A game of Fighting, Fantasy and Fun for All Time
Time’s End is a game of cunning, tactics and leadership. Manage your resources, maneuver your soldiers, capture an opponent’s General then banish them in the Time Vortex to save humanity. But be careful – the beginning and end of all time is in your hands!
At the beginning and end of it all, time as we know it is crumbling. The Doomsday Clock has awoken and the countdown to nothingness has begun. The Last Generals, the guardians of all time, are locked in a battle where always and everywhere have collapsed into one. To restore order, a General must be captured, then forever imprisoned in a Time Vortex and drained of their power. This is the only way to calm the Doomsday Clock and return it to its slumber.
For protection and leadership, these Last Generals have called upon humanity’s greatest Spirits to guide their armies. Pulled from every corner in time, these Spirits must use extraordinary artifacts and their own wondrous abilities to guard the Generals at all costs. In this battle, arrow vs laser, spear vs gun, it matters not. All that matters is the strength of a Spirit’s essence and their will to win.
Notes from the Designer
It took me 12 years to finish Time’s End. I started out wanting to make an action and adventure, fantasy, war game in the spirit of the board games I grew up with. I loved Risk, Stratego, Hero Quest, Shadowlord and of course Dungeon’s & Dragons. Some of my fondest memories are sleeping over my cousins house, eating Crunch Berries and staying up way too late playing these games.
Originally Time’s End was called “Kings”, and instead of science fiction/fantasy, it was just straight up high fantasy. Goblins and wizards and werebears oh my. The more I developed it though, the less unique it seemed. It felt like white noise in a sea of orcs. While the mechanics kept developing, the story line and game play itself felt derivative. I realized what I was missing was humanity. Not just some humanity, but ALL of humanity.
When people think about history, they tend to make the mistake of assuming that those who came before us must have been less intelligent or less skilled because of their lack of technology. I believe that humanity is like a never ending sky scraper that keeps growing higher and higher into the air. The top floor is no more stronger than the bottom floor, it can just see farther because it’s been lifted up by all those that have come before.
With Time’s End I decided to take all of humanity’s greatest warriors and leaders and throw them into one arena together. If technological advantages were removed and it just came down to the spirit of the warrior, who would win the battle? What advantages would Lafayette have over Erik the Red, and vice versa?
It was starting to come into focus, but I hated games where you picked a character and were locked into them forever. With Time’s End I wanted to create a game where you could continually swap out your main character and suddenly your entire army would have a different look and feel. Crazy Horse could give you speed, Maximilian of Habsburg could boost your defense, and each Spirit card would have unique special abilities to bolster your army.
This gave the players options, and I love having options. Always having a different hand of warrior cards to choose from means your strategy and approach to each game would always be different. To further increase the uniqueness and replay-ability of Time’s End, I also made it so the layout of the board would be unique each time you play. I designed 20 different terrain tiles, and each tile can be placed facing any direction. This means that there’s an infinite number of possible layouts for the battle to take place! (Well, maybe not infinite, but an extremely large number that I’m not smart enough to figure out.) Ever wonder how a pirate would do when fighting against a samurai on the moon? Wonder no more.
Time’s End really has been a labor of love. I’ve put so much of myself into this game, but I’ve also received a lot of help along the way. Artist Jimbo Tamoro brought my vision to life with his great illustrations, my buddy Shawncho constantly helped me play-test new features, and my wife was always there to nudge me to finish when I wanted to quit.
