Wouter & Ymke 
Building an engine is usually quite simple in theory. You play a card, it does something useful, and then you add another card that hopefully makes the first one even better. Echoes of Time makes one fairly important change to that idea: most cards you play aren’t actually yours to use yet. They first have to travel across your time board, sometimes spending several rounds there before finally joining your fellowship. So yes, you can have exactly the card you want. You just can’t use it yet.
The setting gives a reason for all this waiting. Four factions inhabit different parts of a fantasy world, from forests and meadows to deep waters, the night sky and tunnels beneath the earth. Across this world are sources containing an ancient energy that can manipulate time. We’re trying to build a fellowship of creatures and artefacts while using them to gain control of those sources. It sounds fairly peaceful when you put it like that. It becomes less peaceful once somebody decides that the source you’ve been protecting for three rounds would look much nicer on their side of the table.
👥 2-4 players, ages 12+
⌛ Playing time: 45 minutes
📝 Designers: Simone Luciani & Roberto Pellei
🎨 Artwork: Giovanni Calore
🏢 Publisher: 999 Games (Dutch version, review copy provided)
Gameplay Overview
In Echoes of Time, you’re building a fellowship of cards that provides abilities during the game and victory points at the end. Most cards don’t go directly into your fellowship when you play them. Instead, they’re placed on your personal time board. Their time cost determines where they’re placed, and from there they’ll gradually move towards the end of the board. Only when a card leaves the board is it summoned and becomes part of your fellowship, allowing you to use its characteristics and effects.
Each round starts with the time phase, which everyone performs simultaneously. You take the time tile currently sitting outside your board and insert it on the left, pushing all the other tiles one position to the right. Anything on the tile leaving the other side is summoned. You resolve any relevant effects and then everyone draws one card. After that, players take turns performing their actions.
You get two main actions each round, with four to choose from. You can draw two cards, play one card, advance two cards, or conquer or fortify one source. You’re allowed to choose the same action twice. Drawing is exactly what it sounds like, while playing a card usually requires you to discard other cards from your hand and then place the new card at the indicated position on your time board. Your hand is therefore both your selection of possible cards and the way you pay for them.
Advancing lets you move two cards one position each, or one card two positions. If you push a card beyond the final position, it’s summoned immediately. Once cards reach your fellowship, their abilities become available. Some effects happen when a card is summoned, some remain active while certain conditions are met, and others are flame effects. These flame effects can be used as free actions when their colour matches the flame shown on the time tile currently outside your board. Each flame effect can normally only be activated once per round.
The other main part of the game is controlling sources. To conquer one, you commit creatures from your fellowship with enough combined strength to beat the required value. You can also take a source from another player by exceeding the strength of the creatures currently defending it. Creatures committed underneath a conquered source lose their effects, although their icons remain available. You can add more creatures underneath a source you already control as a free action, either to defend it or prepare it for fortification.
Fortifying requires another main action and enough strength underneath the source. Once fortified, the source can’t be taken by another player. The creatures underneath are also completely committed at that point, so neither their effects nor their icons can be used anymore. The game ends at the end of a round when the central supply of victory points has been emptied, one player reaches 12 cards in their fellowship, or every source has been fortified. You then score your collected victory point tokens, your sources and the cards that reached your fellowship, including those underneath sources. Cards still in your hand or waiting on the time board don’t score.
Artwork & Components
The artwork was one of the first things we noticed when putting Echoes of Time on the table. There’s a colourful fantasy world here, filled with anthropomorphic animals, strange artefacts and glowing landscapes. The different factions use recognisable colours and symbols, and the characters include foxes, frogs, owls, badgers and various other creatures who all seem considerably better prepared for an adventure than I normally am.
The fellowship cards make up most of what you’ll be looking at. Creature cards put the character illustrations front and centre, while artefacts focus more closely on individual magical objects. The source cards are larger and horizontal, showing locations rather than individual characters. Once several of them are sitting between the players, they also make the shared area easy to distinguish from everyone’s personal collection of cards.
The time boards are the part I like most visually because you actually see the cards travelling across them. Five time tiles sit inside the board while the sixth waits outside, and every round one tile enters while another leaves. The illustrations continue across these pieces, so moving them around physically changes the landscape in front of you. You don’t need the artwork to understand what’s happening, of course, but seeing your cards physically move across this landscape makes the whole time idea very easy to read from the table.
Beyond that, the box contains wooden action cubes, cardboard activation tokens and victory point tokens. It’s mostly cards and cardboard rather than a box filled with oversized pieces. The table can become fairly full once everyone’s fellowship grows, especially with creatures tucked underneath sources and cards still waiting on the time boards. We didn’t have trouble seeing what belonged where, although reading another player’s individual card abilities from across the table isn’t always convenient.
Our Experience
Our first game of Echoes of Time was mostly about individual cards. We’d draw something that looked powerful and immediately start figuring out how to play it. That worked to a point, but we ended up with fellowships containing several good cards that weren’t necessarily doing much together. In later games we paid more attention to factions, card types, specialisations and effects that referred to one another. Suddenly some fairly ordinary cards became much more interesting because of what was already sitting in our fellowship. We stopped asking, “Which of these cards is best?” quite so often and started asking, “Which one actually helps what I’m doing?”
With 105 cards in the shared deck, the combinations we spotted weren’t necessarily combinations we could keep building towards. Sometimes we drew cards that connected almost immediately and an engine came together without much trouble. In another game, one of us kept drawing perfectly reasonable cards that simply didn’t fit what was already on the table. There was some disagreement about how annoying this was. I didn’t mind it too much because those unwanted cards could still be discarded to pay for something else, while others at the table were definitely less amused after spending another action drawing cards. We definitely noticed when one player found useful cards without having to spend actions digging for them. Our games went better once we stopped waiting for one particular card and started working with whatever direction the deck was giving us.
We also underestimated Advance at first. Moving something forward felt less exciting than playing another card, so naturally we mostly wanted to play more cards. That changed when we realised that advancing a useful card by two positions could effectively give us another two rounds with its ability. If that card draws cards, reduces costs or helps another effect, those extra rounds can easily be worth the action. Two cards might also work together but need to arrive in a particular order, which meant several cards approaching the end of our boards could create a small scheduling problem. Add the changing flame colours and we occasionally found ourselves trying to arrange a card’s arrival for a particular round. There were turns where that preparation turned two normal actions into a longer chain of effects. There were also turns where we’d confidently prepared everything and then realised we’d miscounted by one position. Apparently manipulating time is easier than counting to three.
Early on, we were reluctant to put useful creatures underneath sources because we’d waited several rounds to get those creatures into play in the first place. Later, we became more willing to move a creature there once its effect had already done what we needed. We also started paying much more attention to everyone’s visible strength. Sometimes nobody needed to attack at all. Simply having enough creatures available to threaten somebody’s source could make them reinforce it instead of doing whatever they’d originally planned.
The cards that interfere with another player’s hand could change plans as well. Losing a card doesn’t only mean losing something you might have wanted to play. It can also remove the card you were planning to discard as payment. By the end of our games, we were watching the other fellowships much more closely than we had at the beginning. Those personal time boards initially made us concentrate mostly on our own cards, but that didn’t last very long.
Our Thoughts
One thing I really like here is how often a card changes its purpose during the game. A card in your hand might become part of your fellowship, but it might just as easily be discarded to pay for something better. Once summoned, a creature can provide an ability, icons and strength before eventually being moved underneath a source. At some point you have to decide whether keeping that creature available is still more useful than turning its strength into control and points.
And then there’s the time itself. Advance is the most obvious example because you’re literally spending one of your two actions to get something sooner, but the more important question for us is whether an investment will become useful before the game ends. That’s where the three end conditions matter. The victory point supply is disappearing, fellowships are growing towards 12 cards and sources are gradually being fortified. You may be planning around another three rounds while somebody else is already in a position to bring the game towards its end. I like that because you can’t assume you’ll eventually get to use everything you’ve been preparing. Sometimes the card sitting several spaces away really is too late.
The shared deck is also our main criticism. With 105 fellowship cards, you don’t have much control over exactly what you’ll see, and sometimes one player’s cards simply connect more easily than another’s. Being able to use unwanted cards as payment helps, but it doesn’t remove that difference. Knowing the cards makes a difference too. The rules aren’t especially difficult, but an experienced player has a better idea of whether a card is worth waiting several rounds for, what might combine with it and which creature can safely be committed elsewhere. I mean, I wouldn’t expect someone learning the game to compete evenly with somebody who already knows a good part of the deck. If you prefer choosing from a predictable card market and building towards a particular combination from the start, this is probably the part of Echoes of Time you’ll struggle with most.
There’s definitely interaction, mostly around the sources and a few cards that mess with opponents, but you’ll still spend plenty of time looking at your own fellowship. For us, that was enough. We had reasons to watch the other players without feeling that every turn was about damaging somebody else’s plans. The rulebook also includes a reduced-interaction variant that removes many of the cards marked as more interactive, which may be useful for groups that would rather keep the focus closer to their own boards.
I particularly like that building your engine isn’t automatically the answer until the final round. Eventually you need to stop adding things and decide what the fellowship you’ve built is actually for. Sometimes that means advancing one more card because its effect will still pay off. Sometimes it means taking a source instead of improving another combination. And sometimes you have to accept that the impressive card sitting several spaces away on your time board simply isn’t going to make it. That gives the ending of a game a different focus from the beginning, when we were mostly concerned with getting useful cards into play.
We never really followed the same plan twice, mostly because the cards wouldn’t let us. But the time board still gave us enough control to decide which cards were worth pushing forward and which ones could wait. By our later games, we were already looking at some of the same cards very differently than we had in the first.
And I think that’s where we ended up with Echoes of Time. We got better at knowing when waiting was worth it, when a creature had probably done enough and could disappear underneath a source, and when adding yet another card wasn’t actually helping us. There are still combinations we haven’t tried and cards we’d approach differently next time. So yes, we’d happily put it back on the table and see what happens.
📝 We received a copy of Echoes of Time from 999 Games.
