This was our third Time Stories mission.
It is terrible.
I want to tell you why it’s terrible but spoilers, I guess. Here’s a spoiler: It is just a dumb grindy D&D style adventure. There are no logic puzzles to solve, no transcendent AHA moments, and your plans hinge largely on luck. There are choke points you can’t get through unless you’ve drawn just the right order of locations, otherwise it takes too much time.
I loved the asylum mystery, oh man, one of my best cooperative experiences ever. The Marcy Case was brilliant except for a technical detail of the endgame that bypassed our need to logic out the solution. But Prophecy is just bad. And slow, my god so slow: we played seven total hours across two nights before we resorted to straight cheating, because no way were we going to play out the grind for another hour just to get reset.
I’ve got Under the Mask coming to me, but if it’s not more in the spirit of the first couple, I’m calling it quits on _Time Stories._
https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgameexpansion/189035/time-stories-prophecy-dragons
We’re halfway through this mission (I think!) and I don’t disagree.
The fact you need to retrace your steps in the event you fail reminded me of that annoying era in video games before you could save your progress. I gave up after the asylum scenario.
Paul Slawson in Prophecy it’s a step worse because your steps are sometimes not replicable.
Good to know. Saw this game highly recommended by Dice Tower and other YouTube videos, but I had a feeling it was just D&D.
/rant Weird that the boardgame geek and the RPG geek Venn diagram doesn’t overlap as much as one would think. Any boardgame that slightly contains anything D&D related is usually highly ranked. Makes me wonder why don’t they just play RPGs… okay, /rant off.
My group got through this scenario in one go and actually had a lot of fun with it. We did make some lucky decisions and die rolls and barely survived the last encounter so it felt exciting.
Brian Casey haha! I think it’s a Godwin’s Law corollary that every discussion of Time Stores will include someone who says “we got through it in one shot!”
Be grateful! All the rolling and fighting isn’t that fun the second time, and decidedly unfun the fourth time.
Oh, I am grateful. Marcy Case dragged on for us so we felt the pain. It’s amazing how this game goes from discovery/exploration game to efficiency puzzle.
Brian Casey there’s this game I love/hate called Redacted that’s very similar: first half of the game is puzzling out who your teammates are, second half is mathing out the mission solution. Not actually that fun a format!
What I liked about Asylum is that there are logic puzzles all the way to the final scene. Of course there are folks who hated that the game was mostly clue collecting.
Paul Beakley I’ve had the same experience with Redacted.
I’m hoping that there are more logic puzzles in Under the Mask. Seems they would fit well in that setting.
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Holy wow , this thread has been targeted by bots or something. I’ve deleted maybe 30 nonsense comments.
It’s your dryer, Paul Beakley . It has achieved self-awareness… The clothepocalypse will begin soon…
Holy shit it won’t stop. Gotta close the thread. Ugh.