Real-time competition?!

❓Have you tried any competitive real-time games?

⏳ Time of Empires is a civilization building game from exactly this category.
When I first heard this combination I had two thoughts:
1️⃣ Are they crazy, what were they thinking? 🙀
2️⃣ This is the most ingenious and unique thing ever! 🤩
And really, this is such a cool idea! 😅

I really wanted to try Time of Empires during conventions, but didn't get the chance. Upon hearing the unfortunate news about Pearl Games, I decided to grab the last copy from our favorite game store. If you know Kitchen Rush, this plays very similarly, but against each other. It’s not really a 4X as you don’t explore, but there is expansion, exploitation and extermination! ✌️ This is how it works:

You play over 3 Eras, with an app playing music and giving you some sounds so you can keep track while frantically playing in real-time. 😄 After every Era you have a scoring section where you can rest and prepare for the next real-time part.

During an Era you use 2 hourglasses to do actions. Whenever you place one, you do the corresponding action immediately, but have to wait for the sand to flow through before moving it again. The most basic action is gathering the 2 kinds of resources:
🧱 Bricks - used to build buildings. Every action has an associated building - the more you have of them on the map, the stronger the actions will be.
💡 Ideas - used to play technology cards to gain their effect, plus enable the construction of buildings.

🗺️ On the main map you can move your units around to claim new territories so you can build there. Attacking an enemy is pretty simple - you just both lose the same amount of units.
🏛️ You also have side boards for Wonders and Leaders. On these you need to place Scholars to have majorities at the end of the Era to claim cards and bonuses. Scholars are only generated twice during each Era.

As you might imagine, Time of Empires can be stressful and hectic - as all real-time games. 😅 We need to play more to get a better feel for the game. So far it’s fun and pretty cleverly implemented, but of course it’s hard to monitor what the opponent is doing. I think we will return with more thoughts in the future😊