or, How I Invented a Time Machine Disguised as
a Deck of Playing Cards
By Andrew Looney
People often ask me how I came up with Fluxx,
how long it took, etc, and I always feel like they're disappointed
with my answer. That game practically designed itself, with all
the key design points coming together in my mind on a single day
(July 25, 1996 to be exact). But Chrononauts,
my new time travel card game, took almost 6 months of deliberate
brainstorming, research, flow charting, mechanics tinkering, playtesting,
development, and refinement to create. Let's travel back in time
now to the beginning of that process, and find out how it all
came together.
Late one night last January, I had a vision of a time travel
card game that would be fast, easy to learn, and totally fun to
play, in which players could change history, explore alternate
histories, and bring home souvenirs like dinosaurs and other stuff
that doesn't exist anymore. As a lifelong fan of time travel stories,
I wanted my game to include nods to the many different time travel
stories I've enjoyed over the years, with lots of my own ideas
and fascinations stirred into the mix as well. Most of all, I
wanted it to be rip-roarin' fun, with as little ponderous head-scratching
as possible, given the complexity of the subject. I wanted my
third card game to provide all the thrills of time travel with
the same sort of fast, easy-to-play fun as my first two card games,
Fluxx and Aquarius.
I didn't think anything like this had ever been done before.
Time travel has been used in lots of RPGs (Steve Jackson's "GURPS
Time Travel" is an excellent resource), and superficially
in some arcade games, but hardly ever (to my knowledge) in regular
card or board games. The only example I could think of (not counting
Rio Grande's pending release, entitled "Time Pirates")
is Prism/TimJim Games' "Time Agent", published in 1992,
and it's altogether different from the kind of game I wanted to
make. Time Agent uses a complex, chit-and-tile-based board to
simulate the changing flow of history, and the galactic scale
of the game left out most of what I think is cool about time travel,
namely changing the course of famous historical events and imagining
the different worlds that would be created as result. What good
is a time travel game if you don't get to prevent the sinking
of the Titanic, the attack on Pearl Harbor, or the murder of John
Lennon?
So
I started reviewing the literature of time travel, to find out
what people were most interested in using it for. The Titanic
came up a lot (although attempts to keep it from sinking usually
fail), as did the assassination of JFK (or Lincoln, in the case
of stories written before 1963). Plus of course, everybody wants
to go back and kill Hitler. Naturally, I wanted to include all
of these events in my game, along with others that occurred to
me, like the launch of Sputnik, the assassination of Archduke
Ferdinand, and the explosion of the Hindenburg. I began developing
a complex flowchart, focusing on about a dozen of these historical
"linchpins" (major events that a time traveler could
theoretically alter the outcome of), and the possible futures
they might have lead to had things gone differently. But then
the question became, how to use this in a game?
At first I envisioned a card deck filled with famous historical
events, five to seven of which might be out on the table at any
given time; but this quickly evolved into an ever-present grid
of 32 cards that simulates the TimeLine of Changeable History.
Certain cards on the TimeLine, called Linchpins, would represent
the 13 turning points in history that can be reversed by the players
during the course of the game. In my earliest experimental prototypes,
there was a corresponding counter-event for each of these Linchpins;
for example, to prevent the sinking of the Lusitania, you needed
to draw the "Lusitania Arrives Safely" card, then place
it over the "Lusitania Sinks" card on the TimeLine,
thereby altering the flow of history. This mechanism was greatly
improved when we realized we could turn those pairs of cards into
double-sided cards, and then use more generic action cards like
"Prevent Assassination", "Avert Disaster",
and "Reverse Fate" to invert and restore the Linchpins.
Thus, when you flip over the 1912 Linchpin, it instantly changes
from "Titanic Sinks" to "Titanic Avoids Iceberg."
This double-sided-card trick is very effective, causing the headline
to seemingly change before your eyes, like a newspaper in one
of the "Back to the Future" movies.
OK, so by now I had an interesting mechanism for simulating
the changing of history due to meddling by time travelers, but
I was still a long way from having a finished game. What would
the players be trying to accomplish? How would you win?
To
answer these questions, I had to start comparing this card game
to a Live Action Role Playing game. LARPs are one of the few gaming
genres where I've seen time travel used effectively. Back in 1985,
at the dawn of the LARP age, I was the primary writer on Reklone-3,
an Interactive Literature game (that's what we called it back
then) about a gathering of 75 time travelers, summoned to repair
a widening hole in the space-time continuum. I thought about that
game a lot as I developed Chrononauts, hoping to infuse the card
game with the same sort of layered and multi-directional action
one finds in a LARP. This is why there are 3 different ways to
win in Chrononauts. Each player has a unique character, with a
goal of returning to the alternate reality they came from; they
are also issued a secret mission, which requires they track down
a particular set of unique historical artifacts; and finally,
all players share a "big picture" objective, namely
to amass enough victory points (in the form of extra cards in
hand), each earned by repairing damaged areas of the TimeLine
called Paradoxes. Having several goals at once provides an interweaving
of game elements not unlike the intertwining of plotlines in a
movie or sitcom, while also giving the player two other paths
to victory whenever fate makes one path seemingly unattainable.
Finally, I looked to my successes with Fluxx for ideas on implementing
the race to obtain the right combination of rare and amazing artifacts.
This would be akin to the "widget hunt", a staple design
element used in many a LARP game, but with a mechanism very much
like the Keeper system used in Fluxx. However, instead of using
one shared goal for all players, each player would have a unique
goal, as in Aquarius, dealt out at the beginning of the game and
kept secret until achieved by some player. There are also single-use
Action cards, again working very much like the ones in Fluxx,
but named appropriately for the game. For example, the equivalent
to Steal a Keeper is called Get There First, the idea being that
if I can go back in time to the moment just before the moment
when you saved those scrolls from the burning library of Alexandria,
then I can grab them myself, thus causing them to vanish from
your display case and reappear in mine. (Not that they'll stay
mine for long, of course, since with a Rewind card you can make
anything happen again, except this time, the way you wanted it
to.)
Chrononauts is currently in the final stages of Beta-testing. Those of you
with time machines are encouraged to skip ahead to Halloween and pick up a copy
of the finished game right now.
Update: Chrononauts
is now available! Read more about
Chrononauts and buy
it here!
Copyright © 2000 by Andrew
Looney.
