TimeLine (2003)
TimeLine (2003) Rulebook
Table of Contents
Table of Contents
Contained in This Game
The TimeLine deck contains 54 cards (just like a poker deck, hmm.) This includes 46 Path cards, one Start card, and seven Finish cards.
You Will Also Need: 2 to 5 players, a pawn for each player, and roughly 20 colored stones or chips in each of 4 colors. The ideal colors are Brown (Oilpetrol), Yellow (Milkbread), Red (Beetcandy) and Green (Nucleons). You will also need a way to keep score, such as a sharp knife and a slab of wood.
The Game
There are no Time Cops in this game; we just threw that in to make the story more interesting.
This game is about collecting stuff and selling it. You will build a board out of cards, representing a timeline, and then scoot up and down through time in search of high-valued stuff. The value of stuff keeps changing as you move, so you must try to control prices as well as choosing what to grab.
Gold is one thing in this world that never loses its value, so your goal in this game is to exchange other stuff for gold. The object is to be the first player to collect 21 gold.
Setting Up
Each player needs a Pawn to represent his time machine.
Find the "Start" and "Finish" cards (see below) and take them out of the deck. Shuffle the remaining 46 "Path" cards.
Deal a line of faceup Path cards: 4 cards if there are 2 or 3 players, 5 cards for 4 players, or 6 cards for 5 players.
Put one Start card and one Finish card at the ends of this line, and you will have a starting board resembling the board below.
Starting Layout: Start Card, 4 Cards, or 1 plus the number of players, then Finish Card.
Every Path card has four dots, or "waypoints," one on each path segment. When you build the board, and every time you add a new card, place a counter of the appropriate color on each waypoint on the new cards. These represent free stuff that is waiting to be picked up.
The crisscrossing paths on the board represent the unpredictable market forces that change the values of the four commodities. Time flows from left to right, so by tracking any Start space from left to right, you can determine the current sale price of each commodity. In the board above, Oilpetrol is worth 2, Milkbread is worth 1, Beetcandy is worth 3, and Nucleons are worth 4.
The actual length of time and money values represented by this game board don't really matter. What matters is that disrupting the timeline will change the values.
Placing the Players
Randomly choose a player to go first. That player will place his pawn onto the first (leftmost) Path card, choosing any one of those waypoints and taking the counter that is there.
Moving clockwise around the table, the next player will move into the second Path card, and so on. These moves do not disrupt the time line as usual (normally, whenever a player picks up a counter, the board will change).
Players will now take turns, starting with the player who placed first, and proceeding to the left.
On Each Turn
On each turn, you may move your pawn. There are two types of move. Moving within a time zone (vertically) is called "local travel." Moving along a timeline (horizontally) is called "time travel."
Each vertical strip of cards represents one period of time, or "time zone." As the game proceeds, more cards will be added to each time zone, and cards will slide upwards when players change history, as described later. The figure below shows a game in progress. Note how empty space is treated as a straight path. In this diagram, Nucleons are worth 2.
A Game in Progress.
Local Travel: When you make a local move, you can move to any waypoint on any card in your current time zone, whether it has a counter on it or not, or you can go "off the map." If you go off the map, you will add a new faceup card, either directly above the highest card in the zone, or directly below the lowest card, depending on which way you go.
When a new card enters the board, fill the waypoints with counters, as you did when setting up the starting board. The player who is moving must then stop on one of the four waypoints on the new card.
When you stop on a waypoint with a counter, you must pick it up. This will alter the timeline as described below.
Time Travel: Each path represents a direction that you can travel with your time machine. When you travel through time, you can move to any waypoint along the path that you're currently on. Just as with local travel, if you land on a counter, you must pick it up.
Open table space is filled with straight lines. When you use time travel, you can stop in this space and add a new card to the board. As with local travel, you place this new card in contact with the existing cards. Load it with counters, and then stop on the waypoint that's on your line.
You can only time travel between the existing time zones; you can't move beyond the Finish cards, and you can't move into the time zone containing the Start card.
It's possible, though rare, that you will move into a space that's more than a full card length above or below the existing cards. If you do this, place facedown cards ("blanks") in the empty spaces, until you can add a card that connects to your line. A blank can be pushed like a faceup card, and it will be flipped over when someone stops on it.
Shifting the Timeline
Whenever you move to a waypoint with a counter, you must pick the counter up. This is how you will collect the items you need to sell, and it's also how the board changes shape.
When you pick up a counter, you also slide all the cards in your time zone up by one quarter of a card. This is how the time lines change. An example is shown below.
Before and After: Picking up a counter changes the timeline.
Landing on an empty waypoint does not change the timeline. The line only changes when you pick something up.
All the cards in the time zone move up by a quarter step. (Note that in older versions of TimeLine, only the cards above you moved up. This created gaps in the board, which were interesting but needed a lot of extra rules to clarify.)
Markets: You can move into a market only by traveling through time, not with a local move.
Once in a market, you may immediately sell any amount of the commodity that is connected to that market (tracing back to the Start card), for an amount of gold equal to the value written in the market. For example, in the example game board, Nucleons are connected to a 2-Gold market. If you travel into that specific market, you can sell any number of your Nucleons for 2 gold each.
By the end of the game, many markets may connect to nothing! To sell a commodity, you must walk into the one market that's actually connected to that commodity, not a market with a matching number. (Other markets are connected to other invisible commodities that are not part of the game.)
Selling at the market doesn't affect the timeline. You don't have to sell anything in a market, and you can even sit still and sell something on the following turn if you so desire. For example, you expect that the 4 you're now sitting in will be connected to Oilpetrol on the next turn, so you wait there in hopes of selling your Oilpetrol next turn.
Other Players: You can move through other players, but you can not share the same waypoint with another player. Market spaces, however, can hold any number of players.
Other Movement Rules
The Start Card: There is only one Start card. You cannot move into the Start card or affect it in any way.
The Finish Cards: The Finish cards are actually a repeating line of identical Finish cards stretching up and down as far as necessary. Each finish card represents a different set of four markets, which determine the values of the four colors.
Like the Start card, these cards never move. However, you can move into them to sell your goods.
Winning
The first player to collect 21 gold (or more) wins the game.
You will learn that this game requires thoughtful planning. The only random elements are the few new cards that are added to the board, and the unpredictable moves of the other players.
When thinking about strategy, remember that changing the timeline affects everyone!