If you don't know who Cheapass Games are, it is a company that was started by James Ernst in 1995 after quitting his freelance job at Wizards of the Coast. He had an idea to create cheap boardgames by only packaging the necessary materials unique to each game. His reasoning was that most tabletop gamers already have plenty of dice, tokens, fake money, and player pawn pieces from the games they already own. It was kind of a meat-and-potatoes company that became big in the late '90s and into the early 2000s. They made many award winning games -- some you may be familiar with. Some of their creations were even picked up by other companies and turned into full blown, high quality board games, such as Kill Doctor Lucky. Many of them, however, have become obscure and hard to find. This is the story of such a game.
That game is U.S. Patent No. 1, a time travel adventure where the players race and battle each other through time to stake their claim in time travel technology. You see, each player takes the role of an inventor who created a time machine. In order to be hailed as the inventor of time travel, they must go to the patent office. But there's a funny thing about patenting time travel: Unless you're the very first person in line at the patent office when it opens on day one, someone else is going to beat you to it. Therefore, you must travel through time, doing research, upgrading your time machine, and making a bit of money with your uncanny "knowledge from the future" and have a fully functional time machine when your number is called at the patent office, all the way back in 1790. Be the first one to do so and you win.
Of course, it takes more than just going back to 1790 and just saying, "Okay, I'm here. Gimme a patent." In order to have a fully operational time machine, you have to have a complete array of functional upgrades installed onto it. There are four categories of upgrades you need to get. In the chassis category, you pick a vehicle -- it could be an airplane, a bicycle, a "horseless carriage," or the bargain basement canoe option -- that allows you move faster through the timestream (sorry, no DeLorean DMC-12 here). Weapons are used for putting the hurt on your fellow time travelers by disabling, or destroying, one of their upgrades. Shields help prevent other time travelers from doing the same to you. Finally, power generators allow you to keep your other upgrades working -- no power, no functioning upgrades.
This game, like other Cheapass Games, isn't the best looking,
but it delivers on the fun for a reasonable price.
I played this for the first time (even though I've had the game for a decade) with fellow Streakers Kspaz and Ginger last week -- or is that a week from now? Either way, it was real easy to teach them the game and we got a couple of playthroughs out of the night (Kspaz won, both times). I asked what they thought of the game and they had no complaints. We had a fun time sabotaging each others' machines and trying to permanently etch our names into a mutable history.
If you're interested in playing this game, I have only two words for you: good luck. This game has been out of print for years and is really hard to find. Your best bet may be to try and track a copy down on ebay (I did see one up for auction, recently, but it'll be gone by the time you get there). I know, it's pretty crappy of me to entice people to a game that is practically unavailable. But, hey, this is about time travel board games. Why don't you just go back to 2001 and pick up a copy? I mean, if we can avert disasters and rewrite history to suit our needs, then snagging some old board game should be a cakewalk, in comparison (oh, wait, we can't do those things, yet).
And so ends my look into board games for the time traveler. Sadly, there really aren't that many games out there that explore this famous science fiction trope. Sure, there's a couple of old rpgs out there, such as TimeMaster and, of course, Doctor Who. There was also a series of Choose Your Own Adventure style books, called Time Machine, which are hard to find, as well. It really is a shame, since time travel really is a fascinating concept that would work well with gaming. Perhaps someone from the future will come to our time and introduce new games that allow us to break through the fourth dimension.
But we'll just have to wait and see, won't we?
(Images courtesy of BoardGameGeek.com)
I'm going to assume time travelers are to blame for why Cheapass Games games' are hard to find.
ReplyDeleteToo bad they didn't travel back to when they first came out to increase production, but that's time travelers for you always thinking in the short term.