Sunday, 30 July 2017

Tides Of Time


There are many drafting games; Dominion, Century, Star Realms to name some, but very few are as stripped back as Tides of Time.

Brought to you by Portal Games, Tides Of Time is a two player game in which players draft, or pass cards back and forth while taking one at a time, using amounts of different symbols on the cards in order to score more points than your opponent.

Overview

There are 18 cards in the deck and most of them will have one of five symbols in the top left corner; a gold crown (palace), a pink hand (temple), a green leaf (garden), a blue ribbon (library) and a red tower (stronghold).
 

There are three cards for each of the five suits.
Some cards have no symbol on them electing to instead have text relating to symbols or scoring, some cards also have a mix of both a symbol and text on them.

Set up and game play

Shuffle all eighteen cards and deal both players five each, put the other eight to one side. Each player takes one card from the five three we're dealt and passes the remaining four cards to their opponent, repeat this process until all cards have been drafted (taken by each player). Each player should end up with five cards. That marks the end of the first round, both players then total up all their points from the cards they have drafted and note them down.

Both players then choose a card from the five they have drafted that they would like to keep and represents this by putting a Relic Token on top of it and putting it to one side.
In a similar fashion, both players also choose a card from the remaining for they drafted to discard from the game and place those cards in the box. They then draw two cards each from the deck and repeat the drafting process for a second and third round, choosing to keep a card from each round and a card to discard.
The cards both players chose to keep effect the scoring in the later rounds as well as the round they were drafted in, so it can help you in the near future to try and keep

At the end of the third round both players total up their overall scores and the player with the highest score wins, it's as easy as that.

Thoughts

Tides Of Time is a very beautiful game with lovely artwork on each card relating to a historical fantasy monuments, including a tall spired church-like building, a castle on a cliff top and a very picturesque port at sunset. It's a very easy to grasp game with the same gameplay being repeated three times over one game, and it does cause you to rearrange and rethink your strategy on the fly which is a great skill to have as it can serve you well in other game situations especially other drafting games like the ones I mentioned at the start of the review or even drafting in TCG's.

It's small, it's cheap and you will get a lot of play out of it for a two player game and if anyone is looking to get better at drafting in any other capacity, I would definitely recommend Tides Of Time.

If you guys wanna check out Tides Of Time, head down to your local hard and hobbies store but until then, keep checking back to Game Changers for more gaming news and updates.

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