That Time You Killed Me

Congratulations! You’ve done it! You’ve created time travel! You’ll certainly go down in all of the history books that’ll you’ll be re-writing… Only there’s one problem, some rival upstart is claiming they created time travel, so there’s only one thing to do. Erase them from the timeline before they can get to you!

That Time You Killed Me is an abstract strategy game where you must eliminate your opponent’s pieces from two of the three game boards. The game offers a basic game that we’ll go over in this review and several extra rule sets to be added in for a degree of escalating difficulty and challenge as you master the art of time travel.

The game is set up with three 4x4 game boards representing Past, Present, and Future. Each player will have a player piece on identical spots of each board, space 1 for the white player and space 2 for the black player, and the start player begins with their focus token on the Past board while the second player begins with their focus token on the Future board. Each player will also have a number of reserve pieces that are brought in their time traveling shenanigans, but they are limited in number and will not be refreshed as your pieces are eliminated.

On a player’s turn, they will choose a single player piece on the board they have their focus token on and take two actions with it. The following actions in the basic game are:

• •Move a player piece to any adjacent orthogonal space.
•      -When moving your player piece, you can use either one or both of your actions to move. When moving into a space occupied by an opponent’s piece, you will push it one space away in the direction you are moving. You cannot push your own pieces.
• •Time travel to an adjacent era with the selected player piece.
  •      -When you travel from the past to the present or the present to the future, you move your piece off the board it is currently on and onto the identical space on the board it is traveling to if it is empty.
  •      -When you travel from the future to the present or the present to the past, you move your piece off the board it is currently on and onto the identical space on the board it is traveling to if it is empty, but you also make a copy of yourself by placing a player piece from your reserve in the space that you left. If you have no p[layer pieces left in your reserve, you may not take this action.

Regardless of which board your focus token is on, the selected piece will take two actions even if it is on another board with no focus token. After you have taken two actions, you will shift your focus token to another board and you turn ends.

Now we get to the fun part, Murder. To eliminate your opponent’s piece, you can accomplish this in one of two ways:

• •Push them into the wall of the board, causing them to be squished and removed from the game.
• •Push them into one of their own player pieces, causing a paradox and eliminating both of their pieces.
  •      -For this reason, you cannot push your own pieces as it would cause a paradox on yourself and remove your pieces. If you push an opponent’s piece into your piece, their piece will push your piece as if it moved.

If on your turn, your opponent only has pieces on one board, you win the game and will go on to your place in history… at least until the next rival time traveler appears.

That Time You Killed Me is a thinking strategy game, like playing multiple games of chess, but if the pieces could interfere with the other games, that will cause many moments of indecisions as you try to figure out the best board to prioritize on. The basic gameplay makes this easy to pick up, but the forward-thinking that goes into outplaying your opponent and capitalizing on their mistakes without leaving yourself open sets That Time You Killed Me as one of my current favorite two-player strategy games. The game can also be scaled for less and more skilled players to play against one another by having the more skilled player start with less pieces in their reserve. In addition, the extra rule sets that come in the game get added in as chapters, so you can add more rules and actions in as you want to increase the difficulty and challenge of the game adding in more and more interesting replays of That Time You Killed Me.

That Time You Killed Me is available now from our webstore.