Anachrony

Posted on by Paul Beakley

Anachrony

Well…so it arrived. I barely remember backing it. The box is now the biggest game I own, other than FFG’s big coffin box games (Tide of Iron, Starcraft, Runewars). Space Wurm vs Moonicorn for scale.

It comes with a slipcover, which I totally don’t understand. Whatever, it’s slipcovered for now.

I spent two hours punching shit last night. If ever a game begged for a tackle box to keep its shit sorted, it’s this one. Oh, yeah,and there are also attractive colored cubes for the various economies, but the colors are so subtle (grey-ish and green-ish are nearly identical) that maybe I should be using glass beads instead. Dunno until I play.

Despite the sprawling hot mess in the box, the game itself I think is fairly straightforward: it’s worker placement with a time-travel twist. Basically you’re trying to set up your faction to rule the future, and you’re doing that by helping out your past selves. At the end of the game, you check for paradoxes you’ve generated along the way and reconcile the continuum. Or something.

There are tons of modular rules and options as well, and that’s interesting. There’s a solo mode — I may give that a swing next week. There are also alternative endgame situations, and whole new subgame expansions.

This prompted me to look back at my Kickstarters that are delivering, and there are so many of them. I’m gonna get buried under an avalanche of stuff that won’t get played for months.

Published by Paul Beakley

I founded the Indie Game Reading Club in 2010. I've written and developed RPGs since the mid-90s, now I mostly talk about playing them.

23 thoughts on “Anachrony”

  1. I’m curious about this one. I don’t back boardgame kickstarters, because the shipping to Canada is lunacy, but my FLGS usually gets a few copies of any of the really good ones, and the theme of this one jumped out at me.

  2. I’m a huge sucker for anything time travel, yeah.

    So far the biggest winner on that count is Tragedy Looper, with Legacy: something of Ages and its expansion a close second. I had one awesome run through Time Stories, followed by a meh and a straight-up hate-run; I’m sitting on the game’s fourth mission, still too mad to play it.

  3. I heard the third scenario for TIME Stories was bad so didn’t get it but I did get the newest one. I really liked the first two ones, with my favourite being the first one so far. The puzzles were cooool

  5. Our group was meh on TIME Stories. Sage LaTorra and I think it’s because of our RPG backgrounds. (Similar to the reasons we liked Pandemic Legacy less than Risk Legacy.)

  6. Adam D nah, not really. They’re just elaborate logic puzzles you have to suss out as the overlord player, whatever that’s called, adjusts history to thwart the players and ensure that the tragedies unfold anyway. But there’s nothing really RPGish about it.

  7. Yeah, I was okay with it, but I wasn’t super excited to play again or anything. It was basically an elaborate choose your own adventure book, and I like those, but the elaborateness just made it harder to keep track of.

  8. The Time Stories scenario in the box we really liked. The groundhog day thing where you must pass through the loop a few times, bringing vital information with you each time, was novel. And it timed out really nicely with our own personal level of frustration. The payout was perfectly timed and we came out of it high-fiving each other.

    The Marcy Case was pretty good, but I was able to solve it because of bad art and bad form factor, which I won’t spoil here. Honestly, it was going along just fine until I discovered we didn’t really need to use logic at all.

    A Prophecy of Dragons, oh fuck that one sideways. Awful. Grindy dicefest, no logic, took foreeeeever to get through it. We actually quit after a while and just riffled through the cards to see how it turned out. Bad! /trump

    I have the Egypt one in shrinkwrap. It’s been sitting here since we gave up on Dragons. Maybe September?

  9. Same experience here except I read a review on the dragons one and passed on it deliberately, so I’ve only had good times with it. Though it’s pretty expensive, one time play for each one and 35$ or so here to get a new scenario.

  10. Interesting about the color issues with color-coded objects. I wonder how many designers consider colorblindness when they design? I think about it all the time with software.

  12. Lex Larson it’s getting better all the time, but there are notable exceptions. I fear this game will be one of them. 🙁

    One of my best friends is colorblind and we’ve been hypersensitized to the problem. As often as not, we just don’t buy or play games that haven’t taken the issue into account via better color choices or, more common, patterns and colors being used to differentiate.

  13. I’m thinking back to the oldest board games I played as a kid, and even though they weren’t likely designed with colorblindness in mind, they had a few color options or color/text combos that helped folks interpret the differences. And that was 30+ years ago.

    (e.g. Monopoly, Sorry!, Uno, etc.)

  14. The heavy overproduction emphasis in boardgames these days works pretty well. In this game, everyone gets a different set of sculpts for their mechs, for example.

  17. Jeff Scherpelz they looked so sharp on the KS page. I’m thinking long and hard about getting back into painting. So many games come with such beautiful stuff these days. But my poor eyes!

  18. I just got into painting a few weeks ago, so I’m binging on it for a while. Getting close to done with all my Scythe figures right now, so Anachrony is up next. But it certainly isn’t the best activity for eyes or posture!

  22. Played this a couple of times last weekend. It isn’t bad but it isn’t as amazing as the level of bling would lead you to believe. The factions that let you take two actions at once seem pretty overpowered but that might just be our play group.

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