THAT TIME YOU KILLED ME
Timeless
This review will contain some spoilers. But if you’re a time traveller, like I have become since playing That Time You Killed Me, the concept of ‘spoilers’ is a bit redundant.
As an abstract game for two players, That Time You Killed Me, starts off simple enough. You have a pawn in your colour, a handful in your supply, and you can move that pawn on gridded squares orthogonally. But the game is played across three time boards, the past, present, and future, in that order – naturally. Players get two actions on their turn, there’s two things you can do to start with, move and time travel. With the options of jumping forward in time one board, to the same location, or travelling back in the same way – but leaving a new pawn where you were in the future – things start to get spicy. It’s spicy enough anyway, as you’ll immediately try and smush your opponent against the walls of the arena to kill them. To win, you need to manoeuvre yourself around and fatally smush your enemy in two time periods – leaving yourself the only survivor in those areas.
But we’ve not even opened any of the boxes yet. If this has sold you already, read no more and go pick it up to discover what is inside for yourself. If not, read on.
The other boxes contain more pawns and pieces, each thematic and adding new powers. For example, adding seeds, shrubs and trees – plant a seed in the past, and it will grow into a shrub in the present, and a tree in the future. If you plant a seed in the present, only a shrub (which is very tough actually, the rulebook tells us) will appear in the future. You can grow a tree where someone is standing in the future, and that doesn’t end well for them. Or you can knock it over on top of them. The second box contains some giant head statues, which copy movement in whichever futures are available from the one they’re pushed in. And the third component-filled box contains possibly my favourite component of the year – pink elephants, with which you denote your control of by placing your black or white bowler hat on top of.
The final box contains a whole host of scenarios, win conditions, and just really fun ways to combine these components together into something, frankly, magical. We expect that if you have a regular duelling partner that you game with that you’ll choose the one you both like the most and play it to death. And that will be your game.
It’s like 3D space-chess from films and TV, except without the holograms, and rules that delight. That Time You Killed Me is beautifully and amusingly presented, but at its heart is a tough game of strategy. Like all games of this kind, the ideal is that it feels like a duel, a grapple, a struggle of strength and will and wit. And then there’s the ‘seeing the next moves ahead’ – which here is very literal. Something you do now will have immediate effects on the boards ahead of it, and seeing that can make you feel like a chess master. And once you start seeing those moves in your opponent’s side, you feel like a 3D chess master.