Chrononauts

In a previous post I offered bonus brownie points for identifying the source of the post's title. And here's the answer (as posted by Norman Dean) - a card from the excellent Chrononauts game.

Anyway, Chrononauts was in our holiday games pile but we never got around to playing it, so Catherine and I gave it a go yesterday evening. Here's the 'normal' timeline, but both of us are playing time-travellers who come from different timelines and need to mess with history in order to create theirs and get home.

Hmm. Looks like Catherine's timeline depends on JFK not being assassinated.

Towards the end the timeline was looking very unstable; if there are 13 paradoxes in play then the game ends along with the entire universe. My timeline depended on that old favourite, killing Hitler. Thanks to Catherine flipping history back to normal a couple of times, Hitler was killed more than once in this game. John Lennon wasn't, though.

As it was, Catherine created her timeline (the 1929 Stock Market Crash, Woodrow Wilson keeping the US out of WW1 and Martin Luther King becoming president in 1974) and won the game.

Here's my eclectic selection of artifacts. Each player has a secret goal involving the collection of three of a specific set of three of these, which is another way of winning. I was after Mona Lisas (there are three in the game).

I didn't take any pictures of the second game, which was over quite quickly. Catherine failed to turn any of the timeline how she wanted it. I was one of my favourite time-travellers - a super-evolved cockroach from a far-future where humanity was wiped out in a nuclear war prompted by the Cuban Missile Crisis. So I had to start WWIII, amongst other things. I actually had that all set up, but then got lucky and got my three artifacts (I was after the Mona Lisas, yet again), so won via that route instead.

To be honest it's not great as a two-player game. Part of the fun involves chaotic changes to the timeline, and with two players these simply don't happen; it's much easier to simply undo whatever the other player does, which makes for a relatively static game.