Timeless Journeys Preview - Smart Deck-Building with Combos!
Transcript
Hey party people. Welcome back to MVM. Today I'm here with the preview for Timeless Journey the Italian Grand Tour. This is a one or five player game. Uh a game where you're sort of deck building and you have action cards that combo off of each other to give you more actions. You're trying to get um kind of stay with certain special people that are traveling around Italy circa like 17 18uh 19th centuryish kind of stuff here. So this is kind of like the the initial tourism where people come to check out different things over different locations and it's up to you. You're traveling too. You want to see things, you want to be inspired, you want to have conversations with these people throughout history. And uh when you conversate with them and you interact with them, you also have experiences.
You can duel them. You can hang out, party it up, you can do different types of things, but ultimately you'll get benefits from them uh for doing so and score points. The the goal of the game is to score the most points and you'll be doing a combination of things, even writing in your journal, checking out buildings and stuff like that. Now, it doesn't look so crazy when you look at the board. Uh, but the reason why this is on my table is because one of the designers, the co-designer here, this is uh, Neestor Mangone is one of the co-designers of Darwin's Journey, which is my game of the year from a couple years back. So, I was like, I got to check this out. And it ended up being one of those deceptive games, like this deceptive smart games where it's like, you know, maybe you can introduce it to a broad range of people, like maybe people who are kind of just getting into those the hobbyist games, but then also thinky enough. Oh boy, I said it. I said thank you. I'm sorry. All right. I think it's smart enough where it's going to be one of those games where people from different levels can break this game out and they can get it done quick because this game is going to be quicker than you think. And everybody I've played it with has been like, man, that was quick.
You got to do a lot of stuff in a short amount of time. So there's even those choices as well. Just keep that in mind. All right. So here we go. You are looking at Italy. Okay. So you're looking at a map of Italy. You're looking at some of these special people who are here and should I say some of these special famous people. They all have different scoring conditions uh and different benefits you'll get for being around them or just you know in the vicinity. You'll also have uh they'll also be traveling based on what's happening between these five rounds. They'll eventually start moving down here. Uh, so there's different positions that they'll be, but you'll be you'll be hanging out at different spots as you move along, representing these cities and interacting with people, turning in resources, seeing the sites, things of that nature. Heck, you'll even be writing letters to people that you you visited before. How you doing, buddy?
What's going on? What's what's it what's the weather like? Um, you remember that conversation we had about the philosophy of love? You know, that kind of stuff. You'll be writing letters to them to get benefits as well. Oh, I didn't know what to say there. The philosophy of love. But hey, you want to have talks? It's going to give you some points. Uh, and it's going to give you benefits. Uh, but you'll be playing cards out here and triggering a system that is really, really smart. And that is what we're going to talk about. Uh, so you have your player markers that start here and you're at the city uh, Torino. And what you're going to do is on your turn during the action phase, there are uh, four steps to this this game. Uh you're going to have your action phase where you're playing a card uh in clockwise order each time and you're playing up to five cards eventually. And then you have your famous tracker where you're travelers which are going to interact with these based on if you're in those areas and they'll give you benefits if you're in those areas. And then you'll have your market phase where you'll be able to purchase a card and then you'll also go and reorganize these things and begin for next round. Okay. So, starting with you, you have your little journal here where you're going to be inspired to collect things. And by the way, there are a lot of different journals, okay?
Uh, and what you're trying to collect are these explore tiles to put them in there. Uh, because this is your journal, you know, the friends that you've seen and these are randomly placed out according to player count or some of the experiences that you had. So, maybe you are trying to collect different things there because at the end of the game, that's going to give you some points as well. You're also going to get points depending on how many pieces of these experiences that you've had with these people across the board during the game. So, there's a couple different things there, and we'll kind of talk about that again. You'll also have these deck of cards, and these deck of cards are what you're going to be playing from during the game. You can only have a total of eight of them, and you'll be gaining cards from here. So, eventually you're going to have to make some choices and get rid of them. You have your travel cards, which are these orange ones here.
Um, I believe you start with uh seven or six, but they have like a a kind of way to get you going and get you started. Then you have your conversation cards and then you also have your inspiration cards. There's also a white I think it's like festivities or whatever. There's a different suits in the car in the game that give you different types of actions. So, we're just going to kind of walk through them, but I want to show you the system as we move along. So, our first turn, we're in Torino. We're hanging out. Okay. Uh, what do we want to do? Maybe we want to talk to people, but maybe we want to just go see the sites right away. Okay, let's let's go see the sites. So, the blue player goes first. Uh they play this and they want to see the sites. They want to see Torino. They want to see this building right here. If you know the name, let me know. All right, so they're going to choose these. They're going to take these two and that's according to player count. We would take these, look at them ourselves, and they would have different things on them. Some of them have like actual resources and things of that nature, but some of them have extra actions. So during the game as you think as you travel down to different cities or different parts you will find different benefits that are there. Uh but these ones are actions. So this one's a conversation action. I want to take that one here because I want to talk to people eventually. I could actually spin this and that's a free action to take that action or to take those resources and put them to the side of my board. But for now I'm just going to take this and put it back. You can only do that once for that tile, but you can also get that benefit if you wanted to go back to it again. So, you actually have uh that choice as well. But that is my first turn. I'm going to put that
there. Um I I think for myself uh for the yellow player, I'm going to go ahead and travel. So, you can travel uh along this board here. You can actually go along the route here. Some of these routes are going to cost you. So, if I pay one, I just go right here to this city. Uh but if I wanted to, let's say on a next turn, I would have to pay a coin to do so. Now, I've given myself a whole bunch of resources here, but for example, you're going to start with one money, one money, and two money to start off the game. And that's just according to who's first or second. But that is actually my turn. Okay. Now, we're going to get into some of the interesting parts of this game because the blue player has a uh card here. And I should say that before we move forward that you can play a card face down, and that would be one of your played cards. Uh we are eventually going to play five cards.
You can play a card face down in order to get uh one of these options. And this will be your turn. Two money, one movement, or you can buy a card from here according to the prices that are over here. Zero for a level one, uh two for a level two, or five for a level three. You might want to wait for that. There's a reason why you want to wait, but there's also a reason why you want to play one of these face down. We're not going to do that. What we're going to do is we're going to travel two. Okay? So maybe we want to, you know, we're going to go down here. But here's where the trickiness in the card play comes. And this is that smart thing that I was talking about. When you play a card, you also activate the previous cards of the same suit. So now I'm traveling. And since I traveled, I can also activate these. Now, if I did did this right here, I could act I can play this activate and travel. And then eventually I can decide which ones I want to play in what order. So I can go travel and then explore and then travel again or I can travel travel and explore. That kind of thing like that.
So you have these like different options as you play more cards from your hand. And that's where the smartness of this design comes. So maybe I want to travel and then I want to explore again. So I'm going to go in here and and now I have like a little combo going on. And this one gives me another action. And this one gives me the ability to pay a coin to get a resource or pay three coins to get two resources. I just happen to have two coins. Maybe I want to pay to get other resource. I think for right now, this is another action. So, I'm going to take that one right there. That sounds pretty cool. Okay. Now, this also would be an opportunity to talk about what what can happen if we're there. Some of these people will give benefits for being in their city. And when they're when you're in their city, they may have give you the option to, you know, if you explore or something like that or do any interaction in the city, you can also spend certain things. Like for Twain here, you can spend uh resources to get points. Okay? So, every resource you spend is two points. Can't do it a billion times, but you can do it uh when you take actions there. So, you just got to keep that in mind. And they're all different. They're all different. All right? So, that was the two cards that I have in play for him. I have my arrow here. I'm going to hang out and talk to some people. Okay. So, now when I talk to people, I have a couple different options. You see over here, uh we have this tile here. Now, when I play this, I can uh take one of these uh one of these benefits here, and that depends on where you are in the city. You would have to be physically in the city. Uh but you can choose one of these. This one here is a telescope. These tokens are ones that you'll collect during the game. You
want to put those eventually put them inside of your journal because you'll score points based on how much you filled your journal. But you also want to have these for a later thing. I just realized I forgot to put these back over there. We'll figure that out. All right, we'll sus that out later on. But what's going to happen is is you're going to take uh one of these benefits. And I'm just going to go ahead and take maybe uh one I'm going to take this one for right now because that's an action of movement. I don't want to move. And now I have a choice. U I have a choice. I can take this and then I can decide whether I want to take a friendship tile and use it for later. So I can put it in here or I can put a letter there. And that's what I'm going to do. I'm going to put a letter there. All right. We'll put a letter there. What that does is it allows me to play a card eventually that looks like this.
You're going to see a journal. Uh you're going to see this right here. It's a letter. Eventually, another action later on, I can write a letter to them and get that benefit. We're going to save that one for later and show you. All right. So, benefit up here. Or I can take this tile or I can place one of these here. Okay. And I think I'm going to place that one there. That is my turn. I'm going to go ahead and slide these cards over here. And then we'll put these guys back up here. Now, I want to interact with somebody that's there. So, for example, I could play this card here. All right. So, I'll play this card here. And instead of doing all this conversation here, I think instead I want to interact with Mr. Twain. Mr. Twain says, "Hey, if I spend one of these resources here, I get two points. I like the sound of that. I'm going to go ahead and spend one of these right here, and then I'll get two points." And that's interacting with these people.
But but okay, maybe I want to do something like this. When I conversate with them, I also have the choice of doing one of these things here based on where they're at. He is currently in uh Vienna. So what'll happen is is I can do one of these activities. I'll call them experiences with them. I have these five tokens here. And these five tokens represent different activities that I can do with them in order to put more tiles down and score more points, but also immediately get benefits. And I also am kind of establishing presence like a relationship with them. And this is how we do it. So the things that we can do with them, all right, one is having a duel with them. All right, so I can have a duel. We shoot back and forth. For some reason, I'm just starting a beef with Mark Twain. That's cool, right? I'm going to start a beef with Mark Twain. So, I'll go here and I'll place this here. What does that mean? I get to double the gazette bonus.
And I should mention that all these gazettes are different. There's several in the game. And then also, you have the choices of these cards as well, which are all different benefits here. So, you have different people, different gazettes, which will tell you where they're traveling. But then also um different rewards and different conditions as well. Uh so, what that does is is it gives me double that bonus. So, we get two of those. Uh we get two of those as well. And these are different different opportunities like buying cars and these are points. So I would get two of these and then also I can no longer interact with them anymore. So that counts as two presents here but at the same time I can't interact with them anymore. So I would only have to be interacting with them. That's a risk I would take. Or I could just party it up. You know what I'm saying? Like we can just have a night to remember. Man, let's you know what I'm saying? Let's just drink, man. Let's just hang out, bro. Okay, so we going to hang out. we gain a gazette bonus and then it counts as two tokens at the end of the game. So that counts as one two for this right here at the end of the game. Uh or I can say, hey, you know, man, you're just so awesome. You're so amazing. It's great to hang out with you. I'm lost in admiration. I'm having a good time now after uh each action phase. So we're doing the action phase.
I can lose one point to gain the gazette bonus. So I can lose a point to gain this and that' be for the rest of the game. So it's a nice way to kind of hang out, get some points, get some stuff from them. lose a point, but you get the benefit so that you can do more out here during the game, maybe not waste the action. And then you have elective uh elective affinity. So, elective affinities is a star. What you do is you place these out here wherever you are. Like I said, this is the first round, so we can only place up here. Uh and I place that there. And at the endame, two victory points per experience token. Or if I have two of these out here, I get six points with the same famous person. So, you want to have another way to score some points. That's the way you would do it. This can all come from a conversation. All from a conversation. So, we have interacting with them or we're interacting with the people in the city. You choose which one you want to do. Okay. So, this is probably the most complex action in the game. Uh, and that would be that person's that would be the blue person's turn. Now, we go back over here. Okay. So, then we're doing our thing. So maybe we want to do uh you know maybe we want to do some tea time.
Uh so maybe we want to start playing this here. So I'm going to go here and I'm going to say hey I want to do tea time or I want to maybe write some things in my journal. We're going to do tea time instead. I'm going to talk about both but I'll I'll show you one here. So I'll look at these resources here. They both have different resources. Some are going to ask for more. Of course the ones that ask for more you're going to have to reach those cities but then you're also going to be have to be able to turn them in. So, it's really important that you make these choices because there's a lot of scoring ingame, but then you're going to have your endgame according to how many things are in your journal. So, for example, I'm going to turn these two things in sculptures and the telescope. So, I'm going to turn these two things in and that put my little tea time out there. You know, we're discussing philosophy, we're going we're discussing love, you know what I'm saying? And then, so we go we're discussing love and we put that out there at five. Okay? So, that represents the points that we get.
later on if I have more I can six and four 11 points 15 points 17 points 13 points a lot more points uh because you're going to have to travel further down I should even mention like traveling further down cost a lot of money and this is not like a heavy resource game so got to pay attention to that stuff all right so that was this action but let's just say instead I decided to do this journaling so I wanted to journal it up talk about you know kind of think and reflect on the things that I've done you know what have I really done here. What did I really learn about myself? Okay. Well, I saw these things. Okay. I saw these ideas and different types of things and I want to write something down. So, what I could do is take one of the tokens I have that matches any of these in here and I will place one of them in here.
And that could be one of these or that can be one of these things that I picked up here that match one of the cities that I was that I'm from. or that could be one of these friendship tiles that goes inside of here that I would have during the game. So, that's important to note. Okay. Uh, this is just that action. This is one of those two actions on here. Eventually, you'll get cards that allow you to do multiples of these. I should also mention, let's just say on my fifth turn, and I'm just going to kind of skip a turn here. I'm going to go back and I'm going to play this card. Each one of us has a resource card like this that matches, you know, that I think is a purple. And then what you'll do is, like I said before, you'll play uh you'll play this purple card, but then you'll also have the opportunity to do one of these actions because it's also a purple. So, I would be able to get one of these here. Um, boom. And then I'd also be able to take the other action. Uh, just to kind of give you an idea. Or let's say on my fifth turn, I would do something like this. All right.
So on my fifth turn, I would play this card, which will allow me to get a letter. And it says, "Hey, wherever I have a letter, I can choose one of those people." Because eventually I'll have something like this. And you only have three of those tokens. I could choose one of the people that I have reached during the game. And I can go say, "Hey, I want uh this benefit here." Okay. So I choose one of those, take that benefit. That's writing letters. Then I would go back to having a conversation. And so I would say, okay, I want to have a conversation with the previous person based on where we're at. So let's say I'm over here with my lady here, and I'm starting to interact uh interact with her, and I want to have a conversation. Well, when I interact with her, and this is lady, she's she's different. She's got these paintings. She's going to collect paintings, and the more I collect during the endgame, the more points I get during the uh during the end game. So I maybe I want to do that.
Does that make sense to me? Uh and that would be my turn. Now, I'm just going to go ahead and jump to the end of the round. As you can see, I kind of skipped the blue player's turn, but those are all the actions that are in the game. Very, very easy to understand. So, now we go to the round bonuses, and this is where the famous people come in. Now, if we are at certain spots, they will give us different benefits. Charles Dickens, if you're just interacting uh interacting with someone in his town in the town, you just pay a coin and then you can do one of these two actions, explore or go to tea time. So, they all have these different abilities. I'm just going to explain a couple of them. Let's see where my cards are. I got a couple here. Um, let's see. Um, this is John Keats. Uh, so I'm sorry. This is John. Uh, Joseph Addison. So, if you're where he's at, you get to choose one of these actions and then, uh, you get to choose one of these action, you get a point.
Uh, this one, Lady Blessing, is pretty cool. If you're in the same spot as her, you get four points or the closest to her. And then if you are further away, you get negative -2 points. Uh at the end of the round you can turn and you get two resources if you're where she's at or you get three points. Uh this is just when you take a tea time where this person's at they get four points. So they're all they all have their little tricks to them. It's a combination of those that are going to be in the game. Uh and then we move on to the market phase. And this is where we can buy a card based on based on our different suits of cards we played. And I'm going to go ahead and show you two ways to look at this. These are the five cards I played during the round. And since I played one, two, three different types of cards I could buy from here or here for nothing. I get to choose a card during the round. If I'm playing cards and I take one of these actions for a faceown card, I can buy the cards for the cost. But this part is really comes boils down to the different types of colors of cards that I've played. So I played three different colors. I have a choice of one of these. This is a white card. These white cards have some really cool actions on it. They have good combinations and they're worth a lot of points. Um they're worth usually about three points. Um and you're going to take one of these. You put it in your hand. This could take you over the eight card limit, but we'll get there in a minute. We'll take that card. These cards have points on the bottom, but they also sometimes have scoring little scoring extras down here at the bottom.
So like two points for every resource you have uh during the game, that kind of stuff. Uh, but then there's level ones, level twos, and level threes. Of course, the level threes are absolutely amazing, right? Uh, but that's me, right? So, I played those cards and I get that I get that one there. So, I get three cards. This one here, this player, let's say this player played one, two, uh, three, four, and and, uh, five like that. So, they played all different cards. One, two, three, four. They played four different types of cards. So, then they could choose one of these cards down here. Now, maybe they want to lean into traveling more. So, what they go is they say, "Hey, I want to be able to either uh explore twice eventually, or I can play all of these cards eventually, and during a later turn in the game, I have access to play this type of stuff every round, trying to keep pace with these people because when we get to the reorganization phase and we set up for the new round, what'll happen is, and I'm going to keep these cards down here just to give you an idea of what happens. So, we'll reorganize this cards. These cards that are displayed will be refreshed. They don't get refreshed during the round. So, we'll have two new cards out here. And you'll see this other card be visible.
And then what we'll do is we move down to the second round. Now, that moves everybody that's on the board. So, my lady here, she stays down here, which I don't know why I put her down here in the beginning. She's supposed to be in Bolognia. Whatever. She's here. Uh we have uh we have uh let's see, we have Mark Twain. He's going to be in Bolognia now. All right. And then we have uh Mr. Dickens. He's going to be down in Peruga. So now they move further down. And they will eventually get down in this area, which costs more money to move in between spots. But here's the deal. What if I want to catch up? Okay, maybe I'm up here. Like maybe I'm in the middle of nowhere. All right. So, I got to play cards like this so that maybe when I play this card in the beginning of the round, eventually I get two movements. So, that's one, two. I got to pay for that, but that's fine. And then later on, I can maybe I want to get down to him. Well, if I play this card, I can now move. If I can play this card, I can activate this one for one, and then I can play this one for two. You know, that kind of thing. And then I can play this one later to do more movement. So, I can kind of keep up. I can constantly keep up. Very easy system. But that gives you an idea of how it plays. At the end of the game, we'll get points for how many of these tokens we have here. And remember, some of them will give you double presence. So, you almost have to think of it like this, like there's two on here um that are established. Whoever has the most kind of contribution to them, they'll get five points. You'll have your cards, which are points at the bottom uh here.
And like I said before, they're going to have some that are going to give you points per uh like how many of these T icons you have, how many level twos for every two level twos, those types of things like that. Uh this one right here, one point per exploration tile you have. Uh just remember you can use these at any point during your turn. These are uh sometimes extra actions or sometimes extra benefits. Um and then you'll also get points for just how many of these tiles you have. And then you'll also get points for how full your journal is. All those are scaled right here. You can see them. And that is the game. Okay. Now, explain a lot, but it's very easy. You play a card. When you play the card, if it matches another color or color uh the same color, three or four of them, you get to act them activate them in whatever order you want to. If you're conversating, you're conversating with the people or you're conversating with these special people and you get benefits during the round or uh after after your phase, after your playing phase, you buy new cards, try to create some more combos. It's very very easy. I think it what it is is that this game appeals to a wide range of hobbyist gamers. So, people who like that lighter medium weight and then there's also that choice of the person who likes to play those mediumwe games. There's enough meat on the bone for them. So, it's like I believe that the card game, the card play is really smart and and very accessible and easy and it pays it the strategy that you put in place pays off.
You're going to constantly be um I think you're going to constantly want to come back to this design because you want to create so many different card combos and you just want to feel smart. And I think that's what's going to happen when people play this. They're going to go, "Oh, I scored a lot of points. Oh man, I left some points on the table. I'd rather build a different deck next time. And that's what it is. I think that action that action system on these cards is just really smart. It's absolutely very, very smart. And the combos you can create is just very rewarding. That that is very rewarding. And that's the reason why I'm showing you this design today. Hopefully, I helped you make an informed backing decision because I can't tell you what to do with your money, folks. This is your money. Hopefully, I helped you uh helped you figure out whether this is for you. They put a lot of time into this. I believe that this game was once on crowdfunding. They went back to the well and did a lot of work. And you can tell uh if you look at some of the older coverage, they've changed a lot um to kind of make the experience a lot more whole and a lot more uh variability in the game. There's a ton of it. All right, if you have any questions, leave them in the comments below. You take care. Have a wonderful day. Thank you for joining me on MVM.