ConnexionTake Time Board Game Review
Here's a conundrum: Cooperative board games have wide appeal, but they tend to have a singular problem. Because everyone around the table wants to win, rather than genuine cooperation, there’s a tendency for groups to accept plans suggested by the most experienced or able player. Of the various ways to prevent this, the most successful has been to give players hidden information they’re not allowed to communicate.
The most extreme example is 2018 game The Mind where players aren’t allowed to talk at all, and simply have to rely on their innate sense of timing to lay cards in the correct numeric order. Take Time belongs in this group, but it’s trying to use a set of novel, simple mechanics to chart a worthwhile course between no communication at all, and heavyweight cooperative planning.
What’s in the Box
Take Time’s tiny box belies a wealth of goodness within, which you can sense by its weight. First up there’s a player deck of numeric cards, 24 in all, embossed in gold and set against fetching, complimentary shades of white and dark blue. Beneath there are a set of 12 envelopes, also embossed in gold and set with luminous art pieces depicting colorful, stylized scenes from nature. It’s a salutary lesson in how simple yet highly effective graphic design and artwork can elevate everyday game components into something glorious and eye-catching.
Most of the envelopes contain four clock discs, each with six points. While these are thinner cardboard and lack the gold that elevates the cards and envelopes, they’re still delightful things, carrying more of that rich, stylish nature art in slightly more muted colors. You’ll be playing cards at each of the points, and as soon as they’re on the table, the whole thing springs to life visually. The final component is a set of punch tokens which contain a clock hand and several cogs. They’re chunky and a little drab compared to everything else in the box, but that’s fine: they take a back seat during most of the play time.
Rules and How It Plays
The core game rules are very simple. Each player gets a hand of number cards which come in two colors that run from 1 to 12. In the center of the table is a clock face with six segments. One of these will be the starting segment and your goal, as a group, is to play cards so that the total in each segment runs from lowest in the starting segment and ascends to the highest in the final segment. The catch? Most of your cards must be played face down, and you’re not allowed to talk about your plays while making them.
So, you start to make logical deductions about what people are likely to have played. It’s up to the players – without discussion – to decide who’s going first so, intuitively, someone with a low card will likely play into the starting space and the group will understand that is probably a one, or a two. If the next player plays into the next space, it’s a good bet they’ve played a two (ties count as being part of the ascending order) or a three. Cards played straight into the final space are probably high, and so on. On this basis you can begin to figure your way around the puzzle, although deciding where to play your limited number of face-up cards is still an interesting choice. If no one reaches to open the play, for example, then it’s likely nobody has a low card so starting with a face-up mid-range option might be wise.
Each pack contains four clock faces and, from the very first challenge, there are additional requirements to frustrate you. That first face, for instance, requires the first segment to have a single white-color card in it, and the last segment can contain no more than three cards. So you can’t just dump high-values into that final space mindlessly and call it a day, as once you hit the three-card limit there’s a good chance the penultimate space might end up containing a higher total.
Once the difficulty begins to scale, you’ll start making use of the game’s most ingenious aspect. Although you can’t communicate while you’re playing cards, you’re allowed to plan and strategize before anyone has looked at the cards they’ve been dealt. Initially this looks of limited value: how can you plan when you don’t know what values anyone has at their disposal? But there are still things you can do. The card colors are public knowledge, for example, as it’s reflected on the card backs, so in that first clock you can quickly see how many white cards have been dealt and whether you’re likely to have a low-value card to play into its first segment.
But that’s not all. The rules are purposefully vague about what you can discuss in this phase, only explicitly disallowing “codes or signals” during card play. This leaves cunning players with a wealth of ways to approach the game and increase the group’s chances. No spoilers, but once you understand the game flow you can be surprisingly creative in terms of forming a plan, and when imaginative proposals pay off on a difficult clock it is incredibly satisfying. But remember that you have to adhere to the dictum that you must not communicate in any way, even with devised codes, during the card-play phase.
If you’ve played a limited-communication cooperative game before, such as Hanabi, or Take Time’s spiritual predecessor The Mind, you’ll know this rule is hard to enforce. Sometimes a player forgets, and blurts something out by accident, or the preceding player will instinctively react to a play with a wince or a knowing smile, all of which gives out useful information. Some players find this vagueness troublesome: if that’s you, be aware that Take Time has nothing to ameliorate this issue. If not, it can actually be quite fun to watch how different groups interpret and enforce “no communication.” It’s a cooperative game, so it doesn’t really matter so long as you’re on the same page.
Curiously, the game has no final fail state. If you mess up on a clock face, you get to have an additional face-up play for each failure to a maximum of three, and then you keep going until you either succeed or give up. In the latter case, you place the clock into the delightfully named Sleeve of Regrets and move on. To win overall you must go back and ensure you pass all 40 tests although once you’ve at least attempted them, you can open a final sleeve for additional replayability. But how you actually approach this is up to you: Take Time is more interested in being surprising and fun than it is in whether a group wins or loses. It’s clearly supposed to be a cozy, cooperative time to be enjoyed together.
From the initial clock face, you may be wondering how any of the subsequent puzzles get hard enough to make you want to skip them. Each new face introduces new rules and wrinkles, but these never become overwhelming. After the first three faces, for instance, you’re not allowed to have any segment total higher than 24. Later, some segments disallow certain cards, while others force you to draw new cards, and an increasing proportion will have one or more placement rules. The design has a fantastic knack of pulling the rug out from strategies you’ve become used to. If your new clock disallows laying your lowest cards on the first segment, and your highest on the last, working out how to get them in ascending order suddenly becomes a whole lot more challenging.
Amazingly, the lack of an absolute loss condition does little to undermine the excitement and thrill of play. Even with good communication and a full three bonus cards, there’s easily enough uncertainty about what’s around the clock to require thoughtful consideration before late cards, and ramp up the tension ahead of the final reveal. A group win is always gratifying, and it doesn’t take many losses before any given face begins to assume a daunting prospect, propelling you toward discussing new approaches, and offering ever-sweeter satisfaction when you finally take the win.
