In case you missed the news, starting this year, CGE will be distributing games from our friends and German partners HeidelBÄR Games. While some of you may be familiar with Spicy, their super hot bluffing party game, Time Division is an all new release in North America. Let’s take a closer look at what this two-player drafting and dueling game is all about!
In Time Division, players take on the role of competing time agencies—one light, the other dark—as each vies for domination over their mysteriously merging timelines. With the parallel timelines of the animalverse collapsing into one, you must persevere or face being erased into nothingness. Travel across three different eras and gain influence over key characters to ensure your continued existence.
How does it play?
Simple rules, unique card interactions, and high replayability make Time Division a different experience each time you play, depending on the era you’re playing and which cards both you and your opponent draft and play. It’s a fast-paced, tense game of strategic planning, clever counters, and surprise reversals. There’s no direct attacking or defending in this dueling game. Instead, you’ll plan out moves and pivot to respond to your opponents choices, working to gain the upperhand through a mix of risk taking and careful calculation to obtain scoring cards for your tableau.
For a quick 15-20 minute game, you can play a single thematic era of your choice, or play all three distinct eras in a row for a longer campaign to determine who survives the temporal collapse. In either case, each era has two main phases.
Drafting Phase — During this phase, players will simultaneously each draw three cards from the 18-card era deck and select one to keep for themselves, one to pass to their opponent, and one to place on a third “independent stack.” All cards are placed face-down. This quick process repeats until each player (and the independent stack) has six cards.
Play Phase — This is where things get a bit wild. The starting player (who currently has control of the metal coin) will play a card face up from their hand to their side of decision space. This reveals the card’s value and any potential effects it might have. The other player then gets to play a card to their side of the decision space.
At this point, the value of the two cards is evaluated and the player with the higher value card gains immediate control of the metal coin. Now, they get to decide which player gets to bank their card for end game points and which player gets to trigger their card effect. Since only one card ability is triggered and the other gets scored, it creates an exciting tension from round to round.
The player whose card gets triggered resolves that effect first, then moves it to “the past” section of the board (which other players can affect and use abilities to play off of). The other player gets to collect their card and add it to their influence area. This continues until both players’ hands are empty. The player with the most influence points at the end of the game wins the era.
It sounds simple, and it is. But the tensely shifting decision space and wild card effects add a lot of dynamic complexity to the game’s duels.
Card Effects: the crux of the chaotic fun
The fact that only one player will have their card effect triggered each round, and that the person who decides this is the player with the higher influence value on the card they played, makes for some pretty interesting twists.
Card effects do all kinds of crazy things.
Some have delayed effects that trigger at the start of the next round. Some let you take cards, score cards, or trigger card effects from your opponent’s hand, their tableau, the independent stack, or even the past. Some just give you raw end game points. And this is only just a sampling of effects from the first era in the game.
It’s quite important for new players to take a little time to understand the card effects in Time Division to be able to play it to its fullest. You really have to get to know the cards, which often requires just diving in and smashing through a few messy rounds even if you don’t know what you’re doing at first. Without learning what the cards do, it’s hard to know what choices to make during the drafting phase. Since the game plays quickly and there are only 18 cards per era, it won’t take long for you to start to get a feel for the core abilities in the first deck.
We recommend new players start with the Ancient Egypt era deck. It's the easiest deck to get into, and it introduces many of the core effects you’ll see elsewhere in the game. Most of the abilities in the first deck revolve around just a few core symbols that correspond to areas of the board and both players. Master these, and you can explore other eras for greater complexity. The two other era decks—the Dark Ages and the 1980s—each add a unique visual theme and layer on more advanced mechanics that build off the basics in the Ancient Egypt era. Each deck plays a bit differently, and we’ll dig deeper into that in a future article.
The best way to learn quickly? Just dive in and play a few example rounds before your first proper game without worrying too much about trying to play well at first. This gives you an opportunity to familiarize yourself with the card effects and see them in action. Once you learn what the various card effects do, it’s a blast to dive into duel after duel to see how well you can use them to manipulate the playing space and try to outsmart your opponent.
In our next article, we’ll explore each of the game’s three distinct era decks in more detail. Stay tuned!
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