Time Line

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Sun Sep 13, 2009 10:09 pm

So first of all, everyone should be familiar with Chrononauts, because it is awesome.

And now I'm going to talk about a very similar game I am making. It's based on an extremely similar premise and setup, but the key difference is that the key events in history change every game.

Here's how it works: the Critical Moment cards actually say "Paradox: Critical Moment" on the back. And on the front they are split into two halves: the Historical and the A-Historical half. In the middle there is a big symbol. That symbol might look something like this:

or this:

Anyway, similar symbols will be at either end of that card. And when it is spun from Historical to A-Historical (or back), it will cause effects on all future Critical Moments that happen to share the symbol with one on the edge. A symbol can either be pressed into "red wax" in which case it is a "shift" that spins future event cards with the same symbol, or it can be pressed into "brown wax" in which case it disrupts future events flipping them over to be Paradoxes.

When you fix a Paradox, you can either flip it back over to the historical or A-historical side, or you can grab a card with the same date out of the much larger Alternate History deck. And these have different symbols.

And just like Chrononauts, you have a secret and arbitrary mission to complete. And there's an action deck. And that's it.

-Username17

ThinkWriteMute · Post by **ThinkWriteMute** » Sun Sep 13, 2009 11:37 pm

Things needing design:

Timeline Board
"A vertical arrow with graphical place holders to show where to put the cards"

Timeline Cards
"Game cards with two sides, History and Nega-History. History and Nega-History have different effects when they are "chronotriggered" into the timeline"

Mission Cards
"Cards detailing the missions of each player, their requirement for wining, special shit"

This list is under construction, subject to shit tons of change.[/b]

Judging__Eagle · Post by **Judging__Eagle** » Sun Sep 13, 2009 11:52 pm

Oh, wow, that sounds like a really cool idea.

I'm guessing that since there are a lot more possible historical events that can be 'flipped' in a game; than there are cards that can be picked up and used to activate an event; then people will attempt to try "pre-event" re-arrangement of the TimeLine, such that the event(s) that they want to have, or have not, happen will not be flipped into the wrong side.

That's a pretty ingenious game idea.

ThinkWriteMute · Post by **ThinkWriteMute** » Mon Sep 14, 2009 7:05 am

We're looking heavily at making it a "look forward" type game. Anyone remember Spycraft CCG? Winning the game meant paying attention to /this/ mission card *and* the next, or else you were going to get ripped up.

Similarly in the early ideas here, players should be looking at the very least a step or two ahead.

I'm thinking that the Time Cards will have specific dates on the top right corner, so you know how to organize the randomized Time Card layout in chronological order. Don't want Hitler happening before World War I.

Also, Hitler. Going to be used a lot probably as example, Time Travel really isn't Time Travel without mention of killing Hitler once or twice..

ThinkWriteMute · Post by **ThinkWriteMute** » Mon Sep 14, 2009 7:09 am

Also, thoughts of sub-categories on the Missions.

For instance, World War I? It's a WAR card, so is Vietnam, etc. The flip side of these cards will be another subcategory. Possibly ECONOMIC or PEACE? Something.

The idea here is, say, the Total Destruction mission player (Radiated Super Cockroach) goal being to "Time Connecting" at least 8 WARs, or the Radical Anarchist Time Disolving 10 ECONOMIC events.

Time Connecting/Disolving are prototype terms, I suppose, for having one side of a card attached to the Time Stream.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Mon Sep 14, 2009 8:56 am

Well there doesn't need to be any "board" there just needs to be four or five decks. It should all fit into a small box. Like the one used to hold Fluxx. Chrononauts gives each person an ID and a Mission card, and they can win by fulfilling either victory condition. You could do that, or you could give each person just two cards from the mission deck and leave it up to the player to describe their story when they win and are forced to reveal their mission cards ("I'm a Confederate sympathizer from outside time trying to collapse the time stream or at least give Robert E. Lee the victory he deserves!")

Regardless, the needs in terms of play space are thus:

[*] An area about half a meter on a side to place the Time Stream. It starts as being 12 cards, so 3 rows of 4. And people can add a few cards to the list during the game.
[*] Space for four piles of cards that can be interacted with: An Action Deck, an Action Discard pile, the Critical Moments deck, and the Alternate History Pile.
[*] Room for each player to have their action hand, their collected Anachronisms, and their face down Missions. And elbow room of course.

Should be playable by four players at a card table.

Anyway, things that are needed for the game to function:

~ 60 Critical Moment Cards.
~150-200 Alternate History cards.
~120 Action cards.
~40 Mission cards.

A Critical Moment card has relatively little space for text, because the back has to be generic and actually just has the Paradox logo on it. The game may actually get called Paradox because of that. Anyway, it has a control symbol in the middle, dividing the Historical and Negahistorical versions. And yeah, it can have little key words and/or pictures in addition to facilitate weirder missions.

Alternate History cards can have more rules text, because they are never shuffled. The front and back can actually just be the historical and negahistorical versions of those timelines (for example: Warlord Ghandi wins or loses the Battle of Madras). After all, an alternate history is laid on top of a Paradox, so if it is Paradoxed you can just pick it up and put it back into the pile. So the President MacArthur version of 1962 can have a nuclear war option where all Critical Moments between 1962 and 30,000 AD are considered to be out of play.

-Username17

ThinkWriteMute · Post by **ThinkWriteMute** » Tue Sep 15, 2009 12:44 am

We should focus on the board first, get that laid out, then time cards, then mission cards, then work backwards from there.

I should have some draft logos, card designs by tomorrow. Been working heavily on reorganizing my Linux partition, and Adobe CS4 is on my Windows Parition.

Starmaker · Post by **Starmaker** » Tue Sep 15, 2009 10:05 am

FrankTrollman, [color=red]Sep 13 2009[/color] wrote:So first of all, everyone should be familiar with Chrononauts, because it is awesome.

Chrononauts website wrote:Coming October 23 2009!

So, any similarities to the real deal, eh, Frank?

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Tue Sep 15, 2009 11:09 am

That's a new edition of it or something. Chrononauts is a card game that is years old.

And yeah seriously, no board. All cards. The only interaction that anything has is that a critical moment card can be spun or flipped over and an Alt-History card can be placed on top of a flipped Critical moment card and then it can be flipped over as well.

There is zero reason to have a board.

-Username17

Gelare · Post by **Gelare** » Tue Sep 15, 2009 6:32 pm

Not to cast a pall over this, but I remember Fantasy Flight getting a little bent out of shape over SR Horror. And since I've played Chrononauts quite a bit (like, every single day from fall 2007 to summer 2008), I can see there's quite a bit of similarity. Think they'll care?

EDIT: And for a more constructive question, why make this game? I mean, Chrononauts is great. Going from Arkham Horror to SR Horror substantially changed the flavor, but it sounds like the flavor here is identical. Why double up?

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Thu Sep 17, 2009 2:12 pm

Gelare wrote:
EDIT: And for a more constructive question, why make this game? I mean, Chrononauts is great. Going from Arkham Horror to SR Horror substantially changed the flavor, but it sounds like the flavor here is identical. Why double up?

Branchable storylines. Chrononauts always has the same time junctures. This game will have random and expansable time junctures.

-Username17

Gelare · Post by **Gelare** » Thu Sep 17, 2009 7:55 pm

FrankTrollman wrote:Branchable storylines. Chrononauts always has the same time junctures. This game will have random and expansable time junctures.

-Username17

Good enough for me; let's do it. Although I'd take it as a personal kindness if you'd not use legal-size anything, I still haven't been able to get SR Horror printed out because of it.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Fri Sep 18, 2009 3:35 pm

OK, but you couldn't just center those images in an A3 page?

But yeah, the core of the matter is that Chrononauts is not amenable to swapping out time junctures between or within games, because the cards refer to each other by name in a fixed and hard coded fashion. In order to make them malleable, a different symbolic system of card interactions needs to be made. The action deck doesn't specifically need to change, but it might as well under the circumstances, because now you have access to potential actions like opening up new time junctures or even removing access to time travelers to a time period.

-Username17

Gelare · Post by **Gelare** » Fri Sep 18, 2009 5:55 pm

Ugh, the supply stores near me don't have cardstock in sizes other than 8.5x11, and the printers always look at me like I'm crazy. Really it's my fault for being reluctant to special order everything to the tune of a hundred bucks. But whatever.

So I think I get the idea now. Are you going to have cards with multiple symbols on each edge that can be affected by multiple things? Will the Time Stream look identical at the beginning of each game (Chrononauts), or will the components be chosen randomly from the deck?

Also: there's history, negahistory, and alternate history? Really?

ThinkWriteMute · Post by **ThinkWriteMute** » Sat Sep 19, 2009 10:13 am

Still working on that, really. I'm doing a lot of the design now.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Sat Sep 19, 2009 3:17 pm

A block of Legal Sized cardstock can be purchased over the internet for less than 20 dollars. They go through the machines that take 8.5x11, so it's no biggie.

Also: there's history, negahistory, and alternate history? Really?

Yes. Because a card can be flipped over to it's reverse showing or overlain with an alternate history card.

The time stream is random every game, which is why it needs the symbolic associations.

-Username17

ThinkWriteMute · Post by **ThinkWriteMute** » Sun Sep 20, 2009 1:49 am

Some of my work, not related to the card layouts:

ThinkWriteMute · Post by **ThinkWriteMute** » Sun Sep 20, 2009 1:51 am

Thought I missed Yellow, just forgot to upload it!

Grek · Post by **Grek** » Sun Sep 20, 2009 6:05 am

Let me get this straight:

There are four types of card, Mission, Agent, Critical Moment and Alternate History.
Mission cards have a mission on them. The player who gets dealt the card wins if their mission is completed. Each player gets one or two at the start of the game.
Agent cards specify who the player is playing as. Each player gets one at the start of the game.
Critical Moment cards are placed in order on the table in the historical postion at the start of the game.
Critical Moment cards always have the following parts:
- A historical event
- A nega-historical event
- A date
- A paradox symbol on the back
Critical Moment cards have at least one the following parts, but not always all of them:
- A red shift symbol that will spin all Critical Moment cards that have the same symbol and a later date.
- A brown paradox symbol that will flip all Critical Moment cards that have the same symbol and a later date to the paradox side.
Critical Moment cards that are fliped to the paradox side can be "fixed" This allows you to do one of the following:
- Flip the card from the paradox side to the historical side.
- Flip the card from the paradox side to the nega-historical side.
- Place a different Critical Moment card with the same date over the paradoxed card that is taken from the Alternate History deck.
Alternate history cards go in the Alternate History deck.
They are exactly like the Critical Moment cards, except that they have some other peice of text where paradox side would be.
Alternate History cards that get paradoxed are put back into the Alternate History deck instead.

Any reason why Critical Moment cards and Alternate History cards are seperate aside from the lack of space for text? It seems like it would be pretty cool of the Critical Moment cards were also the same as the Alternate History cards.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Sun Sep 20, 2009 11:48 am

# Agent cards specify who the player is playing as. Each player gets one at the start of the game.

That would be a mission card. The Action cards are the ones that you use to do something each turn.

Grek wrote:Any reason why Critical Moment cards and Alternate History cards are seperate aside from the lack of space for text?

Because otherwise you'd deal out the timeline at the beginning of the game and four of the cards would be alternate versions of the same date and you couldn't put them into any order.

Also the lack of text space.

-Username17

ThinkWriteMute · Post by **ThinkWriteMute** » Sun Sep 20, 2009 7:35 pm

*Critical Moment Card
** Side One (Historical Event)
*** Name
*** Date
*** Objectives
*** Extra Notes Here
** Side Two (Paradox Event)
*** Name
*** Date
*** Objectives
*** Extra Notes Here

ThinkWriteMute · Post by **ThinkWriteMute** » Sun Sep 20, 2009 8:39 pm

Here are the card backs.

The gray wont actually be on the print, they're control borders for me.

ThinkWriteMute · Post by **ThinkWriteMute** » Sun Sep 20, 2009 9:32 pm

A similar game? http://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/311

ThinkWriteMute · Post by **ThinkWriteMute** » Mon Sep 21, 2009 12:29 am

Here's how I imagine the card table layout, from 1 player's perspective.

The Gaming Den

Time Line

Time Line

Re: Time Line