The year is 8052. Time travel is possible now. Whether with a heavy and ramshackle car made of stainless steel, a teletime machine or a hot tub, people can now travel through time. What would you do if you could travel back in time? Would you attend special historical events? Avoid making a blunder with your crush? Try unlimited retakes of that one exam? Or try to complete your collection in Time Collectors?
The year is 8052. Time travel is possible now. Instead of stopping climate change or buying a Sports Almanac to become a multimillionaire, travel back in time to collect treasures. In Time Collectors, players will collect sets of cards by travelling through time with a set of four dice. Well, collect? You get to poach animals, mine blood diamonds, disrupt biodiversity by plucking extinct plants and steal important historical buildings and artefacts! Players place collected cards on their tableau and once a player has ten cards on this tableau, the game ends. The player who has collected the most points with his collection at the end of the game wins!
In the middle of the table is a time track. On this time track there are a number of specific years, boxes with cards next to them and a pile of crystals, and around the time track there are also a number of achievement cards. During the game, players roll their four ten-sided dice and create a year with the dice in secret, from behind their player screen. The player with the year furthest in the future may move first on the time track.
With their dice, placed together to create a year, players can move on the time track. With a specific year, players can move to the corresponding spot on the track. With a specific year, they can move intermediate squares. Next to each spot is a random card (or even two in the case of specific years) that players can take. If you choose a year above 8052, you can collect time crystals. With these time crystals you can earn points, but you can also use them to change the dice you have rolled. If you move to a space where another player is already present, you have to pay that player a time crystal.
Time Collectors is a lovely illustrated game with nice components. The gameplay is clear and surprising for new players. Time Collectors is a simple set collector. There are different types of cards that players use to score points in different ways. Players may know other games with a similar way of scoring points such as Cat Lady, Sushi Go and Meadow. The scoring is therefore not very innovative, but that is true of many set collection games. Set collection games differ in the way players collect cards. Think of puzzling with the central tableau of Meadow or drafting cards like in Sushi Go. Time Collectors has a surprising way of collecting cards by using dice that allow players to create years. It is a roll of four dice, so there is a lot of luck involved, but players can decide in what order dice are used and can use time crystals to manipulate their rolled dice.
Time Collectors is fine as a beginner’s game. The mechanism works and the game is not too difficult, but for advanced players it may lack depth, as the cards for scoring are less ‘special’. When players travel to the same square, you as a later player can get an unknown new card. You can trade cards on the track by deploying a time crystal, but if you want to collect time crystals by travelling to the future, you may not be able to collect cards in a round which could cost you dearly. These are interesting dilemmas, by the way, but you are sometimes pretty dependent on fate. With an expansion or advanced card variant, which would allow players to influence the outcomes more, the game would feel a lot more strategic, but for players who don’t have a set of collector cards in their collection yet, or novice players who are a little less afraid of randomness, this game offers enough surprises to keep them on their toes.
