Time Trouble

• Designers: Carlo A Rossi and Alessandro Zucchini 
• Publisher: Hans im Gluck
• Players: 2-4
• Age: 9+
• Time: 25 minutes
• Amazon affiliate link: https://amzn.to/4kcbXjd
• Played with review copy provided by publisher

In the co-operative family game Time Trouble, you navigate four lovable characters through different levels by placing transparent cards on top of each other. Your goal is to catch the Fluffys that are messing up the timeline. With each level, you travel through time to overcome new challenges. Together you must coordinate your actions and use the characters’ abilities to succeed — but you have only a few seconds to carry out your plans!

To set up, the “computer” is placed on the table – this is a little cardboard platform where you can place cards – next to the round character board.  The boards which surround this character board have a level symbol on them and you’ll use the corresponding sides of these board for the level of the game you are playing. The Fluffies, locks, energy tokens, snails and damage markers are placed in their starting spots.  The deck of cards is shuffled and each player gets 3 cards.

The goal is to move the four characters in the game through the seven different levels.  The four characters in the game each have their own color.  They each have a unique ability, a capacity for damage and a capacity for holding Fluffies… The levels increase in difficulty as you go, and it is recommended that you play them in order.  If you finish the levels in the box, there is an app that you can use to create your own levels!  The game is cooperative, and players can talk while they play to strategize – though like all good cooperative games, you can never say exactly what is on your cards, only vague references. The game also provides you with a reminder bar and some colored tokens which you can use to take notes.

In each level, the goal is to collect the designated number of Fluffies and then bring them to the goal.  In each round, there are four phases.

1] Briefing – The players all discuss the goals for the round, using the reminder bar as a way to keep notes of things that have been decided.  Most often, this is done by placing a colored token over a particular number to remind everyone how many steps a particular character wants to take.

2] Actions – this is a real time phase.  The players have exactly 40 seconds to play cards.  Cards are played into the computer – the cardboard tray.  The boss (start player) goes first and then play goes clockwise.  Cards must always be played face up, but they can be rotated. Thus, each card can be played in 2 possible ways.  Cards are always played on top of previously played cards.  Now seems like a good time to mention that the cards are clear plastic, so you can see through areas of cards which do not have footprints on them.  Conversely, you can obscure things on the cards below with footprints on the current card.  Once there are three cards in the computer, the phase turns into a free-for-all.  Any player can play a card if they want at any time.  The team can discuss how/when to play a particular card, but once it is placed in the computer, it’s there permanently.

Once the forty seconds is up, you look at the computer and see how many footprints you can see of each character.  Each character now must move clockwise exactly the number of steps as they have visible footprints, moving along the white line from space to space on the boards. If a character would end their movement on an occupied space, they cannot stop there but must instead stop at the first empty space behind their actual ending space.  If you have snail tokens, you can spend one to reduce any character’s movement allotment by one. The characters always move in the same order: Franky (pink), Jell-E (blue), Cleo (yellow) then Spike (green).  The computer reminds you of this order.

If a character ends movement on a space matching their color, they can use their ability (unlocking paths, gaining energy, healing a character, or collecting a snail..  There are also a bunch of general spaces whose effects are triggered when any character ends movement on them – such as collecting a Fluffy, taking damage, etc.

3] Energy – this is essentially path management.  First, if any character has moved to the frontmost board, add a new board to continue the track, and place any objects on that board as shown by the icons.  Then, remove any boards from the rear of the track which all the characters have traversed.  You will gain back energy from each returned board, seen in the top right corner (1-3 energy units).  Finally, the team must pay 1 energy for each board that has at least one character on it.  If you cannot pay this toll, the team loses.

4] Shift Change – discard all the cards in the computer, pass the start player marker clockwise and all players draw until they have 3 cards in their hand.  Continue this process until either the team has lost (cannot pay the energy costs for occupied boards) or the team has won by collecting enough Fluffies and getting them to a Goal space – the orange spaces on the Goal board – and declaring the round over.  The team can decide to continue playing a level in order to score bonus points.

At the end of the round, the team receives stars based on their performance.  There is a chart in the rulebook that you can use to track your progress.

• 1 star for successfully completing a level
• 1 star for each extra Fluffy brought to a Goal space
• 1 star if all 4 characters have survived the level and end on a Goal space

You mark your progress for each level on the sheet, and then choose to take stars off the bonus side.  Whenever you have completely marked off the stars for any particular bonus, you’ll get that bonus at the start of every round you play afterwards.  Play as many levels as you like in a session; the rules say the game isn’t meant to be played in a single setting.  

My thoughts on the game

When I first saw news of this prior to Spiel 2024, I wasn’t quite sure what to think.  The theme and art looks fairly juvenile, but after the success of the cooperative game Paleo a few years prior, I was definitely interested in seeing what this game had to offer.  There is a layered puzzle going on here – first you have to try to plan for an optimal result, but this is complicated by the play of the transparent cards.  Your group might have an ideal solution in mind, but if you don’t have the right cards…. Well, it’s going to be tough sledding.  A final layer of complication is the time pressure.  With only 40 seconds to complete the card play, mistakes will be made as cards are sometimes played in a hurry to try to meet the desired goal.

The planning is the interesting part for me in Time Trouble, and the game does provide a tracker bar for the group to “take notes” on.  Each color only has one marker, and I’ve considered adding extra cubes to the game to allow for slightly more information to be stored on that bar.  (It would be ideal if pink moved 4 spaces, but 2 or 6 would also be OK).

While you’re working on getting the characters to end on the right spots, you’re also trying to keep the characters grouped together as this is a way to save your energy tokens.  Using the special power of the blue character to gain more energy tokens can really  make the group feel more comfortable with that.   Using the green snails to get people on the right spaces is also super helpful.

The difficulty of the initial chapters are moderate – but the difficulty definitely ramps up as you go through the seven levels.  As you progress through the levels, new rules are added at each break – but they are added in a way as to not overwhelm the group.  I also like the way that the game has some ongoing rewards based on previous results.  This is an organic way to help the group get through the more difficult levels.  If you have done well on previous levels, you can get bonus abilities to start future levels.

The use of the transparent cards is a nice gimmick, something that I haven’t seen in too many other games; as the first three cards must be played in player order, it definitely makes each round start with some uncertainty – because you never know how things will work out with those first three cards.   The transparent cards are a neat idea, but one that seems to lose its luster after a few sessions.  

One thing that I’ve learned in my early games is to try to convince my playing partners to play the first three cards as quickly as possible.  While players always want to try to optimize their play (especially in the first 3), solutions can more often be found with card 4 and later when anyone can play a card.  However, if there isn’t much time left on the timer, the team won’t have much opportunity to change the situation in the card computer.

I’m not sure if it is the theme or just the game in general, but this cooperative game certainly did not grab my attention like Paleo.  For one, I am personally not a huge fan of games with real-time play and time pressure.  The short timer each round is a central factor in each round.  On the bright side, this is a treasured cooperative game that isn’t plagued by the quarterbacking issue – while one player can direct the planning for sure – there is no way to control which cards get played out of each player’s hand.  

Time Trouble is one that I’d be happy to play again if someone suggested, and the game is set up nicely to be able to start and stop a campaign through the game – but not one that I’d want to play through an entire gaming session. 

Thoughts from other Opinionated Gamers

Dan B. I played this as a prototype and thought it was a perfectly fine co-op. The time pressure means you can’t all just discuss everything until you get the optimal moves, which is good. I am not a big co-op fan so I haven’t sought out plays of the published version, and no one has suggested playing it – I assume it has just gotten lost in a sea of co-ops.

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