That Time You Killed Me

Before starting to write about That Time You Killed Me, I checked whether it is a design from Japan. It isn’t. It gives me the vibes. Partly from the name. Partly from the minimalistic components. Partly from the unusual concept. This game toys with the idea of time travel. This is a two player abstract game in which you fight in the present, in the past, and in the future. 

There are three 4x4 grid boards, representing past, present and future. You start the game with one pawn on each board. You have some pawns in your supply and it is possible to add more pawns. You kill your opponent’s pawn by squishing them, for example by pushing them against the wall. You can kill two opponent pawns at one go if you manage to push them into each other, causing a paradox. You win by killing all opponent pawns on two out of the three boards. 

You have a focus token which determines which board you can act on. At the end of every turn you must move it to another board. On your turn you must pick one of your pawns on your active board to act. The basic action is moving a pawn two steps. If you can squish your opponent’s pawn, good on you! There are two special moves - traveling to the past, and traveling to the future. If you travel to the future, you move your activated pawn to the exact same spot on the board one step in the future, provided that spot is empty. A pawn in the past board can travel to the present board. A pawn in the present board can travel to the future board. If you travel to the past, things work a little differently. Your pawn doesn’t move to the board one step in the past. Instead it creates a new pawn there. You can do this only if you still have pawns in your supply. 

These are the base rules. The game comes with several variants, and it is recommended that you use them. They add new elements to the base rules. 

The tree variant allows you to plant seeds. A seed becomes a scrub one step in the future, if the same space is empty.  If the scrub does come into existence, then one more step into the future it becomes a tree, again that is if the same space is empty. Scrubs block movement. Trees can be pushed and toppled to kill a pawn on the other side. 

With the statue variant, there is a neutral statue on all boards at the start of the game. During the game you can build one yourself too. When you build a statue, it will appear in future boards. You can push and also pull a statue. When this happens, the statue will move in the same direction on future boards. You can use this mechanism to push or squish your opponent’s pawns. 

That Time You Killed Me is a clever game. It is an abstract and open information game, and it is unforgiving. The game mechanism is unusual. Sometimes it seems hard to position yourself to kill your opponent. You get a feeling you will just end up in a stalemate. It's only a small 4x4 board after all. If you just take turns pushing each other two steps, you only get into an infinite loop. So you have to think creatively how to make use of the core time travel rules and also the variant rules you are playing. There aren't that many rules, but it is not always easy to consider all the implications of your moves. I find that I keep trying to do something different to get out of a stalemate. You can create copies of yourself in the past. You can disappear from the present to jump to the future. The game can feel a little dry, because of the abstract nature and it being a perfect information game. However I am a little surprised that as we explored different moves, we managed to kill each other eventually. That Time You Killed Me is minimalistic yet thinky.