The research station is stuck in an ever-shrinking time loop—use your time-manipulating powers to accomplish your objectives before time runs out!

Chronofiends!! (yes, the exclamation points are part of the title) is a cooperative time-loop game for 1 to 4 players, ages 13 and up, and takes about 90 minutes to play. It’s currently seeking funding on Kickstarter, with a pledge level of $49 for a copy of the game, with additional tiers that include deluxe component upgrades and more content.

Chronofiends!! was designed by Matt Hewes and Patrick Liddell and published by Spacemole Games, with illustrations by Patrick Liddell.

New to Kickstarter? Check out our crowdfunding primer.

Note: My review is based on a prototype copy, so it is subject to change and may not reflect final component quality.

Here’s what comes in the box:

The game takes place on a big space station made up of tiles that are octagonal (with a square hallway attached). Each of the rooms is illustrated to look like a top-down view of the room, with tons of little details along the walls, plus numbers 1 through 8 that are used to determine random movement for the Chronofiends. The downside to all of that thematic detail, though, is that the tiles are quite large—as you explore the space station and add more tiles to the starting setup, you may stretch the capacity of your table, because the player boards also take up a good amount of space. My personal preference would be for these tiles to be smaller, but I understand that would probably be a lot of work to reconfigure things so that everything is still legible. Even as it is, the numbers on the edges can be hard to read at a distance since they’re done in perspective on the walls so everything is foreshortened.

The timeline track is made up of several square-ish tiles, spanning from 0 to 60 time. You’ll only use the full timeline (which measures around 33″ long) in a solo game on easy mode, but even at 4 players this is also a large component you’ll need to have space for.

I mentioned the large player boards. Everyone gets a skill tracker board, the one seen in the middle with the spaces for cubes. It has 6 different skills, with 11 spaces on each track. To the left of that is your character board, which describes all of your character abilities (and in some cases has spaces to store some ability tokens.) Pantrophel, seen above, has another board placed to the right of the skill tracker, making it the widest player setup by far, but between the space station and the timeline and four player areas, things can get pretty crowded! The Kickstarter page says the skill tracker and character boards will be dual-layered (the prototype was just single layer with holes cut out), and the skill cubes will be color-coded instead of just plain wood as in the prototype.

Overall the graphic design in the prototype is functional but rudimentary, particularly the character boards, which are mostly just large blocks of text. The “resolved” tiles, used to mark a room when it has been dealt with, are a strange diamond shape that reminds me of old hotel keychains—they aren’t shaped like the rooms they go in and don’t seem to fit the octagon/square shape used for most things in the rest of the game, so it’s kind of an odd choice. The illustrations of the rooms, characters, and items are cartoony but have lots of fun details.

You can download a draft of the rulebook here, and it’s available to try for free on Tabletopia.

The game has multiple scenarios to play, each with its own objectives. The goal is to meet your objectives before the time loop shrinks to the point where you run out of time.

Each scenario has a starting layout of the 16 starting rooms plus the Detention Facility; place one Chronofiend in each of the Chronofiend rooms. Place the other rooms in a supply nearby, sorted by type, along with the various tokens like chronomoats, boosts, and scenario tokens.

Each player chooses a character and takes the character board along with any character ability tokens or components for that character. Place your character standee in the Detention Facility. Take a skill tracker board and place 6 tracker cubes at the “0” space of the board.

Set up the timeline according to the player count—the more players there are, the less time you begin with. Place all of the player time tokens at the top of the track, along with the Chronofiends time token.

If your time token is higher than everyone else’s, then it’s your turn! (When there’s a tie, players may choose.)

On your turn, you may move through doorways until you reach a room that hasn’t been resolved, whether it was already on the map or discovered through a doorway. You may explore new rooms only through the doorways marked with a “+” symbol, and the new room must be placed with the hallway portion connected to the “+” door. You must spend time to resolve a room’s task, and then your turn ends. Mark the room with a “Resolved” token—players may now walk through this room by spending 1 time.

Each room has one or two tasks: each shows a skill type and an amount of time, and usually includes a reward of some type. For instance, the Transporter Room at the far right has two tasks: the one on the bottom would require spending 17 time using the Hack skill, but the reward is you may move yourself anywhere.

Whenever you spend time, you will advance the corresponding skill on your skill tracker, which then reduces the amount of time that type of action will cost in the future. The more time you spend, the more skill points you gain. Each of the skills has a bonus of some sort when you reach the “-5” level. The first four skill tracks represent the different aliens on board the station.

As you resolve rooms, you may gain various boost tokens: allies and weapons are common boosts, and then there are also unique boosts. Every ally gives you a -1 time discount for every encounter, and weapons give you a -2 time discount on every alien encounter. (They have different artwork on the front, but are otherwise equivalent.) You may only have 2 allies but any number of weapons.

The unique boost tokens may only be found in specific rooms. If you complete an encounter that has a boost listed, then you find the corresponding token and add it to your supply. These all have unique abilities (marked on the back), and the tile colors correspond to the type of room where they are found.

Whenever it’s the Chronofiends turn, they will move: roll the 8-sided die, and all Chronofiends move one space from their rooms in the direction indicated. (Note the small numbers on the edges of the location tiles.) Chronofiends that go off the edge of the station will warp back in, Pac-Man-style, in a straight line on the opposite side of the station. They’ll also pass through the hallway portions of rooms and will only stop when they reach the central portion of a room. Chronomoats—placed when somebody reaches 5 Hack or uses a Temporal Mechanics room—cannot be crossed by Chronofiends. Chronofiends use 6 time each time they take a turn.

If a Chronofiend is ever in the same room as a character, the character is sent back to the Detention Facility, the Chronofiend, and the top tile of the time track is removed. (If there are still tokens on that tile, slide it apart to show that it has been lost.)

When you reach 10 or lower on the time track, you may opt to spend the rest of your time to gain half as many skill points. If you’re supposed to resolve a room but you don’t have sufficient time, you simply use up the rest of your time but do not resolve the room.

Once everyone has run out of time, the loop ends and will reset:

A new loop starts—rooms that were discovered previously are left on the map, and skill points you gained are retained.

Each scenario has its own particular objectives and special rules, but generally you will be required to locate certain boosts and get them to a particular room, which may enable some new task. You win if you accomplish the scenario goals, and you lose if your time track gets too short to complete them. (Some scenarios have additional loss conditions.)

Ah, time loops! I love time travel stories, and when I saw that Chronofiends!! was a game about being stuck in a time loop, I really wanted to see how it was implemented. The basic gist is that you’ve got a specific amount of time to accomplish a task, and if you don’t succeed, the loop resets and you start over—but this time with the knowledge of the new rooms you’ve explored, as well as the skills you’ve gained that help you resolve encounters more efficiently. What’s different from most other time-loop plotlines is the fact that the Chronofiends are eating up the timeline, so each trip through the loop is shorter than the last. That’s the real time pressure: if enough of the loop gets destroyed, you won’t have enough left to finish your objective.

With all that in mind, using time as your primary resource makes sense. Everything you do spends time, but gaining skills and equipment reduces the time spent on tasks. Each of the different skills offers a different bonus, so over the course of a few loops players can specialize in different skills, trying to choose the best path through the station that lets everyone play to their strengths.

Learning the layout of the station is crucial in the first couple loops. Most of the scenarios involve finding specific items and bringing them to a particular room—but there’s no point in doing that if you can’t finish the whole objective during that loop, because things will reset. It’s also important, of course, to build up skill points, because there are rooms that take as much as 19 time to resolve—and even in the first loop that’s a huge chunk of your available time.

Each of the types of rooms has different types of rewards, so you can try to dig for the effects that you want. Locality rooms have some rewards that let you place additional room tiles down, to get the layout built more quickly. Relativity rooms have a couple of rewards that let you move anywhere on the map. Causality rooms can manipulate time, giving somebody time back so they can get a little bit more done this loop. Finally, some Prescience rooms award extra skill points. But even then there’s a lot of randomness baked in, and each of the stacks has one Chronofiend room, which just adds another Chronofiend to the board, making everything more dangerous.

Getting hit by a Chronofiend is the worst—not only does it send you back to the detention center so you’ll have to waste time getting back to where you wanted to be, but it removes a chunk of the timeline, so that on future loops you’ll be even more pressed for time. Clever placement of the chronomoats can protect you, but sometimes you just have to take that 1-in-8 chance that a nearby Chronofiend is going to head in your direction.

The character abilities are quite varied and make for a fun mix. I won’t dig into all of the details, but here’s a quick rundown:

The scenario book comes with 6 scenarios, but the campaign is quickly approaching a stretch goal that will add 6 solo scenarios, and there are additional scenarios included in some of the later stretch goals as well as the expansion. I haven’t gotten to try all of them yet, but I did look through them and there’s a nice variety there too. One scenario involves hazmat cleanup—you’ll have to spend some extra time to clean 8 rooms while also finding the three goal objects and delivering them to the transporter room. Another one involves finding an artifact, but as soon as somebody picks it up, Chronofiends always move toward the artifact rather than in random directions. The scenarios are quite challenging—we came within a hairs’ breadth of winning the hazmat scenario but were 2 time short for the last cleanup, and the next loop was going to be too short. You can also make the scenarios easier by adding one timeline tile at setup, so we may need to try that next time.

One of the mechanics that is thematically clever can also be a little frustrating at times: whoever has the most time remaining is the active player. It’s reminiscent of Tokaido, where it’s your turn if you’re the farthest behind on the track. As soon as you spend enough time that you’re not at the top of the track, then it’s somebody else’s turn. The annoying part is when you spend one turn resolving an expensive room, dropping you halfway down the time track, and then you don’t get to do anything while somebody else takes turn after turn after turn—in one game, one player managed to build up enough skill and weapon points to reduce most costs to 1 time, and we would just sit and watch him play several turns in a row for each one of ours. (There was a particular combination of items that exacerbated this, plus we were using a now-outdated version of Omni, so I think some of it has been mitigated.)

Overall, Chronofiends!! has a good mix of exploration and planning, and really requires players to work together on deciding who tackles what. Time is precious and you’re likely not going to succeed if everyone just does their own thing on their turns without consulting other players. If you like that sort of collaborative experience (and time travel!), then it’s definitely worth checking out.

For more information or to make a pledge, visit the Chronofiends!! Kickstarter page!

Disclosure: GeekDad received a prototype of this game for review purposes.

Source: geekdad.com