The Inside Scoop on Gaming

Chrononauts is a card game based on time travel and produced by Looney Labs. Looney are best known for Fluxx, a beer-and-pretzels card game of changing rules. Chrononauts has more structure than Fluxx did, but the beer-and-pretzels feel is still there.

Chrononauts is based on the Timeline, a fixed set of cards which are laid on the table at the start of the game and which represent events in history, from Lincoln to Columbine. (Being a US game, the events are rather tilted in favor of American history; the rulebook mentions potential expansions with alternate timelines.) Each event is classified as either a Lynchpin or a Ripplepoint, which affects what can be done with it in the game.

In addition to the Timeline, each player has a hand of cards of their own. Each turn, a player draws one card and then must either play or discard one; if they chose to discard, they can additionally recycle a further card. Cards enable players to affect the timeline, and also provide a number of other subsystems which are discussed below. The cards have no art other than abstract icons as discussed below; however, the text on them is clear and the layout is pleasing and easy to read.

Each Lynchpin card in the Timeline initially shows an event which occurred in real-world history. By using cards, players can flip the Lynchpins over; the reverse side of each Lynchpin shows a particular alternate event. For example, Hitler's appearance at the Berlin Olympics is a Lynchpin; flipping it changes it to show Hitler's assassination at the Games. The cards used to flip Lynchpins vary in the range of changes they permit; Reverse Fate allows any Lynchpin to be flipped, but others have a limited range stated on the card. (For example, Prevent Assassination couldn't flip Hitler as described here - but if another player had flipped it already, the holder of this card could flip it back again.)

Ripplepoints are different beasts altogether. Players cannot flip these directly; instead, each one depends on one or more Lynchpins. If these dependancies are disturbed via being flipped, then the Ripplepoint will flip too. Also unlike Lynchpins, Ripplepoints do not show alternate events on the back; instead, they flip to become Paradoxes. For example, the Final Solution is included as a Ripplepoint. If Hitler got flipped as described above, so that he was assassinated at the Berlin Games, then the Final Solution could never have happened; thus the Ripplepoint also flips to become a Paradox. (Some of them are a little less obvious: for example, the Columbine massacre is paradoxed if John Lennon is not murdered!) Although it might seem that this would require a lot of awkward checking, the game designers have put a lot of effort into ensuring this isn't the case: every Lynchpin includes a list of the Ripplepoints than need to be checked if it flips, and every Ripplepoint has its dependancies written on it in a clear iconic notation.

Paradoxes are bad things, because if there are ever 13 of them on the Timeline, the universe collapses and everybody loses. To get rid of them, you can either flip the Lynchpins back to their original states so that the original Ripplepoints are restored, or you can play a Patch card from your hand onto the Ripplepoint to fix up the holes in your alternate history. If you do this, you also get to draw a new card - this might not sound like much, but bear in mind that every other action in the game has zero-sum effect on your hand, so patching a Paradox effectively increases your hand size by one.

Perhaps unfortunately, there is only one Ripplepoint in the game that has more than one Patch. In other words, there is a fixed alternate history, and by flipping and Patching you can only alter how much of it shows through. The one exception is the dropping of the H-Bomb on Japan, which has three different patches with different prerequisites. For example, if there was no WW2 and no Pearl Harbor then the bomb would never have been dropped, and you can Patch the ripplepoint into a rare time of world peace. But the bomb would also never have been dropped if, in spite of both WW2 and Pearl Harbor happening, the bomb was never invented; in this case, you can Patch it into a conventional assault on Japan having occured. There is also a special case called the "Uber Paradox", which relates to the Cuban Missile Crisis: if it gets transformed into its alternate form (World War 3) then the entire remainder of the timeline is shut down until it's restored to normal.

As well as cards which play around with the Timeline, there are other cards available. The most notable of these are Artifacts, which are basically the same as Keepers in Fluxx - you take a turn to put them into play, and then you've got them. The Artifacts all represent various valuable items from different times (including such wonders as a Betamax videotape of the creation of the universe). Sadly, the artifacts are not at all linked to the timeline, so if your opponent has the real Mona Lisa and you have the fake one, you can't flip any Lynchpin to prevent the original ever having been painted and thus make yours become the original. Finally, there are Action and Timewarp cards which provide special effects, such as retrieving discarded cards, stealing artifacts, halting other players' actions, and similar. These are all justified in terms of time travel; for example, to steal an artifact you just go get it a second before your opponent does.

So what are we actually trying to achieve here? Alas, there is a reason why I have held off on this discussion. At the start of the game, you recieve two randomly selected cards. The first is your ID, representing the time traveller you're playing; and the second is your Mission. Your ID will show a piece of flavor text and three events, and you win the game if you can manipulate the timeline so that those three events occured. Typically they will all be Ripplepoint events (so you need to Patch them in), and at least one of them will be an event from real-world history (so you need to prevent that event changing in the Timeline). Sadly, these three events don't represent what your time traveller wants to happen or anything like that: they just represent the timeline from which the time traveller came. What that means is that the events usually have no bearing whatsoever on the description of your character. There are a few amusing counterexamples (such as the infamous giant cockroach, who was amongst those who took over the planet after mankind's extinction in World War 3), but generally there's little bearing. For example, Dale is a time traveller who uses copies of himself as agents. Amongst other things he must prevent the Great Depression and ensure the founding of Israel. Huh?

The Mission card is similar: instead of listing Lynchpins it instead lists three artifacts that you must possess in order to win the game. There is a third way to win, too: if you get your hand size up to 10 by patching paradoxes then you win the game as a reward for your efforts to keep the universe together.

And sadly, it's these victory conditions that expose the problems with the game. Since you don't know what your opponents are trying to achieve, you can never know that any move you make will oppose them; indeed, you can never know that your move isn't actively helping them. You can have a neat plan and be all ready to put it into practice - and then your opponent announces they've won by a means you could never have known. Ok, you could learn all the cards, but requiring a player to do that much learning to compete evenly in a beer-and-pretzels game doesn't seem very viable; and the random victory conditions can't be summed up in simple phrases that aid memory (unlike Fluxx's Goals, such as "The Brain - No TV" and "Chocolate Cookies").

The one nonrandom win condition - hand size 10 - doesn't seem to be a viable option as there are a number of action cards (like Discontinuity (Pass all hands left) and Time Vortex (Evenly redistribute all cards in all hands)) that can either hose you instantly or hand your victory to another player. If you actually modify the game to make the other victory conditions also non-random, then the game becomes (very nearly) a no-brainer driven significantly by luck of the draw; and it's not quite clear if randomizing the victory conditions actually introduces deductive thought or merely hides the problem. (It also mildly hurts the beer-and-pretzels value of the game by allowing it to be short-circuited, but that seems pretty rare in my experience.)

Still, even if it is random it's still good fun, especially if you follow the game's suggestion that you role-play out the actions that your time traveller takes to affect history (this gets particularly amusing if a Lynchpin gets flipped over multiple times; "I take aim down at Hitler, trying my best to ignore the pitched melee between two assailants and two other snipers, one of whom is me.."). It's amusing, it's fast, and the randomness niggle doesn't cause in-play motivation to shut down as it does in some games. In other words, it basically fits into exactly the same hole as Fluxx except that Chrononauts is less abstract and has a better backstory. This may make it more appealing to some gamers, depending on if you like a little consistency or a lot of lunacy with your randomness.

In summary, then, if you're looking for a quick and fun game and don't mind the random aspect, Chrononauts delivers. Just don't expect anything too deep.

Chrononauts
Chrononauts Playtest Review by Mark Green on 14/10/02 Style: 3 (Average) Substance: 3 (Average) Would you like a time machine with your beer and pretzels? Product: Chrononauts Author: Andrew Looney Category: Card Game Company/Publisher: Looney Labs Line: Cost: Page count: Year published: ISBN: SKU: Comp copy?: no Playtest Review by Mark Green on 14/10/02 Genre tags: Science Fiction Comedy Diceless	Chrononauts is a card game based on time travel and produced by Looney Labs. Looney are best known for Fluxx, a beer-and-pretzels card game of changing rules. Chrononauts has more structure than Fluxx did, but the beer-and-pretzels feel is still there. Chrononauts is based on the Timeline, a fixed set of cards which are laid on the table at the start of the game and which represent events in history, from Lincoln to Columbine. (Being a US game, the events are rather tilted in favor of American history; the rulebook mentions potential expansions with alternate timelines.) Each event is classified as either a Lynchpin or a Ripplepoint, which affects what can be done with it in the game. In addition to the Timeline, each player has a hand of cards of their own. Each turn, a player draws one card and then must either play or discard one; if they chose to discard, they can additionally recycle a further card. Cards enable players to affect the timeline, and also provide a number of other subsystems which are discussed below. The cards have no art other than abstract icons as discussed below; however, the text on them is clear and the layout is pleasing and easy to read. Each Lynchpin card in the Timeline initially shows an event which occurred in real-world history. By using cards, players can flip the Lynchpins over; the reverse side of each Lynchpin shows a particular alternate event. For example, Hitler's appearance at the Berlin Olympics is a Lynchpin; flipping it changes it to show Hitler's assassination at the Games. The cards used to flip Lynchpins vary in the range of changes they permit; Reverse Fate allows any Lynchpin to be flipped, but others have a limited range stated on the card. (For example, Prevent Assassination couldn't flip Hitler as described here - but if another player had flipped it already, the holder of this card could flip it back again.) Ripplepoints are different beasts altogether. Players cannot flip these directly; instead, each one depends on one or more Lynchpins. If these dependancies are disturbed via being flipped, then the Ripplepoint will flip too. Also unlike Lynchpins, Ripplepoints do not show alternate events on the back; instead, they flip to become Paradoxes. For example, the Final Solution is included as a Ripplepoint. If Hitler got flipped as described above, so that he was assassinated at the Berlin Games, then the Final Solution could never have happened; thus the Ripplepoint also flips to become a Paradox. (Some of them are a little less obvious: for example, the Columbine massacre is paradoxed if John Lennon is not murdered!) Although it might seem that this would require a lot of awkward checking, the game designers have put a lot of effort into ensuring this isn't the case: every Lynchpin includes a list of the Ripplepoints than need to be checked if it flips, and every Ripplepoint has its dependancies written on it in a clear iconic notation. Paradoxes are bad things, because if there are ever 13 of them on the Timeline, the universe collapses and everybody loses. To get rid of them, you can either flip the Lynchpins back to their original states so that the original Ripplepoints are restored, or you can play a Patch card from your hand onto the Ripplepoint to fix up the holes in your alternate history. If you do this, you also get to draw a new card - this might not sound like much, but bear in mind that every other action in the game has zero-sum effect on your hand, so patching a Paradox effectively increases your hand size by one. Perhaps unfortunately, there is only one Ripplepoint in the game that has more than one Patch. In other words, there is a fixed alternate history, and by flipping and Patching you can only alter how much of it shows through. The one exception is the dropping of the H-Bomb on Japan, which has three different patches with different prerequisites. For example, if there was no WW2 and no Pearl Harbor then the bomb would never have been dropped, and you can Patch the ripplepoint into a rare time of world peace. But the bomb would also never have been dropped if, in spite of both WW2 and Pearl Harbor happening, the bomb was never invented; in this case, you can Patch it into a conventional assault on Japan having occured. There is also a special case called the "Uber Paradox", which relates to the Cuban Missile Crisis: if it gets transformed into its alternate form (World War 3) then the entire remainder of the timeline is shut down until it's restored to normal. As well as cards which play around with the Timeline, there are other cards available. The most notable of these are Artifacts, which are basically the same as Keepers in Fluxx - you take a turn to put them into play, and then you've got them. The Artifacts all represent various valuable items from different times (including such wonders as a Betamax videotape of the creation of the universe). Sadly, the artifacts are not at all linked to the timeline, so if your opponent has the real Mona Lisa and you have the fake one, you can't flip any Lynchpin to prevent the original ever having been painted and thus make yours become the original. Finally, there are Action and Timewarp cards which provide special effects, such as retrieving discarded cards, stealing artifacts, halting other players' actions, and similar. These are all justified in terms of time travel; for example, to steal an artifact you just go get it a second before your opponent does. So what are we actually trying to achieve here? Alas, there is a reason why I have held off on this discussion. At the start of the game, you recieve two randomly selected cards. The first is your ID, representing the time traveller you're playing; and the second is your Mission. Your ID will show a piece of flavor text and three events, and you win the game if you can manipulate the timeline so that those three events occured. Typically they will all be Ripplepoint events (so you need to Patch them in), and at least one of them will be an event from real-world history (so you need to prevent that event changing in the Timeline). Sadly, these three events don't represent what your time traveller wants to happen or anything like that: they just represent the timeline from which the time traveller came. What that means is that the events usually have no bearing whatsoever on the description of your character. There are a few amusing counterexamples (such as the infamous giant cockroach, who was amongst those who took over the planet after mankind's extinction in World War 3), but generally there's little bearing. For example, Dale is a time traveller who uses copies of himself as agents. Amongst other things he must prevent the Great Depression and ensure the founding of Israel. Huh? The Mission card is similar: instead of listing Lynchpins it instead lists three artifacts that you must possess in order to win the game. There is a third way to win, too: if you get your hand size up to 10 by patching paradoxes then you win the game as a reward for your efforts to keep the universe together. And sadly, it's these victory conditions that expose the problems with the game. Since you don't know what your opponents are trying to achieve, you can never know that any move you make will oppose them; indeed, you can never know that your move isn't actively helping them. You can have a neat plan and be all ready to put it into practice - and then your opponent announces they've won by a means you could never have known. Ok, you could learn all the cards, but requiring a player to do that much learning to compete evenly in a beer-and-pretzels game doesn't seem very viable; and the random victory conditions can't be summed up in simple phrases that aid memory (unlike Fluxx's Goals, such as "The Brain - No TV" and "Chocolate Cookies"). The one nonrandom win condition - hand size 10 - doesn't seem to be a viable option as there are a number of action cards (like Discontinuity (Pass all hands left) and Time Vortex (Evenly redistribute all cards in all hands)) that can either hose you instantly or hand your victory to another player. If you actually modify the game to make the other victory conditions also non-random, then the game becomes (very nearly) a no-brainer driven significantly by luck of the draw; and it's not quite clear if randomizing the victory conditions actually introduces deductive thought or merely hides the problem. (It also mildly hurts the beer-and-pretzels value of the game by allowing it to be short-circuited, but that seems pretty rare in my experience.) Still, even if it is random it's still good fun, especially if you follow the game's suggestion that you role-play out the actions that your time traveller takes to affect history (this gets particularly amusing if a Lynchpin gets flipped over multiple times; "I take aim down at Hitler, trying my best to ignore the pitched melee between two assailants and two other snipers, one of whom is me.."). It's amusing, it's fast, and the randomness niggle doesn't cause in-play motivation to shut down as it does in some games. In other words, it basically fits into exactly the same hole as Fluxx except that Chrononauts is less abstract and has a better backstory. This may make it more appealing to some gamers, depending on if you like a little consistency or a lot of lunacy with your randomness. In summary, then, if you're looking for a quick and fun game and don't mind the random aspect, Chrononauts* delivers. Just don't expect anything too deep.*