For the last game in class we started playing T.I.M.E. Stories. Since I have already played through the first scenario my group played the second scenario, the Marcy Case, instead. In this game we are agents working to prevent changes to the timeline. To do so we control the minds of people present at that point in time, who each have their own strengths and weaknesses. Players then explore areas in different locations finding items or fighting enemies until they finish their mission.

The differing skills of the playable characters emphasize the need for teamwork. Similar to leadership teams in real life some people are more proficient at completing certain tasks than others. Having people work together makes that task finish faster, but also means the team can work on less things overall. Some of the rules for T.I.M.E. Stories also are related to leadership. Making a different player time captain each area allows everyone to experience being the leader. This also helps make sure all the players feel included throughout the game.

The main difficulty of the second case so far is how heavy a focus it has on combat. Each player has to manage a lot of tokens that represent things like ammo, on top of the usual item management. There is also a noise management that causes issues if you use guns too often during combat. This means we often resorted to using weaker melee attacks to not cause ourselves more problems later. Not only does this make us more likely to take damage during combat, but also makes it take longer in general. Since we were working under a strict time limit both in-game and in real life our careful strategies probably won’t work as well next week.