Tag Archives: T.I.M.E. Stories

GOTW: T.I.M.E. Stories

This week, we played a narrative mystery game called T.I.M.E. Stories. In the game you play the part of a team of time travelers sent by an organization to stop a temporal fault from occurring. Our team consisted of four players, each of which took over a receptacle (a host body) in order to explore a specific moment in time and space to stop the fault from forming. The hosts you can play as all have different strengths and weaknesses as well as abilities that can come in handy throughout a run. As a team you explore several locations across a map, fighting off enemies and solving puzzles. However, time is limited, as the organization that sent you there can only hold the link for so long before you are forced back into reality. Many roles have special abilities that can be used throughout the game to gain the upper hand for a player’s given team. The goal of the game is to successfully complete the mission in as few runs as possible, by solving the many puzzles found throughout the map.

Our story started right before we were to be connected to our hosts, and we were briefed on what we needed to do. Our team is sent back to a mental health asylum in 1921. My character was Marie Bertholet. The other characters we had were Felix Bonnunfant, Edith Jolibois, and Mademoiselle Doume. So, we set out to explore the asylum, finding keys, breaking into lockers, and trying (failing) to steal the key off a doctor in the kitchen. Playing as Marie gave me some advantages, especially when it came to the speech skill. I was able to turn any speech roll I made into a minor success. Using her to speak proved very useful in many situations throughout the asylum. However, there was one scenario with a particular orderly that was not so successful. Overall, our team seemed to move quite well, cooperating with each other, and noting down anything we found important as we went. None of us lost any health during the first part of the game, more so having issues with time as we often rolled high on the time lost dice. Our team actually worked quite well together, collectively coming to decisions, and helping each other out as much as possible. We found the secret passageway after murdering Dr. Hyacinth. By the end of the session, we had gathered two pages of a book. Unfortunately, we are near the end of our time loop, and likely will lose everything next week. However, with the knowledge we gained this week, our team should be able to proceed quite easily. I am excited to see what happens.

The hardest part of the game was deciding which options were important with the time we had remaining. While our group was very good at gathering and using information and items, we often ran into issues that cost us precious time points. Our team actually did really well with working together and sharing authority. Our abilities were actually spread pretty evenly, allowing us to prioritize where each of us should go ahead of time so that we worked as efficiently in a new location as we could. I actually believe that that is a way each of us showed leadership. While each of us took on the Time Captain role at least once, we each collaborated and based our decisions on where our strengths lie. The only time other than that that I saw leadership come into effect was deciding where to travel next. Typically, one person would propose moving locations, and then we would all agree on a location.

I loved this game so far. I love games that dig deep into lore, and this one definitely dug deep. I also thought that the mechanics really complimented it well. I loved the exploration aspect as well as the collaborative play. We all had the same goal, which I have not seen much in games I have played recently. I liked the risks we all took, as we all were curious to discover every little secret in the game. This both lead us to learn a lot in our first run, while also being something that cost us a lot of time (I am looking at you moon step man). This being said, this game definitely feels like a game you can only play once. I know there are other decks out there as well, so that makes me a bit tempted to purchase it for myself and play it with my friends. I think my friends Xavier, Katie, Korben, and Roai would love this type of game. They love narrative based games just as much as I do.

T.I.M.E Stories Reflection – Week 2

On April 20th our class had a choice to either dive deeper into the adventures of T.I.M.E Stories or to participate in free play. Although my group and I encountered many struggles during our first session the week before, we chose to challenge ourselves and continue playing T.I.M.E Stories. The scenario we played was the Asylum, and at the beginning of the round we had the opportunity to choose which character we would be playing with. None of us were able to see each character’s conditions and characteristics before choosing them, but after failing our mission once we were able to choose a different character to play with if we weren’t satisfied with our current conditions. The characters we used for the second round were: Madeleine – Anxiety attacks (me), Marie – Erotomania, Edith – Cannibalism, and Felix – Paranoia. I found this to be a very good combination of characters, especially during combat. During this game our party explored multiple rooms and fought some monsters while trying to find hints and leads on how to complete our mission. During the second round we only visited the rooms where we knew there would be items and passages that we needed to get in order to access other areas. Since we took a lot of notes on the previous round, this was not an issue. 

The hardest part about playing this game was to use all the information we gathered to solve the pentacles puzzle. Even though we took notes on what we deemed important, our group had a hard time figuring out what was missing. This might have happened because while we took notes on a lot of things, we failed to notice the smaller details that ended up being the key to solving the puzzle. This was definitely the longest and most complex game that we have played so far, however it was also the most fun and challenging. Being able to explore on our own accord and slowly putting the pieces of the story together was great. We had a good dynamic and we had fun trying to take different paths than the ones we had used before. 

This game ties into leadership in ways that the other games we played didn’t as much. Because there are many different mechanics and rules in T.I.M.E stories, we needed everyone to be attentive and for communication to be clear and effective. Because of that, each of us took on a leadership role and made sure that the aspect of the game that we were focusing on was taken care of. Note taking, collecting items, choosing the best paths for our group, strategizing which characters would be better together were some of the aspects that were divided between us, and this helped us work together as a well organized team. After playing this game I believe that my family would enjoy playing together because it takes a while and it is very engaging. I think that it could definitely become a regular part of game nights since there are many different scenarios. 

Game of the Week Blog Reflection (For Class on 4/21/2022): T.I.M.E Stories Part 2

During our last meeting, my group from the prior week got together to finish our game of T.I.M.E. Stories. T.I.M.E. Stories is a cooperative card-based game that requires the players to travel throughout time to uncover and prevent faults in time itself. Your team works together by possessing the bodies of people present at the time and location in question and using their abilities to investigate the area and find the source of the fault. To do this, your team will have to spend Temporal Units, a resource that determines how long your team can remain in that time. Once it runs out, you will be forced to start over, only keeping certain cards and the knowledge you gained during your first “loop”. For this session, our team started on our second of these loops, and used the knowledge we gained from our previous loop to try and locate the source of the fault.

Over the course of this second session, I would say that the most difficult thing that we ran into would be the final puzzle we had to solve before we could enter the last area of the game. Without spoiling the puzzle itself, the main difficulty of this puzzle came from the multiple layers that were involved in it. Our group had to gain knowledge from several, seemingly unrelated clues spread throughout the entirety of the scenario, before finally reaching a specific location. Once at that location, our group had to use all of these clues to finally piece together the solution to the puzzle so that we could advance and complete the story. While this puzzle was certainly difficult, it was very satisfying to piece it all together, and was only possible because our group was working together and combining our knowledge of everything we had seen up until that point. 

However, what could this particular puzzle teach us about leadership? For one thing, our group was only able to finally reach the solution to the puzzle by combining all of our viewpoints and our ideas of what the various pieces of the puzzle could be referring to. Not one of us knew the entire solution, even with all of the clues, and we needed to combine our knowledge and logic to reach the solution. Similarly, a leader could not possibly succeed on their own, they need to work together with their team in order to reach  their goal. Every member’s viewpoint and skills are just as important to the team as any others, a fact that a good leader must always remember if they want to lead their team to success.

Overall, I definitely enjoyed my time with T.I.M.E. Stories. I was a bit uncertain of just how much I would enjoy it after running into issues with the rules during the prior week, but now that our team was more certain of what we were doing, it was a lot of fun! Piecing together that last puzzle was certainly the greatest highlight of our time with the game, and the journey to finally reach that solution featured a lot of interesting scenarios and discoveries that kept us glued to the game. I would definitely be interested in trying out the second story in the T.I.M.E. Stories series just to see if it has any puzzles similar to this one, along with whatever scenarios it might involve.

Game of the Week Blog Reflection (For Class on 4/14/2022): T.I.M.E Stories

In our most recent meeting, our class met to start playing T.I.M.E. Stories, a cooperative, card-based game that sees a team of player’s traveling to a specific point in time to uncover and prevent a fault in time itself. You and your teammates will be placed into the bodies of people present at that time and location, each of which will have their own specialties and limitations that affect how the team performs. Bear in mind though that every action you take to investigate the area, interacting with cards, traveling to new locations, completing tests and participating in combat, will require you to spend Temporal Units, a shared resource that determines how long you can remain in this time. The base cards at the start of the game will inform you just how many cards Temporal Units your team begins with, and reaching zero Temporal Units will force you to flip over a failure card before resetting the game and starting over. However not all items will be reset if this happens, and your own knowledge of the events can be kept. 

However, the most difficult part of playing this game for our team was not any of these mechanics specifically, but rather the rules of the game itself. T.I.M.E. Stories is a very complex board game, with a lot of various moving parts that make it quite intimidating for first-time players such as ourselves, and the rule itself does not do a good job of explaining things. There were multiple times while we were playing where we were uncertain of how something functioned, or of how a particular mechanic worked. The rule was unfortunately not very helpful on this mark, it feels poorly organized, and some things that you would expect to be explained in the rulebook are actually only explained on cards, meaning that you won’t actually be able to fully understand how the game plays until you start playing it yourself.

With this in mind though, what does T.I.M.E. Stories have to do with leadership? Personally, I believe that one of T.I.M.E Stories best contributions to leadership is its emphasis on teamwork. Given that Temporal Units are in such short supply, the players are heavily encouraged to strategize before deciding anything, determining which team members should interact with which cards. Sharing information is also critical if the players hope to advance through the game, as clues acquired at one location are possibly required to complete tasks later on. Similarly, if a leader hopes to accomplish any of their team’s goals, they need to ensure that their team members are working together and cooperating effectively. If a team does not work well together, progress on whatever project or goal they may be working towards will slow to halt, so a leader must ensure that their team members compliment each other.

Overall, I do think I had fun with T.I.M.E. Stories, though the issues that we ran into with the rules certainly did make it more stressful than I expected it to be at times. Now that our team has a better understanding of the rules and how they fit together, I would like to see if we could make more progress next week, as we saved our game at the end of our first “run”. I would also be interested in trying out some of the other Stories that have been created for the game, as one group in particular was actually playing the second Story, and it appeared to function very differently from the Story that our group was playing.