Time Traveling Board Game, pt. 1

During my commute home today an idea came to me. It's probably nothing unique in the sea of game concepts out there, but I thought I'd explore it nonetheless. I basically want to be able to express the concept of time travel in a board game. I also want this to be simple and (hopefully) elegant enough that people can play it without the aid of a computer to manage timestreams and paradox. This is a thought process in motion, so there are bound to be some contradictions and changes of mind as things progress.

The idea is to take a simple 2d board game that's played on a grid, and extrapolate the 2d plane into a 3rd dimension of time slices. Each slice would be a duplicate board representing different states of the board as time progresses.

My first inclination was to apply this to chess. I thought of making 3d chess where the 3rd D was time instead of vertically stacked boards. I thought this might be a semantic issue, and that the vertical slices could represent time, but then a few things stuck out in my head.

First, every piece would have to be present in every slice, barring its death in an earlier timeslice. Secondly I wanted to account for branching in timelines, so a simple stack of boards wouldn't be enough. I eventually decided against using chess as a starting point, since it's already a complex game and the flatspace game mechanics should probably be as simple as possible before extracting things into the 4th (3rd?) dimension.

The Base Game
The base game I'm starting with is a super simple move/capture game. The board will be 4 x4 and each player will have 4 pieces. Each piece will do the exact same thing. The move set will include moving either 1 or 2 spaces or capturing an adjacent enemy piece. That's it for now.

Each piece in the set will also look different from the others so you can keep track of who is who when they travel through time, due to some restrictions I'll cover in a minute. There will be one black set of pieces and one white set. The pieces will be a triangle, square, circle and hexagon. One side will have a red X. This will be used to show which time slices a piece has been captured on.

Time Traveling Complications
The next step is to apply time travel rules on top of the basic rules. These simple moves can then be extended through time so a piece can move 1 or 2 (maybe just 1) spaces forward or backwards in time, or capture a piece in the same spot in an adjacent timeslice. I chose the simple route because I tried to imagine how to extrapolate the concept of 'diagonal' or 'L-shaped' moves from chess into a time travelling mechanic.

Forking
The game will feature 'forking', or splits in the timeline. A player can go back to any timeslice and choose to make a different move than one he executed, as long as the timeslice was one in which it was his turn. This will create a parallel board to the following timeslice where the alternate move was made.

There will have to be some markers of some sort that denote whose turn a timeslice represents and which directions the forks come from. There will also probably need to be some cap on the maximum number of parallel timelines to keep the game from getting out of hand, both conceptually and from a materials standpoint. There might also need to be a way for players to remove boards from play. Perhaps a player can, as his turn, remove the endmost board from a timeline where it was his turn, basically 'undoing' a move.

Another concept I had might render this pruning mechanic unnecessary, though. As time progresses, older slices of time will fall off the tree. My first thought is 4 timeslices for each player, so a timeline with a maximum of 8 boards in length. As soon as a player makes a move at the far end of the timeline, the earliest slice will be removed and all the boards will be slid backwards.

Time Travel
The game will also feature pieces that can travel through time. This part is a little trickier than forking, due to cause and effect relationships. If piece A travels back in time one step, then there will be 2 copies of A in that timeslice. This would make the next timeslice have 2 copies of A as well, since they would persist through time. The player could probably repeat this process ad infinitum until he had a whole board full of copies of one piece. This means that special restrictions probably have to be applied.

Moving Forward
My next step is to begin testing some of these first, basic ideas and see what happens. The time travel part in particular will probably have to undergo a rapidfire series of iterative playtests to see what's even in the realm of feasibility, then what subset of that is actually fun. More posts as progress is made.