection between the Beatles, JFK and the Loch Ness monster - January 30, 2020
Time travel board games? I can’t wait to read how some of these work.
Nice idea for a column, Craig! And the pictures are great. Do you really have all those? I have two that I’ll write about at some time in the future, if you like. One is a card game called Chrononauts, and the other is the box game, Time Stories. There will be a category for games in the new ITTDB, too!
There’s definitely a variety of approaches to representing time travel in the games. Some work better than others. Hopefully we can introduce you to some that you will enjoy.
Thanks for the feedback, Michael. Believe it or not, that bookshelf of games is in my house, and there were quite a few more that I couldn’t include in the photo. Chrononauts is one of my favorites, and one which captures the feel of time travel a bit better than some others in the category. Chrononauts also comes from Looney Labs, the publisher of Time Breaker, which I’ll be reviewing shortly.
I also have T.I.M.E Stories, along with the expansions, but while I’ve looked through the game components, I haven’t had a chance to play it with anyone. I’ve heard people really love it though, and it’s currently one of the most popular time travel games, second only to Anachrony. That’s one I’m really looking forward to exploring.
On the ITTDB, I’ll soon have the data collected for almost 300 games and expansions. Stay tuned!
That’s excellent, Craig! I’m hoping to have the input mechanism for films in the ITTDB set up by the end of the month, or at least by tax day (in the US). Once we’ve done a bit of testing there, adding input forms for the other kinds of time travel works should go pretty quickly.