T.I.M.E. Stories - Tips & Strategies

The puzzle presented by each case in T.I.M.E. Stories requires careful note-taking and meticulous attention to detail to solve. Each player should be taking notes as they go, faulting on the side of “too much information” because once you’ve left a location it’s going to be very costly to revisit.

But we live in a digital age! Is your penmanship even legible anymore? What use will you have for indecipherable notes? This line of logic must have been on the mind of the idiot in my group who started taking pictures of each location card he visited with his cell phone camera so that he had a perfect record for puzzle solving later (… ok… that idiot was me).

While we pretty quickly realized this was cheating (oddly, I don’t recall the rulebook saying anything about note-taking – which is necessary – let alone picture taking), we lost at least a half hour of play time debating the thematic sense of taking pictures. See, the first 2 scenarios are set in the 1920s and early 1990s, and cell phone cameras certainly wouldn’t have been available to the vessels you’re occupying. But regular cameras would have been. However, would institutionalized 1920s mental patients have been able to get there hands on one? It went on like this for some time.

In any event, we made that fool (again, me) immediately delete the pictures from the phone and gumshoe the old fashion way. It probably takes longer, but rushing through T.I.M.E. Stories is the last thing you want to do.

In the Asylum, you have the luxury of choosing from a diverse and eclectic cast of…interesting individuals, but don’t fall into the trap of simply picking your receptacle based on appearance.

Pay close attention to each of the receptacle’s stats and choose a team that balances out well. If one stat is high, it is incredibly likely that another won’t just be bad, but absolutely dire.

As it isn’t clear what each panorama card could potentially lead to, you can’t exactly plan ahead for combat or speech tests. It’s a good idea to have 2 specialists in combat and 2 linguistic wonders and dividing them up to create balanced teams. Otherwise, a butch pair may come across a task not suited for their abilities, and will likely waste a LOT of time by not completing it quickly, and thus have a knock on effect on the exploration of a location, WASTING MORE TIME!