Two Rex Makes # 4 - Version 001
The first thoughts to spill out on the page involved bouncing around three distinct ‘eras’ of time. My instinct was to choose popular periods used often in board games and time travel shows/movies:
Pre-Historic,
Roman,
Modern - 1980’s.
Three eras become three overlapping circular tracks on a shared board that players move around collecting resources to rebuild their time machine. The points where these tracks cross over represent a rip in space-time allowing the player to move into a different era.
Having recently watched ‘Primer’ the notion of meeting different versions of you repeatedly travelling through time really stuck in my head. Coloured dice represent different versions of the same time traveller; players control these travellers. At this stage I wasn’t quite sure how to make the most of this idea mechanically!
So you move around the three time periods collecting resources specific to each era, then your traveller die comes off this shared board and onto the individual player sheets. The sheets hold three areas (matching the three time periods on the circular time track) and the era that your die ends up in has to match where they ended up on the shared track.
Here I drew a column split into three zones marked 1-2, 3-4 & 5-6. You place your die onto the number that matches the die value and get to take the related action.
This is all in service of the main ‘write’ part of this roll 'n' write; Era exploration tracks.
My idea at this point was that your time traveller had to explore the place that time had stranded them to find a power source for the time machine you’re building. This was done by moving up a vertical track that gave you additional rewards as you made your way to the top.
In summary I had a ‘roll and move’ mechanism using dice on overlapping rondels,
then there was a sort of dice worker placement, and this all allowed you to fill in resource tracks and move up multiple era exploration tracks to somehow build a time machine and trigger the end game!
Quite a lot to consider and certainly enough to work with!