Time for a Game

A few years ago, I played a real beast of a board game called Cerebria: The Inside World... and didn't like it very much. It had wildly complex rules, taking almost as long to explain as it did to play, and didn't feel to me like it had enough strategic weight to merit such complexity.

Three of the designers involved with Cerebria --  Dávid Turczi, Richard Amann, and Viktor Peter -- collaborated on an earlier game, Anachrony, that remains in the Top 50 at Board Game Geek. Because of that experience with Cerebria, I was a bit reluctant to try it. But I was pleasantly surprised when I did.

Anachrony has a somewhat involved back story, but the main thrust is this: a cataclysm has come to the planet, but you have the opportunity to use time travel to send resources back in time and prepare a group of people for evacuation before the last city on the planet collapses. Four players each embody a different "path" for how to do this best, each with a slightly different emphasis on what types of people to evacuate, and each with different "main characters" you can select for a game (each with a unique power).

Though this game isn't quite as elaborate or involved as Cerebria, it is a lot of game. But more so than Cerebria (by far), it does start to make sense once you're a round or two into play. Systems do dovetail together well, goals are pretty clear, and your options on each of your turns are fairly easy to grasp. It's just that it's all connected in a way that defies easy explanation; I won't attempt to summarize here a rules set that easily takes half an hour to an hour to explain.

However, there are a few mechanics in particular that are the real meat of play, and worth highlighting. Anachrony is a worker placement game. First, each player has their own private placement spaces on a personal board (and constructs more throughout the game). Those are fairly low cost to utilize. But then there are the shared spaces on a central game board, which have a higher cost to access -- and which you essentially have to plan for at the start of each round, by choosing to "power up exo-suits" that allow your workers to go out onto the harsh apocalyptic surface of the planet. There's a tricky needle being threaded here, in that you need to know at the start of a round just how many exo-suits you're going to want for actions on the central board... yet it's also OK not to have every action you'll take planned precisely. You can't, because your opponents might beat you to the limited spaces.

There's also an interesting "time travel" mechanic at the core of play. At the start of each round, you can give yourself limited resources from the bank, for free, figuratively "sent from the future." But in future rounds, you have to "pay back" those resources (to the bank) by "sending them back in time" to preserve the timeline that gave them to you in the first place. If you fail to do this, you risk a paradox that can gum up your personal game board, cost you victory points, and threaten your win. It's an interesting mechanic that I think I was too risk-averse about when I played. This is a time travel themed game, after all. I'll be curious to explore the mechanic more in subsequent plays.

When I tried out Anachrony, all players were all buckling under the weight of the rules explanation, and pretty skeptical at first about how this game found its way to the top of the Board Game Geek chart. But by halfway through our play, all four players agreed that this was fun, had a lot of potential, and that we'd definitely want to play again before the rules faded from our memories.

I'd say Anachrony merits at least a B+, and I wouldn't be surprised if my opinion of it grows when I get to play it more. That it hit in my group, despite being a good deal more complex than we generally like, I think says a lot.