Write history with us
📒 Books of Time is the newest upcoming euro game from Board&Dice . Sunday was our lucky day and we found a free demo table!🤩 Our first impressions were good, let’s see what the game has to offer:
It has a very unique feature: each player has 3 small ring binders (though they did mention it might not be a feasible solution for the final copy).
As you are writing the story of time, you will be drafting new pages for your books and using their powers to get resources and build your engine. Each round the pages of a central chronicle are turned too - when there are no more pages left, the game ends. It also grants you an additional power you can use before or after your main action for free.
On your turn you have 5 possible actions:
✒️ Draw 2 new pages that you place above your books
✒️ Add 1 or more pages to your books by paying the resource cost (paper and pens) to where they are currently opened. Page icons are important for end game objectives or point scoring on the central tracks. Some pages give you a one-time bonus when writing them down.
✒️ Advance on the 3 tracks to get victory points, unlock the next levels of your end game objectives, etc.
✒️ Activate the two visible pages of one book then turn to the next page. If you reach the end of the book you open it at the first page and also re-activate one-time placement bonuses.
✒️ Pass and just close and reopen your books (getting resources for the already seen pages - you would mostly do it if you get stuck with no resources and no good open pages)
When the game ends you’ll check your objectives. These include set collection or specific sequence of icons.
💬 The rules and the game itself are quite light and easy to learn. I did like the idea of building these books, though I didn’t feel like we were getting that much “stronger”. You get the one-time bonuses once again if you re-open your book, but even if it has a bunch of pages, you still only activate two sides as an action. So there isn’t as much engine-building as I hoped🤔. I also felt like getting icons you needed were a bit up to chance. Still I liked the game and its concept, and I’m curious how it will be tweaked in the future.😊
