Tag Archives: TIME Stories

Trying Out T.I.M.E Stories

This game seems to have so much potential and I would love to play it again, but hopefully with people that have played it before. My favorite thing about this game is the artwork and the mystery aspect. I felt like I was somewhat in a video game or a movie. I wish that I would have watched more educational videos on how to play before playing because I would have had a better understanding. The people in my group also did not seem to have a good understanding of how to play, and with such a complex game, it’s important for everyone to be on the same page. This game taught me that it’s important to not rely on other people to know what is going on because someone has to take on the leadership responsibility/ role and instruct others in that situation. If there’s not someone who understands enough to explain, everyone is just lost. I think we figured the game out to the best of our ability, and what missions we did complete were fun. There are still a few questions that I have about how to play, most of which have to do with the tokens and symbols.

Another question that I had while playing the game was since there are 4 people playing, what do people do if they’re in the same room? Who gets to pick up the card with the clue on it and who gets to receive the object? I also feel unsure about what the different characters really mean and how our character choice impacts the story. I know each character has strengths and weaknesses but we didn’t use the characters enough to fully understand how that impacts things. Lastly, I think the end of the game confuses me as well. It sounds like there’s a built-in story so I would like to know what about the game is different each time it’s played and what incentive there is to play the game again if returning players already know what happens. I definitely still have a few questions but hopefully, those could be answered if I ever have the opportunity to play the game again. 

To be honest, I don’t think most of my friends would be able to sit through an entire game of Time Stories, I think it would be too complicated and too much of a time commitment. However, my friend Josh might enjoy the game because he enjoys video games and I feel like this game demonstrates some video game-like qualities. Josh also likes to fully commit to things he’s doing and doesn’t like giving up and also does not like losing, so I feel like he would be more likely to sit through this game than other people because of the challenge. At the end of the day, I hope that I get another opportunity to play this game and I was a little bummed that my group did not want to continue playing. 

Game of the Week Blog Reflection Week 12: T.I.M.E. Stories Week 2

For the last game in class my group finished the Marcy Case in T.I.M.E. Stories. We started off by exploring the other starting locations we hadn’t been to yet which finished off our first and second loop. We had a lot of events in our second loop that wasted a lot of time so we had to wait for trying to win until the third loop. Even with the large amount of info we had we still made several mistakes in the third loop and barely made it to the end. We also had to guess on the final puzzle but luckily got it right and won the game.

As I mentioned last time T.I.M.E. Stories reflects the importance of teamwork in leadership. My character for example was weak in combat, but was the only one good at searching for items. There was also a few mistakes we made that with better communication might have been avoided. As the only one who had played the first case I knew this series likes to troll the players. So I probably should have been more adamant about not pressing the red button that we had no clue what it would do. The result wasn’t as bad as it probably sounds but it easily could have been avoided.

A large challenge for finishing the game was the lack of clues. We knew for the final puzzle only one of the four options was correct but we only had two clues to solve it. At best the clues eliminated two options but didn’t seem to help narrow down between the final two. With very little time in class to make a decision we couldn’t come to agreement and ended up just guessing correctly. We were lucky to even have the two clues that we did and I couldn’t find any others that we missed. I would have preferred some more hints to piece the solution together.

Game of the Week Blog Reflection Week 11- T.I.M.E. Stories Week 1

In class we played the game T.I.M.E.. Some people played the game two weeks in a row, but I chose to only play it the first week. For me the hardest part was understanding the rules. I was very confused by the rules to the point that I couldn’t even focus on the mystery aspect. I love solving mysteries, however while playing this game I was too focused on the rules to pay attention to all of the clues. 

We tied this game to leadership with our discussion about does leadership ever end and can you win at leadership. I think my friend Spencer would like to play this game because he likes role playing games and thinking strategically. 

Everyone I played with chose not to save for week 2 of this game, mainly because we were all confused. We all did start to get into it when we started moving rooms. The one thing I did like about this game was moving to different locations and being able to unlock new maps. However, I did not like how confusing the rules were and how the rules took away from me being able to solve the mystery.   

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.