For our weekly game day last week, my wife and I decided to give T.I.M.E. Stories a shot. This is another game that I got for Christmas, this one from my mother-in-law, Sally. I saw this for the first time when I was in The Jester’s Court in Grand Junction for Thanksgiving. It’s a cooperative “decksploration” game based around the idea of time and dimensional travel – for me, this is an obvious hook!

The nature of T.I.M.E. Stories’s gameplay makes people very nervous about spoilers (which I’ll address why in a bit), so I want to be upfront that I’ll be keeping this review out of spoiler territory and I’ll be discussing mostly mechanics, though I will dip into broad strokes about how the stories appear to be structured.

First, it’s definitely worth noting that the main reason that folks are so mortified by spoilers in T.I.M.E. Stories is because the game provides you with enough materials for one story. The main goal is to get through that story until you get it “right”, figuring out the win condition is, itself, part of the exploration. However, once this is done, there’s not a lot of play left; while you can certainly go for 100% completion, once you know what’s going on, there isn’t much left.

This is both the boon and bane of this game. On the one hand, the designers have embraced this, and are already releasing a number of new stories. It’s also provides a nice framework for creating your own stories in a very wide array of settings. So, while there isn’t much in the game box itself, it has a lot of expandability, which should be really fun to see develop.

Mechanics-wise, the game seems stable, but there are a couple of things that feel really clumsy – most notably are how Time Units work, which is your main timer in the game. Spending a single Time Unit allows everyone on the team to make one action – either making a roll or moving to a different space. But, exploring a location card does not cost a TU. What ended up happening in our games was that everyone split up to explore, but one person would draw a card which required a check. So what would happen is that a TU would be spent to attempt the check and everyone else would have to figure out what to do with the TU, which often ended up being “move to help” if you need it, or “do nothing” if not. This tended to re-enforce the concept that if you know what you’re doing, you can get out of spending a lot of TU, but if you are exploring, you end up wasting a lot of time.

This leads me to what I see as the main flaw of the game – it seems a lot more about finding and executing the shortest path to the win state, and a lot less about actual exploration. The way this comes across in game is that there are a lot of choices that end up only wasting TU, without providing any story content or information. So, rather than being encouraged to seek out multiple possible paths to finding a solution and learning more about the setting and events, players are encouraged to actively ignore anything that isn’t getting them to the success state. Additionally, multiple mechanics in the game actively tell you to hurry up, so spending time exploring is discouraged both on the micro scale (you only have so many TU in a run) and on the macro scale (you only get so many runs).

As such, while I really enjoy this game, and plan on picking up more stories as they are released (and maybe collaborate on writing one), I would tend to label this game a “decksploitation” game rather than a “decksploration” game – you’re trying to get the most out of the deck by exploiting your TU rather than exploring all that the deck has to offer.