Episode 129 –Daniel ZayasTangled Timelines

Daniel Zayas is well-known in boardgaming circles, especially on Facebook. We talk to him about snow and football… but then get to the real reason we’re here: his new game!

Tangled Timelines

Tangled Timelines is a card game, on Kickstarter starting January 22nd.

Tangled Timelines is a strongly thematic set-collection game. Start with a hand of 4 cards, representing different heroes, at a variety of skill levels. (Alphabetical set of fantasy characters.) Rescue other heroes by sending your heroes into the “tangled timelines”. Hope you play a strong enough hero to gain initiative and be the first to trade in your hero.

Any heroes not rescued are lost to the dimensional abyss. Heroes appear at mutliple skill levels (Apprentice, Novice, Master, Legendary).

e.g. If you play an apprentice Assassin, you’ll lose that card, but gain all other apprentice-level characters and all other Assassin characters currently in the abyss. If the next player plays an apprentice Bard, they’ll gain that apprentice Assassin that you lost.

You are playing against the other players, assuming what they are going to use against you. End game, build up a large hand and score based on largest chain (A-M) and highest-ranking 4 of a kind. This is where the scoring comes from.

“There is a set-collection scoring element, but that’s really to determine how well you played the interesting parts of the game.”Daniel Zayas

Abilities

You can play as we’ve described above, swapping cards in and out of the abyss, and it makes for a fun game, perfect to play with kids or grandparents. But that’s not all!

In the “full” version, every card has a special ability. If you win initiative, you MUST use your special ability. ie. the Assassin makes you give a card to the person with the lowest initiative. The Bard can only rescue one character from the abyss.

Special abilities mean you do a lot more analysis, deciding what’s the highest initiative you can play with a special ability that won’t hurt you. Or maybe you’ll decide you don’t want to go first, so you aren’t forced to use that ability!

Anitra compares this initiative struggle (“do I really want to go first”) to Gravwell.

Daniel recommends that any time you play Tangled Timelines with new players, to play the first round without special abilities. Don’t bog yourself down figuring out all the abilities until you understand the flow of the game.

It’s a nice quick game and Andrew looks forward to keeping this handy for those times we want to play in 20 minutes or less.

The art that has been released so far looks fantastic. There are 2 artists. Illustragus is doing the character art (diverse cast but dynamic martial arts inspired poses), and Bryce Cook is doing the rest of the graphic design. Alex Williams animated the video promo.

More about Daniel:

If you have heard of Daniel Zayas before, it’s probably because of the social media groups he manages. As his day job, he works for LongPack Games Manufacturing, helping people with manufacturing, logistics, etc. for their games (especially Kickstarter projects). The community-building he does started before that job,