So, after Fedex dragging their feet as much as humanly possible (the package was in Wisconsin the Saturday before last, which is a few hours from here tops, but somehow it still took until this past Friday to arrive), I finally received my Kickstarter copy of Temporal Odyssey, a small drafting card game of dueling time travellers that Level 99 Games Kickstarted sometime last year, as a sort of appetizer between things like the reprint of Argent: The Consortium and upcoming magic train game Empyreal. Today we tried it out. Short version: it’s good. Straightforward, reasonably attractive, aggressive, fast, and varied, for about $30.
Long version: The basic idea is that you play one of six (eight with promos) time travellers, each with their own special starting spells and allied characters etc. Your goal is to defeat the other time traveller(s). But it’s not as easy as that, being time travellers. Any time you defeat a traveler, they get knocked outside of time and face Judgment. But then they come right back the next turn, just a little less temporally stable. So instead you have to force them to destabilize three times, either through direct defeat, discarding their allies (2 discarded ally characters = 1 instability), playing powerful artifacts, or possibly other shenanigans, and then defeat them, at which point they’re finally banished from the time stream and out of your hair.
You do this by recruiting your own allies, casting spells (empowered by elemental sigils you have in play, but effective even at a basic level), powering up with rare artifacts, and engaging in physical combat or using special abilities on your cards. But any of these use your limited action point resource, and a card with AP on it can’t be activated again that turn. Furthermore, when you cast spells they are exhausted until you use an AP on your traveler to Rest (which also denies them the ability to attack). And characters form allied groups and share defensive abilities for further complication.
And oh yeah, at the end of each turn, you draft a new card. There are three time period decks, future, present and past, and you draw three cards from one of these decks, take one of the cards, put another one back face up on the deck, and banish a third from the game. This is one of the most clever design elements, because all of these cards are powerful and potentially dangerous in both your hands and those of your opponent(s) and yet, you can only take one, and the card you put back is a known quantity for their planning purposes and guaranteed to be available.
Make no mistake: this game is brutal. In my first turn of offense, I slaughtered two of one of my friends’ character cards, ones he hadn’t even had a chance to do much with yet, and damaged his traveller, for an instability and an easy setup for another the next turn. I then promptly lost my traveller (and an instability) to a character who did enough damage to one shot him from my other friend’s tableau. (He proceeded to handily blow past my defenses and kill my traveller another two times on the two subsequent turns, although with different approaches. I still won.) We constantly looked at cards and emitted audible gasps of shock at what they’d let us do.
It’s a keeper. We did fuck it up a little bit though, by house-ruling a Vampire: The Eternal Struggle style predator-prey arrangement to prevent dogpiling - except my friend specified we couldn’t even affect our predator by using abilities to affect their ability to attack us. Having defined targets to rush down offensively seems like the only way to have a fair 3 way free for all, and may still work, but not being able to target his stuff really made several effects feel useless to me. We’ll skip that part next time.
