Back to the future
Time travel is a game that exercises memory, develops imagination and teaches you to recognize emotions. It consists of boards-lands, picture-tiles, emotion tokens and the penguin Przemysław, who visits beautiful places during the game and guesses what things are in them. The goal of the game is one: collect as many picture tiles as possible. In the basic game, each player places the tile with the item next to the picture with the land and tells the story related to it. This allows you to build a sequence of associations and gives you a chance to guess the item. In the variant with smiley tokens, the story must be additionally marked with specific emotions.
Is time travel possible?
The rules of the board game are easy to explain even to a toddler. You have to come up with a story, connect it with an object and place, and remember what and where it is. After rolling the dice, each player moves Przemysław to the appropriate tile and must remember whether, for example, in the land with dinosaurs, Tyrannosaurus had problems with his eyesight and needed glasses, or whether the pirates ran out of tea and had to buy a new kettle.
To properly review the game, I met with our friends and we played in the lineup of a married couple in their thirties and a five-year-old girl and her mother. We all swallowed the rules quickly and during the first game there was a lot of screaming, laughing and “sewing”. While I was telling short, abstract stories, my husband was very involved, my friend created associations so that the daughter could remember the cards more easily, while the little “camera” invented very dramatic stories and was definitely the most involved: most of the stories ended either with the drowning of a random kitten or a fire in the house, garden, forest, car … long to mention. If anyone is going to make a remake of the P- launcher from Drew Barrymore, I have a candidate. 😉
Travel not only in time
We didn’t play the emotion-chip version, because we already had a lot of fun with the first variant. If the family wants to use the game also to talk about feelings, Time Travel can be both therapeutic and awareness-raising. Not only do you need to tell a story about an object that will be, for example, sad, cheerful, scary, but you can also ask your child how Penguin Przemysław is dealing with a given situation, how to cheer up a pirate or cheer up a snowman. This is a great opportunity for the child to analyze and express emotions, and for the parent to take up a possibly problematic issue while having fun.
Houston, do we have a problem?
Is there something in the sea of superlatives to stick to? I don’t know if Time Travel would be as good to play without a child, but I consider a child on board the game necessary. After all, it’s a family board game. So I have no objections to the rules or the form of the game. The illustrations are really beautiful and they force you to be creative. The whole thing is solidly made. The only slight complaint is a printing error: unfortunately, on a few pages, the illustrations slightly drift apart and do not fill the whole thing. Instead, unnecessary white margins have crept into the image. However, this is only a minor technical error.
Successful trip
The game can connect players from different generations and interest everyone. Coming up with stories and guessing what has been hidden on a given board is a lot of fun – especially when you don’t remember everything and players try to make up things up. Additionally, the variant of the game that allows you to talk to children about feelings is a very plus. 100% recommended!
