T.I.M.E Stories: Madame

Board Game Geek Reviews

1. 3 out of 10

   JonathanW

   I've played all the scenarios in the white series and this certainly was the worst! Having 5 T.U. at the start means that you have to replay again and again. Also having some characters as mandatory at different parts in order for the plot to carry on meant that we had to restart the missions several times. In addition, being only three players made some demands for entering various locations even more difficult. Good components and an interesting theme but they didn't make any good out of it.

2. 4 out of 10

   Ragnarok1er

   [i][u]Disclaimer:[/u][/i] This is a [color=#880088][b]narrative game[/b][/color]. I don't expect to replay it, which is why its rating is based on [color=#990099][b]the experience I had playing the scenario[/b][/color]. Beware, [color=#FF0000][b]this comment may contain spoilers![/b][/color] [b]Madame[/b] was the last scenario of the first cycle of [i]Time Stories[/i] adventures, and boy was it disappointing. The story started well enough: the setting was inspiring to me (much more than pirates or zombies, for instance) and the way you could take control of more powerful characters as you rose up in the ranks of nobility seemed interesting mechannically, even if it didn't make too much sense thematically. But soon enough, the whole edifice crumbled. In this scenario the runs are extremely short, ranging from 5 to 10 time units. This is already tedious because you're starting over non-stop, and even more annoying when you take into account the fact that you lose your progress (characters, items, money) 4 runs after you found them. Now for the really horrible part: the agency gives you intermediary objectives along the way, and for some reason, the designers thought it would be a good idea to add time to your runs if you succeed (why not) and REMOVE TIME if you fail. This not only means that your already short runs become even shorter... but also that you have even less time to succeed in the later objectives, causing you to lose even more time ! It's a vicious circle in all its glory, full of frustration, anger and finally resignation for the players involved, and I cannot comprehend how this abomination of a mechanism was released on the market. From that point on, we meandered around the map, knowing we could never complete the scenario in less than 12 runs. I'd say it took us maybe 30 runs to end the game, but we were not really counting and after a while we didn't even play correctly anymore, going from location to location to read every card. The game had breached the implicit trust of balance and fairness, so they was no point in upholding our role by playing the right way. Even the puzzle, which can sometimes save a bad adventure from mediocrity (see my [i]Lumen Fidei[/i] review for that) was incredibly boring. To sum it up, there's a puzzle involving Lafayette and Vauban that you have to move around a small map. This puzzle has an obvious solution that takes 3 turns, which means if you search hard enough, you should be able to make it work in 2 turns (to reward people looking past the obvious path). But no! Even that they couldn't get right. It's impossible to do better than the solution a 6-year old could come up with. Shame, shame, shame. Finally, we were disappointed with the ending that forced you to collect all the cubes. We have played honestly every scenario and of course we missed some of them, because they're not mandatory items that you need to pick up to complete the missions. So it felt very anticlimactic (not to mention downright annoying for people who didn't buy everything) to go through every deck of every box to find the cubes. Did they really expect people to replay every scenario until they found them ? It just doesn't make much sense to me, and I really hope the second cycle will stop this trend of scenarios getting worse and worse, because we're getting close to giving up on [i]Time Stories[/i].

3. 2 out of 10

   Lagomorph

   [Spoiler Warning] . . . . Yikes. Where to start? Not only is this a bitterly disappointing and anti-climactic ending to the series, with zero mention of (much less resolution to) the factions meta-narrative that had been built up over the previous 8 games, but the game itself was mundane and tedious. The setting is boring enough, but we stayed in the game for nearly 8 hours anyways, hoping there was a twist somewhere that would take us somewhere unexpected, or introduce something magical, dark, or twisted, like in many of the other games that dealt with cosmic horrors, serial killers, and extra-terrestrial body-jumpers (rival agents). But, alas, the story is just dinner parties, dancing, exchanging items for gold, and lots of guys in wigs. And collecting 12,000 redundant receptacles. Around hour #7, when the game would not end, despite having imprinted the King, we were forced to simply read through, methodically, all the cards we had skipped over or missed, eventually stumbling upon a convoluted plot that lead to the secret deck and it's dumb, disappointing ending to the series. None of the choices we had made regarding the factions throughout the other games paid off or even mattered. And despite this game feeling like it was on rails at times, the final puzzle(?) had no hint or clue that would have lead us anywhere near the solution. The series was fun while you were leading up to the ending, because you felt like it was going somewhere, like there was a greater meaning to everything - until you get to the final episode only to learn that no, there is no payoff, there was no meaning, and after walking around in circles for a while, your calves are sore and the plunger is just a plunger after all.