‘In the near future, humanity collapses into a dystopia. In a last-ditch effort, scientists invent brain-connected nanochips that allow travelers [sic] to move through time and alter events. However, rival alternative futures clash and the prosperity of one means the ruin of another. Will you save your future?’
I like time travel stories and movies, but so far, no time travel game has really grabbed me. Could Restart by designers Vangelis Efthimiou and Antonios Yannopoulos (of Age of Rome fame) be the one for me?
The 1–4 player game is currently in preview on Gamefound, with the campaign due to launch at the end of April. Due to relaunch, I should say, since it spent some time on Kickstarter in 2024, but the creators cancelled that project due to negative feedback on the game. In one of the updates to that campaign, they stated, ‘As designers, our goal is to create fun, simple, and joyful games. Somewhere along the way, we seem to have forgotten that. While this is not the time for self-criticism, we felt the need to share this with you and assure you that we will do our best not to make this mistake again. To get back on track, we have managed to refine Restart (Restart Restart as a fun guy would say) into a more fast-paced, straightforward tactical fun game.’ I thoroughly applaud this honesty and look forward to finding out more about the new Restart.
Components and Setup
According to campaign update 3, ‘Restart is not just a game; it’s an entirely new gaming system designed to offer new challenges and experiences every time you play.’ Uh-huh. Hyperbole aside, they have chosen quite an interesting way to build the game. You use a core set of components and base rules, then add in a scenario-specific secondary board with additional rules and components, something like Final Girl, perhaps, or replacing the main board by adding the Cataclysm expansion to 4th edition Talisman. I’m not convinced this will offer ‘new challenges’ every time you play, but it does bring a lot of variability.
Anyway, the common game setup involves laying out a grid of 3×3 Event cards for 1–2 players, or 4×3 for 3–4, on the main board, termed the Spacetime grid (top row represents the future, middle present, and bottom past), sets of scoring Objectives (such as having a certain amount of some resource) and a drafting pool of Missions (which score on the basis of patterns of Event cards on the grid), then players take a Character card and Mind board along with two player tokens, as well as Mission and Event cards. After this, you choose one of the scenarios—dystopias, they’re called—and add its components. The recommended first scenario to try, Pandemia, has you pitting your wits against a pandemic virus, and the additions to the game are a secondary board with two separate tracks to progress using associated custom dice, as well as small boards to place below players’ Mind boards, providing bonuses as progress is made along the Mind tracks (more on those in a moment).
The two Character tokens represent adult you and child you, and they spend most of their time meandering across the Spacetime grid—but the child and adult pieces belonging to the same player can’t occupy the same spot; some sort of temporal paradox, I guess. Adult pieces belong to different players also can’t coexist, because… um… reasons. Perhaps they’re just antisocial ;-) The adult tokens can also hop across to an Objective card to gain that reward. In general, interesting actions happen where player tokens are, so part of the game is making sure you’re in the right place at the right, er, time. On the first turn of the game, players place their child token on any space on the bottom row of the main board (i.e., in the past).
The Mind boards along with the Character card represent 4 separate abilities: Focus, Perception, Intelligence and Memory. The latter three make use of Event cards which have been placed in the appropriate slot of the Mind board to add further options. Event cards have a sequence of icons running up the left side offering scoring points (termed Prosperity points in the game) or actions to be taken. A track alongside each determines which of those slots are valid to be played in conjunction with a similar scale at the bottom of the board and that for the dystopia in play; this track is populated from Fragment and Adrenaline tokens acquired during play. An Action marker determines which ability is active at any time.
Gameplay Summary
On each turn, you move your Action marker to a new slot on the Mind board, then perform the actions indicated below that slot (or on the Character card, if Focus is chosen), as well as any extras enabled by the tokens in the Mind track alongside it.
· Focus: optionally play an Event card into the Mind board, changing the actions available to play when activating the corresponding slot.
· Perception: here, you can move your Character tokens (child tokens can move only horizontally; adults anywhere, including to Objective cards), play an Event card into the occupied space, gaining any benefits indicated on the card, and complete a Mission (see later).
· Intelligence: this is where the dystopia comes into play; all the dystopias offer a ‘Plan A’ and a ‘Plan B’ and in the case of Pandemia, you choose which track to advance along. An important feature of the dystopia boards is that they are the mechanism for acquiring new Mission cards to work on, in this case by passing certain spaces on the tracks. You can also ‘bury’ an Event card, by placing it underneath the cards in your Mind board, gaining the score from that card but none of its abilities.
· Memory: you can gain a variety of additional tokens (Time tokens, used to pay for Mission completion, Adrenaline tokens to advance the Mind board tracks, or Void tokens) or additional Event cards, and if your adult Character token is on an Objective card and you’ve completed the objective, you take the card and its scoring potential.
Event cards come in 4 ‘aspects’—food (green), energy (yellow), technology (blue) and society (purple). Mission cards indicate configurations of these aspects, and if you’ve managed to complete the pattern on the Mission card, you can claim the Mission. This provides Prosperity points and a Fragment token, but also comes at a cost in terms of Time tokens. A Void token can be used as a wildcard to override the colour of one Event card in the pattern. There’s an interesting interaction between Objectives and in-progress Missions: you can have up to 3 in total of completed Objectives and Missions in progress, thus completing Objectives early reduces the number of Missions you can work on; if you complete an Objective or gain a Mission card and already have 3, you have to abandon a Mission, which leads to a scoring penalty.
If at the end of your turn, there are fewer than a player-specific number of Mission cards in the draw area, a ‘time fault’ is triggered, moving the game on to its next phase. The Mission and Event card draw piles are refreshed, and more significantly, player’s child tokens are moved up a row (i.e., from past to present, then top future). The game is over on the third time fault, and scores are totted up from completed missions and objectives, progress on the Pandemia tracks and Event cards stacked on Mind boards. There are penalties for discarded missions, and unused Adrenaline tokens add extra Prosperity points.
This has been a quick summary with many details skipped over, but I hope it’s sufficient to give you a flavour of the game. The main rulebook also describes a collection of ‘side effects’ to make the game more complex as well as a campaign mode. Solo play, using an automa called Chaos, is covered in a separate rulebook.
The Other Dystopias
The four dystopias outlined so far are the already mentioned Pandemia, as well as Anomie, Extinction and Oceanrise. As a very nice touch, the dystopias rulebook contains a table comparing them in terms of luck factor, complexity, strategy and duration. (Pandemia’s the shortest, least complex and lowest strategy!)
Each dystopia includes a different secondary board, but offers the same choice between Plan A and Plan B, though the actions players take are very different across the dystopias.
In Anomie, players manoeuvre their Senator tokens around each other on a shared grid, trying to land on Law and Bill spaces in order to make progress along scoring tracks.
I misspoke, as all the best politicians are prone to say, when I stated that each dystopia provides a different secondary board. Extinction is card-based, with no such board; you draw X and Y Chromosome cards and play them in sets of the same value or groups of decreasing sequential numbers, scoring on the basis of numbers of the two types of card in play.
Oceanrise provides players with a map upon which they draw wildlife, lake and forest symbols based on where their and other players’ tokens are on the main board, striving to complete columns of symbols or have symbols of particular types close to cities (preprinted on the maps). A nice interaction is if you use another player’s token position, they gain points.
Time to Talk About Time
For a game ostensibly about time travel, there is practically no time-based mechanism in Restart at all. Player tokens represent child you and adult you, but they could just as easily be siblings, or a person and their trained monkey. The vertical axis on the main board represents time, but so what; what you do in the lower rows has no effect on the upper ones. If you squint, there’s maybe a hint of time in the Mission cards, e.g., the Food Technology mission requires a food event card in the row representing past, and technology ones in the present and future; but the connection is a bit more tenuous for Healthy Diet, which requires energy in the past, society in the present and food in the future.
Unless I’ve overlooked something, there’s not even a reference to time in the dystopias!
The rulebooks are early drafts, with spaces for unspecified stretch goals—maybe time will put in an appearance later on… (As a side note, I find it mildly irritating that these stretch goals affect play in such a fundamental way that they need to be mentioned in the rulebooks: are the designers really going to remove game features if they don’t reach these goals?)
Verdict
The campaign hasn’t yet started, so details are possibly more in flux than they could be; on the other hand, this is an overhaul of a previous design, so perhaps things are reasonably stable. However, it’s certainly true that details are scarce: for example, everything looks solidly constructed, but it’s not clear if this is the typical deluxe crowdfunded version vs the lesser standard one (if there actually is deluxification variation).
The creators made draft rulebooks available in their fifth update: the main rulebook is very readable, though the dystopias one is a tad dense in places. A few playthrough videos would be welcome, and hopefully will be available by the time the campaign launches. (Note that you can find a bunch of videos on BGG, but they’re all for the cancelled version, and the game has been sufficiently overhauled to make them invalid.)
The separation between core game and dystopia hints that the game will be extended in the future, and the existence of a Sand and Cables page on BGG suggests that deserts and zombies (cyber-zombies, no less) could be coming next year, with yet more game mechanisms: bag management for the first and area control for the second.
From what I can see so far, Restart seems to be an interesting game, despite the disappointing fact that it has next to nothing at all to do with time travel, and this campaign is one I’ll be keeping an eye on.
About the author
When not playing boardgames or blogging about them, L.N. Hunter keeps himself occupied writing fiction: a comic fantasy novel, The Feather and the Lamp, sits alongside close to 100 short stories in various magazines and anthologies, and on websites and podcasts (see https://linktr.ee/L.N.Hunter for a full list). L.N. occasionally masquerades as a software developer or can be found unwinding in a disorganised home in Carlisle, UK, along with two cats and a soulmate.
