Pyramid Review
Time Control
Published by Thompson Industries
Designed by Anthony Thompson
Edited by Andrew Mayer
Illustrated by Rob Arnow
4 timeline boards (full-color), 72 time wave tokens (full-color), 31 Fate cards, 64 Problem Cards, 88 time control tokens, 48 time agent tokens, rulebook, boxed; $24.95
As confusing as time travel can be, trying to mimic it in a gaming format can be even harder. Trying to fit the broad spectrum of this literary device into the compact environment of a board or set of cards seems almost impossible. Time Control, the new time travel game from Thompson Industries, is of little help.
The object of the game is to be the last time-traveling power left in the game.
Each player gets a timeline board showing the present and the six other descending eras of the past (back to the prehistoric) for their timeline, and a set of time agent disks representing the men sent through history to maintain or fight for the timeline. The disks are generic agents, brawlers, historians, and scientists, the last three having special abilities for dealing with duels or time waves.
In a single round, activity is split into two turns: the Time Agent turn and the Time Wave turn. During the Time Agent turn, after all the players have sent their agents to whatever era they want on their board and "alerted" (flipped over) those agents that were busy doing something the previous turn, players may use agents to take actions.
The game plays in real time, without turns. Everyone does anything . . .
This article originally appeared in the second volume of Pyramid. See the current Pyramid website for more information.
Article publication date: February 20, 2004
Copyright © 2004 by Steve Jackson Games. All rights reserved. Pyramid subscribers are permitted to read this article online, or download it and print out a single hardcopy for personal use. Copying this text to any other online system or BBS, or making more than one hardcopy, is strictly prohibited. So please don't. And if you encounter copies of this article elsewhere on the web, please report it to webmaster@sjgames.com.