WBG Score: 9
Player Count: 1-4
You’ll like this if you like: Viticulture, Caverna, Perseverance
Published by: Mindclash Games
Designed by: Dávid Turczi, Richard Amann, Viktor Peter
This is a review copy. See our review policy here
I was going to write a whole piece about the timey-wimey nature of the story that sets the world of Anachrony, in which an unexplained explosion hits and sends the world into an apocalypse. Until we learn that we can now time travel thanks to the neutronium brought with the said asteroid. We then learn that the asteroid hasn’t actually struck yet, but it’s a future event that will have ripples in time. Confusing? Well, don’t worry, this quote from the hard Sci-fi TV show Red Dwarf is sure to explain it all.
Lister: Hey, it hasn’t happened has it? It has “will have going to have happened” happened, but it hasn’t actually “happened” happened yet, actually
Rimmer: Poppycock! It will be happened; it shall be going to be happen; it will be was an event that could will have been taken place in the future. Simple as that
Right, now that’s been cleared up, on with the review!
When is Anachrony? Sorry, WHAT, is Anachrony.
Anachrony is a worker placement game set in a dystopian future after the impact of an explosive event left few survivors. After humanity formed different factions called paths, they eventually came together and discovered, through the use of Neutronium left by the explosion, that they could travel through time. Each round, players will be powering up exosuits to explore the toxic wasteland (the main worker placement board) and use these spaces to recruit more workers, build buildings (which in turn will give you more worker placement spaces), mine for resources, trade, and even collect water. You’ll even be able to borrow resources from your future selves, but beware! If you don’t pay these back by the end of the game, you'll lose points. You can pay these back by using certain buildings to travel back in time to a previous round. You can also use this to travel back and build powerful but expensive super weapons. Having unpaid debt could also lead you to gain paradoxes, which could lead you to place paradox buildings that block building spaces on your board.
After the fourth round, an impact will happen, and certain spaces will be populated with bonus tokens which, when visited, will destroy those spaces for the end of the game. At this point, the game will end after either the seventh round or when all spaces with tokens have been visited. The fourth round is also when you can activate your evacuation protocol for a huge chunk of points. Be careful to trigger it before the game ends, though. The player with the most points at the end of the game wins.
Wobbly Wobbly Timey Wimey
I’m not great at teaching a theme when I teach a game. I tend to stick to the basics and the “need-to-knows.” However, Anachrony is a game that does so much to integrate its theme that you’ll almost be doing it a disservice not to give some backstory. Don’t get me wrong; mechanically it’s not necessary to learn the game, but I’m sure that at some point you’ll be bombarded with questions like “why do we need exosuits to go here” or “how are we able to time travel” or, most importantly, “why do we need to evacuate the planet because I’ve just put on my pajamas and settled down on the sofa to watch Netflix and I don’t feel like getting up?” It’s a game that weaves its mechanics and theme so well that you may as well front-load the teach with a bit of story time (I mean, they are already in their pajamas), so why not throw in a bit of flair and entertain your friends. You never know, you could end up reading the CBeebies bedtime story, move over Chris Evans!
A game that goes 88mph
I love the way the worker placement plays out and the way your available actions ramp up as you play through the game and build more buildings, which, in turn, will give you more spaces to use. As you build more structures that can go inside your colony, you start to build up this big asymmetrical puzzle that you’ve crafted for yourself that you now need to navigate. Most of the buildings have a type of worker placement slot that can be used without the need for exosuits, and before you know it, a game that only seemed to have a few options now opens out into your own unique slice of this desolate world.
Each round you’ll need to choose to power up a number of exosuits. You’ll need these to place your workers in so they can go outside onto the main board. The apocalypse has happened, and the air is toxic outside; trust me, you’ll need them. The exosuits aren’t the only important part of going outside because in a lot of cases, the more important decision is who to send. Each area will either require a certain type of the four different types of workers (admin, engineers, scientists, or geniuses) or give you special benefits if you choose a particular type of worker. For example, when you use the recruit space, you can't use a scientist, and you can only recruit geniuses (a wild card worker) using an admin since they have the gift of the gab (even in the apocalypse, we still have salesmen). I love that it makes that worker economy puzzle so much more interesting to navigate.
Anachrony even ups the race element of a worker placement game. Because some of the spaces have some type of diminishing resource attached to them and some of the later spaces have costs attached to them, it makes getting to them as early as possible even more nail-biting and the source of so much back and forth on where to go first. This changes according to player count. At three or four, the board will fill up pretty fast, especially in the early rounds as players have fewer buildings. You’ll really feel that tug of war in your head as you try to decide your best move, knowing that whatever you choose, there’s a good chance the other space you want will be gone by your next turn. In contrast to this, a two-player game could feel almost relaxing as the fight for the main spaces isn’t quite as frantic. In one two-player game I played, for example, the first player marker never changed hands because neither of us felt it was necessary to pay the price to get it, as opposed to the other counts where it’s much more of a valid option.
Speaking of workers, don’t expect your dedicated workforce to be pulling their weight at all hours. As you take them back at the end of a round, they return to your “tired” area. Yep, that’s right, they have the bare-faced cheek to have a rest! How to get them back? Well, there are two ways. Running along the worker area is a motivation track. Here you can take an action and pay an amount of water, depending on where you are on the track, and bring them all back. This moves the track one way to give you positive points at the end of the game. If you don’t fancy that either because you can’t afford the water cost or because you just don’t want to, you could always drive them hard. This gets them back by using a free action but pushes that track the other way for negative points at the end of the game. If you take this action with the marker at the end of the track, it costs you a worker. This little twist actually triggered a little bit of role-play from me in my first game. I’d decided that my Path didn’t believe in being nice to their workforce, and I never gave them water to get them back. Yes, I lost a couple of workers (a worrying amount actually) and some points at the end of the game, but crucially it didn’t hinder my game (me not keeping an eye on the end game objectives saw to that). I love that this is a valid choice you can make and head down this path of negative points, but you won't necessarily be sacrificing the win if you do.
Time Travel, without a DeLorean!
Of all the buildings you can get, arguably the most fun is the power plants (the time travel ones). I mean, let’s face it, time travel is one of the reasons this game piqued your interest, right? These let you jump into your metaphorical time travel device of choice, be it one of the two phone boxes, the grey car, the necklace, or just randomly leaping through time (oh boy) and going back to a previous round to help pay off any resources you borrowed previously or to build a super project. Time travel could have been such a perfunctory mechanic, but they’ve managed to weave it into something with meaning, some strategy, and a touch of threat. Each round you'll look back on the previous round spaces, and whoever has more borrowed resource tokens in each space will roll a die, which could get them paradoxes tokens. Get three, and you get an anomaly, which will take up precious building slots and give negative points if you don’t pay it off with resources and a worker.
Anachrony isn't a game where you’ll necessarily be performing a Scrooge McDuck into your resources each round, so choosing how to spend them effectively is all part of the puzzle, and paying off the odd resources or worker may not seem worth the loss at first glance. That is until you realize that you get points for paying your debts. Not only that, because paying back your debts means that you could now avoid rolling that paradox die and throwing your competitors under the time travel bus (has there been a time-traveling bus before?). It’s great because it makes its own little strategic ecosystem. Plus, who doesn’t want to hop about in time just for the fun of it.
Round five onwards is when you can complete your Evacuation objective. These are path-specific objectives that you can complete for a decent chunk of points. If you thought the race for spaces before was tense, then evacuation is about to up the game…literally. From here on out, you have a new space open on the main board which you can go to to complete your evacuation goals. One will require you to have three of a particular building type. The other will score you points based on how many sets of certain things you have. At first, the game gives you a little incentive to try and be one of the first to score your evacuation by having the last player to do it get a -3 point token. But the main reason you need to be fast is that the game could end in any of the next three rounds. So now your brain is whirring, do I trigger it now and cash in early (providing you’ve completed the main goal) or do I wait to eke out some more resources for a few extra points but risk the game ending before I trigger it. That fluctuating end game makes for a source of some great nervous tension, and you desperately try to work out how much time you have before someone triggers the end and what exactly you can get done.
Whoa, this is heavy!
Anachrony is certainly a big game, and with a BoardGameGeek weight rating of 4.01 out of 5, you’re going to need to have your brain switched on. I actually found this easier to have taught to me than actually teaching it myself. Mainly because there’s a lot to go through, and quite frankly, I get sick of the sound of my own voice if I’m teaching for too long. Having said that, I found that the game is actually pretty intuitive for the most part, especially when you start to get a grip of the icons. When I was having this taught to me, I didn’t find it hard to pick up the bare bones or the flow of the game. You’ll definitely need to dig out the rulebook for the super projects and the odd building or two, but for the most part, you’ll have a good idea of what everything does as you get into the game. The rulebook does a good job of telling you what each building does and even goes so far as to suggest some good combinations with other buildings.
An exo(suit)stential crisis
All the components you see here are from the retail edition of the game except for the Exo suit miniatures. In the retail version, they are hexagonal tokens that your workers sit on. Full disclosure, I was lucky enough to be sent the exosuit miniatures with this review copy to use as well and thought it’d be rude not to talk about them. I wasn’t asked to, but I mean look at them, how could I not. I’ll say now that you don’t need them. The game functions the same if you don’t have them, and you'll still have the same fun experience of this game with the original components. But now I’ve got them, I wouldn’t play without them. Workers will sit in the slot at the top, and they go a long way to help differentiate your exosuits from your opponents more easily, which is especially helpful when you pull your suits back at the end of each round. If I didn’t have them, I do think they would have been the next thing I would have brought for this game.
Anachrony is a game that takes a theme that most books, films, and TV can struggle to pull off well and throws it into an arguably more difficult medium to navigate. But it does it well enough that it feels thematic but not so much that you feel the need to stop halfway through a game to have a conversation about if any of this actually makes sense to enjoy the game. All this while remembering to deliver a brilliant, strategic game to go along with it. Anachrony has been on my wish list for a long time, and it certainly hasn’t disappointed.
Right, I'm off to invent some form of Time Machine. Maybe I’ll make it into a reclining chair and have the remote as the controls. It’ll be like watching a historical Netflix documentary but with all the smells, noises, and danger of the real thing…on second thoughts, I’ll probably just stick with the TV.
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