User:JoeGillAT

About Time

About Time is a board game launched in 2007 by Circa Circa Ltd, a games company founded by Joe Gill, Iain McGill and Matt Gould in October 2006.

The game is of the trivia or quiz variety, with a broad historical theme, and is designed as a party or parlour game for a duration of 30 to 90 minutes. It was launched at Essen Spiel 2007.

In the game, players attempt to guess the year of historic events, with the player or team that guesses closest to the correct year collecting a token or tokens.

Game Elements

Aside from the board, the most important element of the game is the question card and the card holder in which question cards are held. Each question card contains six events in six categories. The answer to all the questions is a single year or, in a minority of cases, a number of years falling into a single decade or century. The year of the events ranges from 2007, the year of publication, back to ancient events in the first millennium Before Christ, although the median year of question cards is 1970.

Design and art work for the game was by UK designer Michele Rosaus.

Game Mechanics

The game can be played with 2 to 8 teams of players, in singles or groups. During each round all teams try to guess the year of the event, with the closest answer enabling the winning team to move their player piece with a roll of the dice.

Each team is given four 'Time Cards' at the beginning of the game, which can be used during the game to increase the chance of winning a round. The two main Time Cards are 'Clue' which gives the user an extra question from the same card, and Digit, which allows the user to ask for a digit of their choice from the answer year.

The board contains an inner and outer circle and movement is clockwise around both. A dice i is rolled to move, with only the winner of each round moving. The board includes a number of jeopardy spaces, including Duels, Plagues and Highwaymen. All of these can deplete a player's stock of tokens, or allow a player to take tokens off other players by winning a round. Time Cards can be accumulated by landing on the relevant board space. Once a team arrives at the centre of the board, they must win a round in order to end the game, or return to a 'Castle' spot on the inner circle. At the end of the game the player with the most tokens wins, although this is not necessarily the team that ends the game.

Game launch

The game was launched through the Borders bookstore chain in the UK in December 2007. A distribution deal was signed by Circa Circa Ltd with Esdevium Games of the UK and another with Fred/funagain.com, the independent US games distributor. Distribution in the US was planned for early 2008.

The launch was announced in the UK's Toy News on 4 December 2007.

Reviews

User reviews of the product began to appear on the board game website www.boardgamegeek.com in October 2007.