At last we come to the final entry on the list. The game that we liked above all of the others. We aren’t arguing that this is the best game ever - just the one we personally have had the best experience with. Time Stories is by far the game we look forward to playing the most. It incorporates a lot of the bits and pieces of the games we’ve mentioned recently. Immersive storytelling, some randomness with dice rolls, and puzzles to figure out.
Time Stories is a scenario game which generally means you are only going to get to play each scenario one time unless you have a bad memory. Some of them are better than others (my personal favorite is still Marcy’s Case) but they are all very unique and bring some small changes to the mechanics to make the game play feel fresh each time. While you can only play each scenario once we’ve also really enjoyed watching other people play the same scenario as us to see how they play through all the events in the story differently!
Another one of the aspects that really brings us into the game is the theme of the game is a time traveling mechanic. You are all time agents from the future going into the past to fix something that has gone wrong in the timeline. Very few board games successfully integrate time travel into the game. Each of the scenarios has a brief bit of story in the present day (the future to us) that interconnect from scenario to scenario. While each scenario has had its own pay off we are looking forward to where the story about the overarching world takes us as well!
The game play mechanics are fairly simple with the group going from location to location taking time to spend actions with a limited amount of time allowed. Occasionally there will be tests or combat that need to be resolved which are performed with simple dice mechanics. This gives Time Stories just enough meet to be more than simply a story telling games like the others that we have mentioned. You have limited time so a lot of the game is figuring out how to get from the start of your adventure to the end with time to spare! If you don’t succeed on your first try you get to keep a few things and try again! This also gives you a handy time to take a break if you want to spread a scenario across a few evenings of fun!
No game is for everyone but this one was definitely made for us. A terrific theme, immersive story, cooperative, and lots of exploration with puzzle solving weaved in as well. We always wait with baited breath for when the next expansion will be released. There have been some exploring the arctic, the original is in an insane asylum, some deal with grisly more modern events. Each one has felt distinctly different while still giving the same enjoyable gaming experience. We wish we could just have that same fun experience each time but maybe the fact we can’t replay them makes us like it that much more as we are thinking about Time Stories as we eagerly await the next release. So with that we conclude our Top 100 games with our personal favorite - Time Stories!