Welcome to our review of Pandasaurus Games That Time You Killed Me. If you love abstract, funny board games, read on.

Ok so, I know that abstract and funny don’t really go together but hear me out. This game is a bit like chess. The rules, though, are different and exciting. That’s the abstract part; the funny part is the writing for the rule book and the chapter intros. There are a ton of snarky (in a good way) asides.

Game Overview 

In That Time You Killed Me, both players claim to have invented time travel, and now you are out to murder your opponent so you can be the one true inventor of time travel. So how do you do this? Well, by hopping back and forth in time and pushing your opponent into walls and other copies of themselves. The game has three identical chess-style boards with 4×4 grids. They represent the past, present, and future. If you time travel forward in time, you can move to the next board (or era). If you decide to jump back in time, you must leave a copy of yourself in the original space from where you moved. Sounds simple, right?

You or your opponent wins the game if only one of the three boards has the opponent’s pieces and the other two are empty of the opponent.

Also, did we mention this is a narrative campaign? Each chapter adds more to the story and new components that get revealed. Without spoiling the chapters, the added rules make the game much more challenging. For instance, you can create things in the past that affect the present and future. What’s neat is how the rules change with each chapter. There’s even a chapter with elephants (yes, you read that right… elephants)… never would I thought I’d write about elephants in a chess-type game, but here we are. 

Game Components

That Time You Killed Me comes with three boards, as mentioned above, and many player pieces. Some of these pieces are available when you open the box, while others are hidden away inside the four chapter boxes. The player pieces are made of high-quality plastic and are surprisingly detailed… did I mention there are elephants?

The rulebook is excellent too. We usually don’t mention the rulebook, but this one is quite funny. Throughout it, there are these random quotes from the narrator that are laugh-out-loud funny as they say how “one of you” is the murderer and the other is the inventor of time travel. The style of writing is like they are talking directly to you. An example is while explaining paradoxes:

“You can’t run past yourself and hope for the best. Paradoxes wait for no one. Not even you, the inventor of time travel. Or you, the person who murdered them. Paradoxes simply don’t discriminate. 

You murderer.”

Game Setup

The time you Killed Me is easy to set up. At the start of the game, you each take a set of player tokens, white or black, and place one on each board in opposite corners. Then the white player places a focus token just off the “past board,” and the black player places their focus token just off the “future board.” That’s the setup. Each chapter has added rules and components that come in their boxes.

Gameplay

After setup, it’s time to play. Again the core concepts are easy to understand. First, pick a player token from the board where your focus token is currently placed. Then you do two actions with it. Finally, you move your focus token to another board, where you do your next turn.

The actions

The actions themselves are easy to understand too. You must do two actions each turn, and you can repeat actions. If you choose to move your player token, you can move one space left-right or up-down but not diagonal. You can not move into a space with another of your own player tokens. Moving into this space is called a paradox… you can’t see yourself at the same time… every good time traveler knows that!

You can move into a space with your opponent, which is “pushing your opponent” to the next space. If your opponent is against a wall (or immovable object) and pushed in that direction, they get “squished” and die. You remove their token from the game. 

What would a game about time travel be without, well… time travel? So another action you can take is to jump forward in time. As long as nothing is in the same space as you in the next era (past – present, or present – future), you can freely move into that space as an action. If you want to jump back in time by an era, the same rules apply regarding nothing being in the space, BUT… you must take a player token from your supply and add it to the new era. You are leaving a copy of yourself in the future. The key here is you only have four copies of yourself. Once you run out of copies, you can’t jump back in time anymore.

As mentioned above, if your opponent is only on one of the three boards, you have murdered them and won the game! 

Overall Impressions

That time you Killed Me is surprisingly easy to understand once you get playing. The game itself isn’t overly complex, and it is similar to chess. The trick to the game is that you have to think far enough ahead and keep yourself out of danger while monitoring all three boards. We noticed that once we had all three boards filled with our player tokens and chapter-related tokens, it did become difficult to keep track of things. 

That said, it can be very satisfying to win a game based on time travel. In one of our games, I had cleared my opponent’s “past board,” and they had used up their supply so they couldn’t go back in time. There was only one opponent in the future, with several in the present. Once I saw that I could do whatever in the past without repercussions, I kept changing the past’s chapter-specific tokens by moving them around, which ended up moving elements in both the “present board” and “future board,” and that pushed my opponent into the wall in the future in one move. 

Overall, it is a fun and very challenging game. The added elements in each chapter keep things exciting and fresh. This game is an excellent two-player game and one we’d highly recommend.

Also, as a note, this will be the last full review before the New Year. The store will not be shipping from December 23rd – January 1st. We’ll still take orders and will ship out on January 2nd!