So Uwe Rosenberg and Doc Brown walk into a Bar...

Several play-tests and too many beers to count later, they walk out with Anachrony.

Anachrony - a game so weird and complicated that it could have been called Cronanhay. Or maybe Ryan Cohen. When you play this game, jazz hands just might help.

yowzer

It's The Future - specifically the 26th century. Mankind survives in a perilous landscape with blah blah blah blah blah. At first, it seems like a somewhat over-ornate game of worker-placement: you're building your own personal city, but - at the start at least - your workers (Engineers, Scientists, Administrators) troop off to the capital, wearing exo-suits to protect them from the perilous blah blah. Some are jauntier than others, and - if you give them a suitable job to do - will return at the end of the day refreshed and ready to go again tomorrow.

actions

Others will lay about in bed complaining of feeling jaded. You can get them up an about with water - a glass or a bucket; it's unclear - or simply force them up. Water is good for morale - forcing them isn't. So far, so very much like Fresco in space.

Six jaunty workers, only four exo-skeletons...

The actions in the capital are pretty easy on the brain too: recruit more workers, gather resources in the mine, build buildings (in your own city!) using said resources, harvest some water or trade with the nomads on the perilous blah blah.

Easy!

But wait. This is all Uwe and no Doc. The latter is also at large, in the form of... time-travel!

We, the hardy survivors in this future world, know that at specific moment in time in the future - let's call it round five - an asteroid will hit the planet, and the capital will fall to collapse, by which time we hope to have our cities built and ready to shelter the screaming space yuppies running our way, forced to eat their words about how parochial we were and that we didn't need a post office.

How do we know? Because we've come back in time, and told ourselves.

Embedded in the asteroid is the precious neutronium that allows time travel to function, not only delivering the terrible news from round five back to here in round one, but also sending stuff back to help us - in each round, we can request things from the future like a kind of bendy galactic loan system: if you want it now, you need to make sure you send it back later. Or paradoxes will build and grow, potentially turning into the contorted space-time horror of minus 3 points.

If you're doing most of the borrowing, you're also the most likely to be picking up Anomalies - and not only are they a drag on your city's success they also Take Up Space, a bit like the kind of anomaly still in the kitchen at the end of a big party who you just wish would piss off, only if you really want them to go you have to pay a scientist to drive them back in a neutronium-powered taxi.

Asteroid background; precious metals foreground

Fortunately, there's also a way to avoid these paradoxes developing into a more obtrusive guest, which is to travel back in time yourself and pay off your aforementioned debts. To do that, you need to build specific buildings of course, and then send workers there...

This is all just the first four rounds.

Round five doesn't even exist - it's just a massive explosion! Suddenly the complexion of the board changes drastically: six of the key action spaces are one-use-only between now and the end of the game - which could theoretically be very soon indeed. These actions are abruptly changed from moderately helpful to extremely alluring. But another action is also available, and this one is your potential game-changer - or game-saver. You can evacuate people from the city, with the whopping caveat that you can only do this once. How, and how much, you score in doing so depends on which faction/colour you are: I needed engineers with titanium, Stan needed neutronium.

oh no

Post-asteroid, there's a maximum of three more rounds - which we played tonight - but there might well only be one. My cack-handed plan was to evacuate early and try and take up all the special one-off actions as quickly as possible... my problem was that post-asteroid, exo-suits are rather hard to come by and all my workers could do was potter about at home, achieving very little. Considerately not cackling at my foolishness, Stan took his time and harvested a shedload of neutrino before taking his evacuation action, outscoring me on that count...

Stan 72
Sam 44

Nuts. I'm not sure what's more nuts, the game itself or the alleged 30mins per player to supposedly complete it. It took us two and a half hours! Though to be fair we were learning as we went. Stan laid in the dark upstairs and whispered that next time we play "it shouldn't be in the evening..."

I'm not sure who this game is for. I think the Adams might love it. Probably though it needs an evening to itself - starting early. Otherwise you might need some neutronium to get home.