Stemming from the work i did on the How to Play Trickerion video, Mindclash Games sent along a copy of Anachrony: Essential Edition and all the related bells and whistles from this year’s Kickstarter campaign (watch the unboxing!) so that i could make a few more nice How to Play videos. This is the first among them, for the new streamlined version of the time travel board game.

(click to view transcript)

Hi! It’s Ryan from Nights Around a Table, and this is Anachrony, a worker placement time travel game for 2-4 players. Let me show you how to play.

You and your friends play one of four different factions in a post-apocalyptic 26th century New Earth. You’ll recruit workers…. to mine resources… to construct buildings… and conduct research… to build superprojects… and evacuate people from the World Capital after a meteor hits. The meteor crash makes… or will have made(?)… time travel possible, so you can even borrow stuff from yourself in the future… but in doing so, you risk causing anomalies in the space-time continuum… so you have to build power plants to travel back in time and return the stuff you borrowed to yourself in the past. At the end of the game, the World Capital collapses, and whoever has amassed the most victory points wins the game, and controls the future!

THE STORY

The story in Anachrony is a little far out, but i think it’s key to understanding the game:

New Earth is just starting to pick up the pieces after the Day of Purgation, an apocalyptic event where the planet got shaken to pieces by a mysterious blast of energy. There are four dominant factions vying for control, and each faction has its own stomping grounds: the path of Dominance has a city on a gigantic ship, the Path of Progress lives in a sky city, the Path of Salvation lives underground, and the Path of Harmony lives out in the woods like a bunch of dirty hippies. The main board represents the World Capital, the last independent city on New Earth. But the journey to and from the Capital is dangerous, so any Path member travelling there has to wear a protective exosuit.

After the Day of Purgation, New Earth suddenly had this weird purple element in abundance. They called it Neutronium, and they built a big monument to each of the four paths in the middle of the Capital… and in doing so, they opened wormholes into the future! That’s when they discovered these important facts:

1. Time travel is possible.
2. In the future, a giant meteor packed with Neutronium will smash into the earth.
3. When it does, it’ll open a time rift and send Neutronium back into the past, while simultaneously causing the apocalyptic Day of Purgation.
4. After the meteor strikes in the future, it will cause the World Capital to eventually crumble.

That’s where the game kicks off: you have access to Neutronium and time travel, you know the meteor’s coming, and when it does, your faction wants to be the one to take over New Earth and set the ideological agenda going forward into the unknown future.

RESOURCES

At first glance, Anachrony looks kind of terrifying. It’s one of these games with a language-independent board, so everything’s been reduced to a million little icons. Once you understand the icons and you see how things are grouped, it gets a lot less intimidating. Let me show you.

At its heart, Anachrony is a worker placement game, and there are three different types of workers you can place. Just focus on the shapes: These circular Path markers are free actions. You can use as many of these on your turn as you like. So if you’ve got an empty round space, you can put a path marker there and do the thing.

These oblong hexagonal shapes are your workers. They come in three flavours: scientists, engineers, and administrators. This fourth worker, the genius, is a wildcard that can usually stand in for the other three. So whenever you see this shape, you can place a worker there, and do the thing.

Your exosuits are large hexagons. They’re just flat hexagonal tiles in the base game, but if you’re a deluxe-level Kickstarter backer, or you buy the exosuit add-on pack at retail, you can play with a unique set of plastic exosuit minis for each of the four Paths. (pass an exosuit from the future) Oh – thanks! The exosuits are pretty cool, so i’ll be playing with them for the rest of the video. Notice that the exosuits have slots for workers: whenever you see a large hexagon shape on the main board, you can put an exosuit there, but it’s not a robot: the suit has to have a worker inside it.

There are a few different currencies in the game, including three types of minerals: grey titanium, green uranium, and yellow gold, which the rulebook sometimes refers to as T/U/G. Purple neutronium is the fourth, most valuable resource in the game. These minerals are used mostly for constructing buildings.

You also have water as a resource – the light ones are 1 unit, and the dark ones are 5 units. Water is used for all sorts of things. And finally, there are these Energy Core tokens that look like radiation symbols.

Whenever you see a symbol for a resource on a space, that means you take the resource. If you see a hole beneath the icon, that means you pay the resource.

PHASES

There are two main locations in Anachrony: the World Capital, and your own player board, which represents your Path’s city. The timeline runs along the bottom of the Capital board. Each tile represents a round, and the game ends at the end of the 7th era… or when the Capital has completely collapsed. We’ll talk about that situation later.

Each player has a path marker that goes beneath the current timeline tile. That signifies where in time you are. The meteor crash will happen between the 4th and 5th rounds, which imposes a bunch of changes to the board that we’ll look at in a bit.

Each round has 6 different phases:

In the Preparation phase, you flip over the Superproject tile for the next Era. Superprojects are powerful buildings that you can construct. There are four stacks of regular rectangular buildings that you can construct – at the beginning of every round, you pop one off each stack and place it next to the stack, so there are two buildings in each category to choose from when it’s time to build. The game has cards that control the distribution of resources – flip a mining card and fill up the mine space accordingly, and likewise, flip a personnel card and fill up the recruitment area with the workers it depicts.Make sure to start with a blank slate – clear out any stuff that was leftover from the last round.

Phase 2 is the Paradox phase, which is all about suffering the consequences of messing with the timeline. But since this is the beginning of the game and no one has time traveled yet, we’ll loop back to that later.

Phase 3 is the power-up phase. You have 6 exosuits at your disposal, and 6 hex-shaped spaces on your player board. You get to put up to six exosuits on these spaces to power them up. However many you decide on powering up, these are the suits that will be available to you this round to send to the hexagonal spaces at the World Capital – the main board. Remember, your workers need to wear protective suits to access those spaces. You don’t have to put any workers in the exosuits just yet – that only happens in a later phase, when you’re taking your actions.

If you put any exosuits on these spaces, you can charge them up, but you have to pay an energy core to do so. Energy cores are kind of like surplus batteries you can use if you run out of wall sockets to charge your suits. Once everyone has decided on how many exosuits they’ll power up for this round, count up the empty spots where you didn’t power up a suit – you’ve decided to put that energy into water purification instead, so you’ll earn one water for every space you left blank.

Phase 4 is the Warp phase. You start the game with a handful of resources depending on which faction you’re playing, but you can always use more stuff. Thankfully, the meteor impact four rounds into the future made time travel possible today, so you can spend this round borrowing stuff from yourself. You have a bunch of triangular warp tiles, each of which depicts a different resource, worker, or powered-up exosuit that you can snag from future-you. You secretly put up to two of these tiles in your hand, and then everyone simultaneously reveals which warp tiles they’ve chosen.

The warp tiles go on the current timeline era, and you get to take the stuff from the supply. Sounds like a pretty sweet deal, right? Free stuff? Well, you’re going to have to time travel back and give that stuff to yourself in a later round, or risk causing a disruptive, points-losing anomaly. We’ll see how that works later on..

If you warp a worker in from the future, you have to pay 1 water, because time travel makes people pretty parched. The water you feed the worker can either come from your supply, or from yourself in the future, if you warped back any water this phase. Workers pop out of that time portal wide awake. If you warp back an exosuit, it comes back powered up. You can put it on one of these spots without having to pay an energy core, and you don’t have to pay back any water you collected previously for having an open space.

Phase 5 is where most of the action happens. Beginning with the starting player and going clockwise, everyone takes a turn. On your turn, you can use as many of your round free-action tokens as you like, and then, you can place either one worker somewhere on your player board, or put one worker inside a powered-up exosuit… and place it on an empty spot in the World Capital… or pass.

WAKING WORKERS

Your workers are either awake or asleep. At the end of the round, after you collect them from the various worker placement spaces, most of them will be sleepy, and they’ll go into this column. There are two ways to wake them up:

If you place a round path marker here as a free action, you can wake up all of your sleepy workers and put them in the awake column. You’re essentially forcing them out of bed, and they don’t like that, so you have to slide this morale marker one space to the left, and each space it moves down will cost you more and more points at the end of the game. If you start forcing people awake when the marker’s all the way down here, one worker of your choice actually dies every time you do it. My advice is to pick the one who complains the loudest.

On the other side, you can place a worker here to wake everyone up with a fresh, hot pot of… water. You pay however much water is depicted below the morale marker, and move your workers over to the woke side. Then, you move the morale marker one space to the right. You’re gaining points for the end of the game every time you do this, but your entitled workers are also expecting more and more water as you treat them better and better. Pfft! Unions. If morale is all the way over here, whenever you wake people up using a worker and 7 water, you collect 2 points in chits.

Administrators are perky little jerks; if you use one to wake everyone up, he or she stays awake at the end of the round.

WORLD CAPITAL

On your turn, if you decide to send one of your powered-up exosuits to the Capital, you stick a woken-up worker inside it and choose a space. There are 16 different spots to choose from… but these six are just more expensive versions of these ones. The diamond shape describes the function of the area on the board. So you can collect water, trade with nomads, conduct research, hire new workers, construct buildings and superprojects, mine for resources, or use a space that’s already filled up, and potentially take over as the new starting player.

To conduct research, place a powered-up exosuit with a scientist inside on one of these spaces – but let’s be real: you’re probably gonna choose the one that costs you the least amount of water. Engineers and administrators can’t conduct research, but remember: a genius worker can stand in for any of these three.

Whenever you research, you’re going to be making a scientific breakthrough.

Breakthroughs come in three different shapes, and they have one of five different symbols on them. To find out which one you get, there are two dice here: one has shapes, and the other has symbols. You get to set one of these dice to whichever face you want, and roll the other. Whatever you roll is whatever you get. If the breakthrough you roll isn’t available, roll the die again until it is.

One of the faces is a question mark – that means you get to take whichever shape you chose with whatever symbol you want on it. But when you’re setting a die to a face of your choice, you’re not allowed to choose the question mark.

At the end of the game, each breakthrough you collect is worth one point, and each set of circle, square, and triangle breakthroughs you have is worth an additional 2 points. The symbols in a set don’t have to match.

But more importantly, breakthroughs are required if you want to build one of the superprojects above the timeline. We’ll look at superprojects in just a sec.

If you place your exosuit here or here, you can still research, but you have to pay one or two water to do so. These lower-tier spaces work the same for the other two columns.

The recruit action lets you gain a new worker. Place a suit with a worker inside, and then, take one of the available workers. If you recruit a scientist, you also get 2 water. Recruit an engineer, and you get an energy core. Recruit an administrator, and you get a 1-point chit. If you recruit a genius, you get to choose any one of the above perks. You can use any worker to recruit, but if you place a suit with an engineer inside, you’re not allowed to recruit a genius. The newly-recruited worker goes in the woke column of your board.

Finally, the construct action lets you erect either a building or a superproject.

You have four different rows on your player board that can house the rectangular buildings. You have to build from the left to the right, and the cost of each building is printed right on the spot. You can choose either of the two face-up buildings to construct from any given stack. If you pull the top building, the one underneath it can now be constructed this round. If you grab this one and there’s a building beneath it, that building becomes available.

Place the building on your board in the row matching its colour. Buildings do all kinds of things. Most give resources and discounts, and they may require a worker or a free action path token to activate them. Some buildings give you passive powers. If anything is listed in this column, it means you get that stuff immediately when constructing the building.

The yellow buildings are called power plants, and they let you travel through time. That’s coming up. Administrators can’t build things because their hands are too soft. If you use an engineer to build something, you get a one-titanium discount.

You can alternatively build the superproject above the era where your path marker sits. Time travel lets you reach back in time to to past eras, so it is possible to build an unconstructed superproject from the past. Superprojects always cost a certain number of resources and/or workers, and usually either a specific scientific breakthrough, or two breakthroughs of certain shapes. Any workers you pay can be asleep or awake. But they have to be exact matches: geniuses can’t stand in for other workers when paying for superprojects.

Pay all the stuff, and then place the superproject on your player board. Superprojects take up two spaces – you have to place them as far to the left as possible… and if there are multiple rows that will fit a superproject that are tied for leftmostness, you get to choose.

The two spaces up top refer to these three columns. If you place here, you pay 2 water, and you get to bump out the banner and put your own banner there, making you first player. Next, if any of these columns are full, you can take one of those unavailable actions. The worker restrictions for that column still apply, but you don’t have to pay any extra water to use the space. You can’t copy an action from one of these columns if there are still empty spaces there that you could have taken.

If you place here, you pay one water to take one of the unavailable spaces in these columns. Again, if a column has one or more open spaces, you’re not allowed to copy an action from that column. And you still don’t have to pay the extra water cost in the bottom two rows.

Over at the mine, you place an exosuit here, here, or here to take the resource cube next to the spot you chose, and any one of the available cubes from the left column. Engineers flippin’ love mining, so if you use one here, he or she stays awake at the end of the round.

The two spaces here and here are much larger than the rest, which means more than one exosuit can occupy the space. Up top, you’re purifying water. Place the exosuit and take three water… or 4 water if you use a scientist, because they’re really good at filtering water.

Down here, you can trade with the nomads. You can swap 3 water for 1 energy core, or vice versa, swap a core for a neutronium, a neutronium for any 2 non-neutronium cubes of any non-purple colour – same colour, different colour… doesn’t matter – or two cubes of any non-purple colour for 3 water. White collar administrators are great at trading and negotiating, so if you use one here, you can complete two trades in a row.

PHASE 2: PARADOX

Before we get into time travel, let’s talk about that phase we skipped over. In phase two, just after the preparation phase where you set everything up to play the next round, you look at each era in the timeline. Whoever has the most warp tiles on a timeline tile has to roll this die, which can net them 0-2 nasty paradox tokens.

Count up the number of times each player has to roll. So the yellow Path of Progress player has the most tokens here and here, and has to roll two times. The blue Path of Dominance player has to roll once, and the browny-red Path of Salvation player is tied with the green Path of Harmony player here. A tie on any tile means all tied players have to roll once each for that tile.

You roll the die however many times you’re required to. Any paradox tokens you roll stack up here on your player board. If you collect three paradox tokens, you’ve created an anomaly in the spacetime continuum! Stop rolling the die for this phase, no matter how many more times you’re supposed to roll. Wipe out the paradox tokens, and take an Anomaly tile and put it in the leftmost available building spot on your player board. If there are no available spots, you have to cover up one of your buildings with the Anomaly, rendering that building useless until the Anomaly is gone.

When you gain an anomaly, after everyone’s finished rolling for paradoxes, you can remove one of your warp tiles from any timeline tile for free.

If you don’t like the randomness of the paradox die, you can just agree to have everyone take 1 paradox token any time they’re supposed to roll the die.

Anomalies are worth -3 points at the end of the game. During the actions phase, you can pay the resources, water, and worker depicted to remove the anomaly from the game. You lose all that stuff, including the worker. But you may open up a slot that you can build in again, or uncover the building the anomaly was blocking.

Gaining anomalies is one way to get rid of warp tiles, but it’s not the best way. The best way… is time travel.

TIME TRAVEL

If you’ve built one or more yellow power plants, you can activate it during the actions phase to travel to the past. The number on the power plant is its range – that’s how far back you can send your path tile to “focus” a different era on the timeline. 3 means you can go back up to three spaces from the current era. If you activate a second power plant later, or if you have power plant #114 that lets you travel twice, the range is always measured from the current era, not from where your focus marker is. So if you activate this power plant, you can go back to any of these three eras, and then if you activate this one, you can move your focus marker to either of these two. One other note about power plant #114: depending on your version of the game, there’s a misprint on the tile – it requires a scientist and a water to activate.

If you move your marker to an earlier era, you can re-enact the moment you received something from yourself in the future, but this time, you’re the giver from the future, not the receiver in the past… and in closing that loop, you get to remove one of your warp tiles from that era. You just have to pay the resource that’s on that tile. If you remove a worker warp token, you have to get rid of a worker who’s awake since, earlier in the game, you received a woken-up worker. You don’t have to pay the water to hydrate the worker – past-you already did that. If you send back an exosuit… it has to be an unused, powered-up exosuit from your board, not from your supply.

If you take both of those steps: use a power plant to move your marker back and pay to get rid of a warp tile, you’ve successfully time travelled, so you can move your time travel marker up to gain victory points at the end of the game.

The meteor tile doesn’t count as an era, so you can skip right past it when you time travel. If you use a second power plant, you can set focus to the same past era you’re already focussed on for a separate time travel mission. If you remove a warp tile on that mission, you still get to move your time travel marker up, even though your focus marker didn’t move to a different era than before.

Now that your marker is sitting beneath a different timeline tile, when you take the construction action, you can build that era’s superproject, if it’s still available and you’ve got the scratch. But you can’t build the superproject from the current era, or any other era, because that’s not the era you’re focused on. At the end of the round, all path markers warp to the next era together, no matter where they’re focussed.

Play continues in clockwise order. If a player can’t, or doesn’t want, to keep taking actions, he or she passes, and is out for the rest of the round. Once all players have passed, the round ends.

CLEANUP

In phase 6, you take all your workers back… and they end up in the sleepytime column… unless you see this “stay motivated” symbol, which means they can go into the “hooked on amphetamines” column. Take note if you remove any workers from spaces that say they die at the end of the round – you don’t get those workers back. They ded.

If that was the 7th round, or if the capital has completely collapsed, which we’ll talk about in a bit, the game is over, and you proceed to scoring. Otherwise, take all your exosuits back and put them in your supply, including any on your player board that you didn’t use, and take back all of your free action markers.

Move all of the players’ focus markers to the current era. If you cross over the impact tile, it’s time for the meteor to strike.

IMPACT

When impact happens, a bunch of scary stuff goes down.

First, you flip over this tile at the top of the World Capital. There’s a new action available for the rest of the game: evacuation.

Then, you randomly draw 2, 2, or 3 impact tiles for a 2, 3, or 4 player game for each of the three columns of Capital Actions, and cover up those spots. Everyone gets two of these no-go tiles that block two exosuit spaces in their city. Finally, at the start of every post-impact round, replace the topmost resource of the mining space with a neutronium cube. Love is in the air… and also neutronium

Let’s deal with that new evacuation space first. Add the -3 point chit to the space that matches your player count. You can place a powered-up exosuit on this space, which can fit multiple players, to evacuate people from the World Capital to your own city, as a way to beef up your faction’s population and score additional points. Every player’s path card has an evacuation condition on it. If you meet this condition, you can evacuate people and score points. What’s more, there’s a second set of requirements that let you rack up even more points for meeting them.

So for example, this evacuation condition says that to have built three yellow power plants to evacuate. If you have those three power plants, you can put a worker in an exosuit, place it here, and mark the spot with one of your path tokens. Then, take three victory point chits. Additionally, for every neutronium cube you own, you get another 3 point chit. If you’re the last player to pull off an evacuation, you get three fewer points for evacuating. What took you so long?? This place is flippin’ fallin’ apart, n’ stuff’s landing in my hair, n’ (inaudible mumbling)

You don’t pay any resources when you evacuate people – these are just prerequisites that you have to meet. So in this case, you hang on to those neutronium cubes. If your evacuation conditions mention specific worker types, you can’t use geniuses to stand in for them as wildcards. Likewise, superprojects don’t stand in for other buildings. If you need three yellow power plants, and you have a superproject taking up most of your power plant row, you’ve only got one yellow power plant. You don’t meet your path’s prerequisite for evacuation. You goofed.

Here’s an important concept that some players miss: evacuation doesn’t end the game – it’s just one more way to score points. And some evacuation conditions are easier to exploit for points than others. To keep it fair between factions, the maximum number of points you can earn for evacuating is 30.

After the impact, certain capital spaces are covered with special collapse tiles. That means you don’t have to pay the extra water costs here and here, and you get some sort of perk or benefit when you place your exosuit on those tiles. Unfortunately, at the end of the round, every suit that gets removed from one of these spaces makes the tile flip as part of the capital crumbles beneath it, making the space unavailable for the rest of the game. Since these spots are now unavailable, you could place a suit in either of the World Council spots to take this action.

At the end of the round, if all of the collapsible spaces have been flipped over to their inactive side, the Capital has completely collapsed the game ends, no matter what era you’re in. That means the game could end early in the 5th, 6th, or 7th era.

Shea: Well actually, Ryan, the game always ends in the 7th era if the capital has collapsed. You mean it could end early in the 5th or 6th era.

Ryan: Oh! it’s… Shea from RTFM. Are you… calling me on the Board Game Guru crisis line?

Shea: Yeah. You were about to explain that rule incorrectly.

Ryan: i mean, it was kind of a minor…

Shea: The Board Game Gurus Guild exists to further the pursuit of pedagogical perfection through teaching board games for the furtherance…

Ryan: … of better board gaming around the globe. Yeah. i know, i know. i took the same oath you did.

Shea: Hey… you know i’ve got an Anachrony video on my channel?

Ryan: Yeah, i know. You did a great job. But….

Shea: Here! I’ll put a link to it up in the corner…

Ryan: You don’t have to do that… (link appears) How d… This isn’t even your channel.

Shea: I’m a Guru Guild Gold Member, baby! Deuces!

Ryan: (agonized groan)

The two collapsed spots on your player board can’t be used to power up your exosuits any more but if you warp a suit back from the future, you’re allowed to put it on one of these spots with no penalty.

ENDGAME

If it’s the end of the round and the capital has completely collapsed, or you’ve reached the end of the 7th era, it’s game over, man. If you still have warp tiles on the timeline, you have to fix all those potential problems by paying back the woken-up workers, powered-up exosuits, or resources that you borrowed in earlier rounds. You don’t get to move your time travel marker up for paying off your warp tiles at the end of the game. For every warp tile you’re unable to remove, you lose 2 points.

Next, check out the 5 Endgame Conditions cards that have been sitting there this entire time that i neglected to mention. Most water, most breakthroughs, highest morale – that kind of thing. For every one of these conditions where you’re the top earner, you get 3 victory points. Wherever you tie, all tied players score the full 3 points.

Then, you count up the points you earned on your buildings, superprojects, and anomalies, your time travel… and morale tracks… and whatever vp chits you’ve collected along the way. Each individual breakthrough tile is worth 1 point, and each set of 3 differently shaped breakthroughs is worth an additional 2 points. So this set is worth 5 points: 1 for each tile, and 2 more points for the set.

Whoever scored the most victory points wins the game and gets to govern New Earth going forward. Most water breaks ties, and then most resources. If players are still tied, they get to govern New Earth together.

SETUP

To set up the game, use the 4-player side of the main board, or the 2-3 player side depending on player count. If you want a trickier 2-player game, cover the rightmost World Council space with a blocker tile.

Research dice go here, and the evacuation tile starts on the happy side. Shuffle all four building stacks and place them face up next to the board. Shuffle the recruit and mine pool cards into face-down stacks. Put the anomalies, paradox tokens, and the paradox die in their own little section. Water goes here, cubes go here.. and workers, VPs, research tiles, and energy cores go wherever you can fit ‘em.

Build a timeline of 7 tiles with the impact tile after the 4th era, and deal out 7 random superprojects. The first one goes face up. Put a focus marker for each path beneath the first era.

For a more advanced game, you can play with these alternate timeline tiles. When it’s time to reveal your warp tiles in phase 4, instead of revealing them simultaneously, you go in player order. The warp tiles go onto the timeline tile in order, following the arrows. If you have two tiles to place, you can decide on which order to place them. Certain of these spaces get you perks, and some get you penalties. Here, you get double the benefit of your warp tile – so two resources instead of one, or two powered-up suits, and so on. When you time travel to pay this tile off later, you only have to pay one thing, not two. This space gets you a point, this one makes you take a paradox tile… this one moves your morale marker up… this one moves your morale marker down… and this one lets you get rid of a paradox.

Deal out 5 endgame condition cards. Alternatively, you can draft the endgame condition cards: deal 4 cards to both players in a 2-player game. Each player picks two cards, and you deal out a fifth from the deck and discard the others. In a 3 or 4 player game, deal each player 2 cards. Everyone chooses one, and then you deal out the rest from the deck to bring yourselves up to 5.

Each player picks a path, and takes their player board, their path board, and their six exosuits. Put the morale marker in the middle of the morale track, and the time travel marker at the beginning of its track. Stack up your path markers here, and take your path’s banner.

Grab all of the warp tokens in your colour.

Flip your path board to a random side. Take all of the starting resources printed on it. Then, take your two path leader cards, and choose one to play. Each path leader has a special ability that’s explained in the rulebook.

If you want to go crazygonuts, you can have everyone flip to the B-side of their player board. This makes Anachrony even more asynchronous, since the player boards are all slightly different, with unique costs and perks.

You can even draft your starting resources instead of taking the ones printed on your board. Give each player 2 active scientists and 1 active engineer, 2 energy cores, and 2 water. Then, deal everyone 8, 5, or 4 Starting Asset cards in a 2, 3, or 4 player game. Everyone takes one card and passes the rest on to the next player. Repeat this process until everyone has chosen 4 cards. The rest of the cards go back in the box, and you receive the resources printed on the cards you chose. Then, add up the numbers on the bottom of those cards. Whoever has the lowest number gets to be the starting player. If there’s a tie, whoever has the lowest numbered single card gets to be the starting player. In clockwise order from the starting player, players receive 0, 1, 1, and 2 water.

If you’re not playing with this draft variant, the starting player is the last person to have had deja vu. If you’re not playing with this draft variant, the starting player is the last person to have had deja vu.

And now, you’re ready to play Anachrony! (“Oh, thanks!”)

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[Music – Board Game Boogie by Ryan Henson Creighton]

Addenda

At 13:46,  i say “you can use any worker to Recruit,” but that is a FILTHY LIE! Each of the three Capital Actions has at least one worker restriction: engineers and administrators can’t Research, scientists can’t Recruit, and administrators can’t Construct. Thanks to Stelios Zafeiropoulos for pointing out the omission!

Get Your Own Copy of Anachrony: Essential Edition

If you want to add Anachrony to your own board game collection, you have two options depending on availability: the original game, which may be subtitled “Followers Box,” includes a few extra modes, including a solo variant. In an effort to streamline the offering and to lower the price of the game, those modes were stripped out and the Anachrony: Essential Edition was born. The original chronobot solo mode is available to print-n-play online, and the other modes were repackaged in the Classic Expansion Pack

A rose by any other name would smell as sweet! Use the Amazon link below to buy your copy, and i’ll receive a small commission.