The T.I.M.E Agency protects humanity by preventing temporal faults and paradoxes from threatening the fabric of our universe. As temporal agents, you and your team will be sent into the bodies of beings from different worlds or realities to successfully complete the missions given to you. Failure is impossible, as you will be able to go back in time as many times as required.
At the beginning of the game, the players are at their home base and receive their mission briefing. The object is then to complete it in as few attempts as possible. The actions and movements of the players will use Temporal Units (TU), the quantity of which depend on the scenario and the amount of players. Each attempt is called a "run"; one run equals the use of all of the Temporal Units at the players' disposal. When the TU reach zero, the agents are recalled to the agency, and restart the scenario from the beginning, armed with their experience. The object of the game is to make the perfect run, while solving all of the puzzles and overcoming all of a scenario’s obstacles.
The base box contains the entirety of the T.I.M.E .Stories system and allows players to play all of the scenarios, the first of which — "Asylum" — is included. During a scenario, which consists of a deck of 120+ cards, each player explores cards, presented most often in the form of a panorama. Access to some cards require the possession of the proper item or items, while others present surprises, enemies, riddles, clues, and other dangers.
You usually take possession of local hosts to navigate in a given environment, but who knows what you'll have to do to succeed? Roam a med-fan city, looking for the dungeon where the Syaan king is hiding? Survive in the Antarctic while enormous creatures lurk beneath the surface of the ice? Solve a puzzle in an early 20th century asylum? That is all possible, and you might even have to jump from one host to another, or play against your fellow agents from time to time...
In the box, an insert allows players to "save" the game at any point, to play over multiple sessions, just like in a video game. This way, it's possible to pause your ongoing game by preserving the state of the receptacles, the remaining TU, the discovered clues, etc.
The currently available scenarios are:
- Asylum (included with the base game) - Explore an early 20th century mental institution disguised as some of its 'guests'.
- The Marcy Case - Conduct a search-and-rescue mission in a ruined city for a kidnapped teen whose future is vital to humanity.
- A Prophecy of Dragons - Journey to an alternate timeline, where magic and mages were commonplace in the Middle Ages.
- Under The Mask - Enter the Valley of Kings and uncover the Pharaoh's secret.
- Expedition: Endurance - Discover what happened to the Endurance when it became lost at sea in 1914.
- Lumen Fidei - Escort the Papal Legate around 1419 Spain.
- Estella Drive - Attend a Seance in a 1980s Hollywood home.
This card game provides examples of:
- Death Is Cheap: While it is entirely possible for a receptacle to die, the agent controlling them merely jumps into a new body and rejoins the team a few turns later. Sometimes however, death is part of the overall mission or results in failure.
- Do Well, But Not Perfect: Often the initial run is an 'informational' run, in which players gather information and attempt to find an ideal path while avoiding bad routes. The second or even third runs usually end up becoming the good path, especially when checkpoints are introduced.
- Easter Egg: If certain items are collected and certain paths are taken, a special item card can be recovered that persists across the scenarios.
- Luck-Based Mission: Since the game uses dice to make skill checks and in combat, your fate relies entirely on whether you can roll what you need when you need it.
- Mean Boss: Bob is one when you do your job wrong. Even worse if you manage to fail the mission in the worst possible way.
- Mental Time Travel: The main theme of the game. You have to possess your receptacle and make something right. Think Wolverine in DoFP.
- Narrative Board Game: You play out scenarios about using Mental Time Travel to possess someone and make something right. You'll usually have to replay each scenario at least once, but your goal is to use as few attempts as possible, and all you get to keep between your attempts is whatever information you learned.
- Race Against the Clock: You have a limited amount of time before your machines return you to your present, represented by the Time Track on the board. Run out of time, and Bob merely rants at you before sending you back in.
- Red Herring: The stories are filled with these, with more places and items than is necessary for the optimal run, but until the options are investigated it is unknown what is important and what is not.
- Schmuck Bait: Some of the traps are pretty obvious, and performing them is pretty much the players being Genre Blind.
