Are you ready for your first mission?

That’s the simple pitch of T.I.M.E. Stories, a board game in which you play as agents of this organization who are going back in time or across the multiverse to stop catastrophic events from happening. You start out as rookie agents, and you are given a mission to go back to an insane asylum in 1920s France. There is some event that is going to take place there, and you have to unravel the mystery and figure out how to stop it. Each character’s consciousness is placed into a receptacle — in this case, so as not to raise suspicions, the receptacles are some of the asylum’s patients. Now you are racing against the clock to solve the mystery and stop the time event from happening. The good news is that if your receptacle dies or you run out of time and have to be sent back to your own body, you can always jump back to the same spot in time and try again, but those trips aren’t cheap, and it will affect your overall score.

As you can imagine, there are some crazy things going on and twists and turns that you need to figure out over the course of the game. And if you’re like the team that we took in, there are going to be clues and puzzles that you just get stumped on. T.I.M.E. Stories reminds me some of the Unlock and Exit games, which are essentially escape rooms in a box. While those are focused on escaping most of the time, this game is focused on solving a mystery. And while Unlock and Exit are limited in their scope and storytelling, T.I.M.E. Stories can tell a story through multiple locations and the events that unfold. There are a few other unique things about T.I.M.E. Stories, the first being the game-saving system. We didn’t use this, but it is possible to save the game partway through playing so that you can pick it back up again later — this is made possible with the way the box has been created and laid out. The second thing is the multiple run system that you can employ if you run out of time or if all the characters die. This gives it more of a video game feel than with Unlock or Exit, because with those, you just go until you are done and then you are done with the game for good. With T.I.M.E. Stories, it would be possible to play multiple sessions with no problem.

Finally, one of the cool things I want to talk about is the scenario we played, the Asylum scenario. This is the one that comes in the base game, and it is meant to get you up to speed. It can still be tricky, however, so don’t take it lightly. There are also a lot more scenarios for the game out there to be purchased, and I’m excited to get some of them soon, because I’m ready to play again. These scenarios are all over the map, with some seemingly set in Ancient Egypt, a fantasy world, and the year 1992. This is one of the coolest aspects of the game to me, because the possibilities for scenarios is pretty limitless because of this. And the fact that it’s a board game, with a board, decks of cards, combats, challenges, etc., makes it feel more substantial and meaty than the Unlock and Exit games.

Let’s talk a little bit about your receptacle and the stats that you have to play around with, which are based on the scenario. In the Asylum (and all of this is outside-of-the-box stuff that you will know before you start playing, so these details aren’t spoilers), I was placed first into a cocaine addict and then a cannibal girl. Each character has special abilities, as well as some stats; for example, deftness, glibness, and strength(ness). You use strength to fight and probably break open stuff, glibness for all the talking (and sweet-talking) you do, and deftness for stealing things, rummaging around looking for clues, things of that nature. You roll dice with the hope of rolling as many blue stars, or successes, as possible, and of avoiding the red skulls, or failures/damage. If you are up against a dangerous foe, they can do damage to you — just a point at a time, but you don’t have many life points to start with. If the number of red skulls you roll combined with the number of red skull shields the enemy has is higher than your character’s defense number, your character will take a hit. This gives the game a logical way to have a character die, and there’s a good way for characters to come back, too — the dead character comes back in automatically after 7 more time units have been spent. This makes it so no one is sitting out of the game too long; that person can still take part in the discussion, as well.

Next, let’s talk about time units. I covered most of how the game works in the previous paragraph, but there is another key part to this game, and that is the time units. You spend time moving around the scenario’s map — in this case, you’re exploring the various rooms and grounds of the asylum. The group moves as one unit, which is maybe not an ideal part of the game, but it allows players to take each turn as a group so that everyone is involved, which is an ideal part of the game. These rooms are split into several cards — by spending one time unit, you can explore aroom, placing as many people at a location as you want, but you can only explore one card per pawn, and you determine where your pawn goes in the room. You might want to explore the same room multiple times, and each time you go to another part of the room, you have to spend another time unit. So that’s one way you have the clock counting down on you, but the other way is that when you move locations, you roll a die to see how much time you spend — it’s possible to get only a single time unit knocked off as you change rooms, but it’s also possible you’ll lose up to three. But that’s part of the stress of the game, and one of the strengths is that you have a timer that you can watch count down.

Finally, one thing I wanted to touch on is the multiple runs. I know I mentioned this before, but want to explain it more fully here. When we played, we had to play the scenario three times in a row to be able to beat it (a.k.a., we did poorly at the game). But the game is fast to reset between times playing, and once we failed the mission a second time, even though we’d been playing for a while, we wanted to finish it off. All in all, I think it took us about three hours to play through the scenario three times, which isn’t bad. In the future, I would be very tempted to split it up so that the third play doesn’t just happen immediately, because it did get a little bit long, as we already knew a lot of the story by that point. However, that did allow us to speed through some of the first part and just select a few things to do and a few to skip, until we realized that the things we’d skipped might be important as well. So if you have a gaming group that regularly gets together, with up to four people in said group, T.I.M.E. Stories scenarios could easily be played over multiple sessions.

This is a very good game. The pieces are nice, and the game itself if very aesthetically pleasing. I don’t really have any knock against the mechanics, as they make a lot of sense as to how they work. T.I.M.E. Stories also falls somewhere between roleplaying and a board game. If you wanted to, since you are inhabiting a receptacle in the game, you could pull a Jack Black from Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle and really get into character, acting like a person inhabiting the body of another person. I think most people would enjoy this game; however, I can see it having some adult themes at times, and I know with the most recent scenario, they did warn people about that. It is also a pretty intense game in a great way, but it could be too stressful for some people. Overall, though, I would recommend this game, and if you are turned off by the price of it and the expansions, see if you can find two groups who want to use the same copy of the game, and that will make the cost a whole lot more palatable.

Overall Grade: A
Casual Grade: B
Gamer Grade: B+

Have you had a chance to play T.I.M.E. Stories before? If so, how did you like the game? If not, does it seem like something that would interest you?

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Cloverfield

So, this has been a movie that I’ve loved for a while. I saw it in theater whens it came out, and the marketing for Cloverfield has not been duplicated and rarely even tried to be duplicated. Let’s go back in our time machine and talk about the build up for Cloverfield.

The Build Up

Cloverfield was a rumored JJ Abrams project for a little while. He was still in the midst of Lost, and everyone wanted to know what his next project was. Even someone like myself who has never really enjoyed Lost and has only watched the first season and a half was curious because of it being JJ Abrams. Then it came out that this was going to be a creature feature and it got closer and closer to the release date. But instead of seeing trailers, seeing shots of the monster on posters and billboards, we got websites. We got conspiracy theory websites, we got news websites for the movie, there were sounds being released of this monster, but you never really got a full clue what it was. As it came time for the movie to come out, we just had bits and pieces of information and people were stoked for it. It was a horror movies/creature feature that had a build done is a completely unique and carefully planned out way.

The Movie

Unfortunately, I didn’t go see it opening night, but there was a group of us friends, and we were interested in seeing it. We had heard a little bit more about it by then, but I’d managed to stay spoiler free. The experience of seeing this movie in a theater is a good spot to start describing it. We were maybe a week or so after opening, and the theater was still mostly full. The movie starts and you quickly get an idea of what is going on. With Cloverfield, I don’t think that there are a ton of actual surprises in the movie, a few, but not a ton. It’s a creature feature done with found footage and done really well. The characters are celebrating a friend leaving for a new job when there’s a disaster that starts. A monster is attacking New York City. You don’t know where it’s come from, you don’t know how it got there, and you don’t know what it really looks like for a while, you just know that there is a monster. We get to tag along with a group of characters from that going away party who are trying to escape New York City and find the people that they have gotten separated from.

Initial Thoughts

I loved this movie from the first time I saw it. I had not been and to this day am still not a fan of found footage movies. I thought that The Blair Witch Project was dumb. This movie almost changed my mind on them and I gave a number of them a chance, I still think that it’s kind of sloppy normally. Cloverfield did a better job at creating a situation where it wasn’t as nauseating to watch, and it mattered that you didn’t know what was happening. There were moments of reprieve for the characters that you don’t often see, and there were moments of real life that were happening as the story unfolds. It wasn’t just a movie meant to scare you, in fact, for a movie that would be classified by some as a horror movie, there really wasn’t a ton of the horror to it. Action, most definitely, suspense, for sure, but the classic jump horror moments that plague so many horror movies, there weren’t a ton of them. It was about the characters and their struggle to survive, it wasn’t a found footage where someone had placed themselves into a bad situation, it’s where they had a bad situation placed around them, and now they had to deal with it and they did a great job in the acting, while not always the greatest, of dealing with it like normal humans. Very scared humans, but normal humans. There wasn’t any sense that these were special characters in the story, sure we got to see their story, but they weren’t a cut above the characters you saw in the background who were panicking and trying to escape, they were doing that as well.

So there we have my non-spoiler review. I think that covers it well enough to jump into more details about what I really enjoyed/found interesting in this movie.

SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS

Spoilers Sweetie.

You have been warned.

I’m not going to recap it again, but just to add in some information. Everyone dies in the end, well, not everyone, theoretically one of the main characters escapes, but that is it. It’s something you could guess was going to happen. When the brother of one of the characters (fiance to another) gets killed off early in the movie, you know that no one is safe. The fact that the characters survive as long as they do is more luck than anything else. That makes it even more gripping.

Another piece that I appreciated was that the camera man, played by TJ Miller, for the found footage, was a bit of a goofy character. Once stuff starts going, that isn’t the case so much, but he handles it differently, the disaster/attack going on around him than the other characters do. His panic is unique to other peoples panic, and actually, the main characters, Hud, Lily, Marlena, and Rob, all have their own particular type of panic. They all have different things that they focus on. Rob is worried about Beth whom he loved but had broken up with recently. Hud is able to hold it together fairly well because he likes Marlena and because he can document everything. Lily is focused on the fact that her finance, Jason – who is Rob’s brother, just died as they were trying to escape. And with Marlena is actually what I’d call the most pure panic. She is loosely connected to the group, but is an outsider compared to the rest of them. She gets separated from them at the beginning and she’s clearly seen something horrible when she comes back. As much as Hud, TJ Miller’s character, tries to talk to her, she’s in many ways broken as a character, which is interesting to see.

Let’s talk about the monster. The monster doesn’t matter. Sounds weird, but I’d say it’s very much the case, the monster just needs to look good enough and monstrous enough that it’s scary. It could have been any sort of monster and worked. Now, that isn’t to say that it doesn’t look cool, it really does. And having the babies fall off of it, or maybe smaller monsters was a nice twist and set up some of the better horror aspects to the movie. But the suspense of not knowing about the monster is how the monster is used most effectively. At the end of the movie, we don’t know for sure where the monster has come from, we don’t know if it was doing this specifically or because monsters just attack cities in creature feature movies, we don’t know even how powerful it truly is, and that’s okay, because Cloverfield is a creature feature that isn’t mainly about the monster. It’s about the group of four characters and Rob’s need to save Beth. And that’s good, if it was about the monster, you wouldn’t have been about to do found footage like they did.

Finally, as time has gone by, and I just watched it three weeks ago, maybe four now, how has it held up? I personally think that Cloverfield has held up really well. The CGI for the monster is good, and the whole found footage style works extremely well. Just to touch on that again, what I love about this found footage style is that movies like Welcome to the Jungle (so horrible) and The Blair Witch Project are made a horror movies first and foremost. They are about people going out of their way to put themselves into a horrible situation and then reacting poorly to that situation. As characters, they almost always had the ability to go back and leave well enough alone, but they never did. They always kept on poking the bear, going further and further into danger, but in Cloverfield, that wasn’t an option for these characters. They were actively trying to run away from the danger instead of filming themselves being stupid, they were filming it because, as Hud puts it, people have to know what happened here. There’s no trying to be cool, trying to get famous, and trying to prove a legend like there was in the other two, it’s purely characters in a bad situation trying to do what they think they have to do. At the core of that, that’s what I really like about Cloverfield, it’s a monster movie, but the monster is just a piece in the background, it’s really a story about Rob, Lily, Hud, Marlena, and Beth, and how they fight to survive something horrible and what matters to them as as characters. Is it a cinematic masterpiece, no, but it’s a really well done movie that takes you on a pretty crazy ride and tells an interesting story,  and when I watch a movie, that’s what I want, and Cloverfield does that well.

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