Ever fancied some kind of jolly in a bit of a homemade flying machine, all in the name of bagging victory points? Well do I have some good news for you.
Introduction
It’s another Pack O Games review and YET certainly feels quite different from any of the others I’ve played so far. It has a few… nuances… to it and whilst it has a little bit of a look of Clock Patience to it, there’s an interesting action card drafting bit that holds it all together in a fairly pleasing way. Chocks away…!
Ever fancied some kind of jolly in a bit of a homemade flying machine, all in the name of bagging victory points? Well do I have some good news for you.
Introduction
It’s another Pack O Games review and YET certainly feels quite different from any of the others I’ve played so far. It has a few… nuances… to it and whilst it has a little bit of a look of Clock Patience to it, there’s an interesting action card drafting bit that holds it all together in a fairly pleasing way. Chocks away…!
Setup
I’ve mentioned before that Pack O Games titles aren’t scared of having oddly specific player counts, and here there’s no exception as this is only suitable for 2 or 3 players thank you very much.
The small box contains four different types of cards – very much in keeping with packing as much into the chewing gum-sized packs as possible. Firstly we have the 3 airship cards – give one to each player. Next are the 12 time capsule cards (numbered 1-12) which you’ll shuffle and set out face-down in a random order but mimicking layout of the numbers on a clock.
There are two clock hand cards (a big hand and a little hand for those who did analogue clocks back in primary school…) and they’re set out in the middle of the circle of cards, pointing to the 12 spot. Again, this is an imaginary 12 o’clock space as all the cards are face down. There are some clock ‘marker’ cards that you’ll use just for positioning a little later in the game but they can be set aside at the beginning. Finally there are 10 action cards which you need to give a good old shuffle.
Players place their airships on the starting spaces around the clock (6 o’clock and 9 o’clock for a two-player game, and adding in 3 o’clock for three players). The ships can face in either direction. And we’re pretty much ready to take flight.
WATCH what you’re doing
Watch because it’s timed themed you see? In all seriousness, bad puns and glib primary school jokes aside, the rules are really clear that you do have to know what an analogue clock looks like to be able to play this. Reading that gave me simultaneous food for thought about how society has moved on, and also reminded me of the joke that my daughter sometimes tells, that I was “born in the late 1900s” – thanks kid.
There’s six steps to each round. Four of them are dead simple, but as you can imagine, it’s the other two where most of the game happens.
We begin but advancing the time. Move the clock forward one hour (so from 12 o’clock to 1 o’clock in the first round) and if the new time capsule card the little hand is point to has no airship on it, you flip it over.
Steps two and three are some card drafting. Shuffle the cards (step 2) and deal them out face down, and three to each player, setting any unused card(s) aside for the round. Players then select one and draft it face-down, passing the remaining two cards clockwise and repeating (step 3).
Now we’re into the “doing stuff” part of your turn as a player, where you’ll play two of the three cards you’ve drafted, but you’ll do this one card at a time so each player plays their first card in order, and then their second. The third card is always discarded
Each card has two symbols on the top relating to the different actions you can take. You can choose to do one or both of the symbols and you can do them in either order:
– Movement – these are shaped like cogs (which is a lovely fit with the airships theme) and you can move exactly the number of spaces indicated by the large holes in the centre of the cog. For example, a cog that’s divided into four allows you to move exactly four spaces around the clock face. A cog with no dividing lines allows one movement. You have to do the full amount of movement for the card you play and you have to go in the direction your airship is currently pointing
– Flip/rotate – this symbol allows you to either rotate your airship so you’re facing in the opposite direction (e.g. move from facing clockwise to anti-clockwise) or to flip over any unoccupied time capsule card so it either goes from face-up to face-down or vice-versa
– Advance time – this allows you to move the clock one hour forward, but you can’t use this action to turn it to back to 12 o’clock as it would end the game
– Foresee – this allows you to either secretly look at any unoccupied time capsule card or to look at another player’s hand. I’ll be honest and say that second ability is one I’ve rarely used
The symbols are easy to understand and you’ve always got some control over what you end up with in your hand, and just how much of the chosen cards you decide to activate.
Now we’re into the land of points…
Capturing Time Capsules
This is where we’re going to bag ourselves some sweet points. Hopefully. An airship will capture a time capsule it has landed on if:
1. It’s a face-up time capsule and
2. The time the clock shows is equal to or lower than the value of the time capsule…. Let’s have an example
Say your airship is on the face-up time capsule card that shows a 6. If the clock hand cards are showing 6 o’clock or later you can capture it. If the clock hands are showing earlier (in this example, 5, 4, 3, 2 or 1 o’clock) then you can’t capture it yet.
You might need to read that again – it took a while to stick in my head if I’m honest. The keynote version is “you can always capture a card if it’s equal to the current or an earlier time).
But wait – there’s more!
If you’re on the card that exactly matches the hour shown on the clock, you can take any other face-up, unoccupied cards as long as they match a past hour. So essentially there’s a potentially big bonus for getting to exactly the right place at exactly the right time.
And maybe now you start to see how the card abilities all stack up a little. You always know what card will match the current round so if you can find it, get there and flip over the past cards, you can potentially score a lot of points in one go. Equally you can use a flip symbol to prevent an opponent from doing exactly that. It’s an interesting combo of sneaky and strategic planning.
At any rate, captured time capsules are removed from the game and placed in front of you, and you airship returns to it’s space on the clock. This is also where the ‘marker’ cards come in as they help you remember where the 12, 3, 6 and 9 spaces are if those cards get removed.
Scoring up
The game ends if at the end of a round, the short hand is pointing back at 12, in which case you add up all the values of the time capsules you have and most points wins. Any ties are given to the player with the lowest value capsule.
Final thoughts
I have differing thoughts about this one. Like I said for SLY, this one probably isn’t pushing to be my favourite, but there’s strong competition there so it’s not necessarily a mark against it.
I think it can feel a little chaotic at times and it gets increasingly like that as time capsules get snapped up. The marker cards help you see where the 3, 6, 9 and 12 points are, but movement action cards still take into account missing capsules so you need to take increasing care as the game progresses which interrupts the flow a little. I’d probably make the same argument for getting your head around which capsules you can and can’t score when the moment comes each round, though that does become more intuitive the more you play.
It’s definitely not all doom though! It’s superficially straightforward, but making sure you draft the right cards, play the right actions in the right order is really critical to maxing out your score so there’s definitely a difference being able to play it and being able to play it well and it’s definitely a game you can play again and again to get to and the fact that it’s quick to play makes that an appealing thing.
