I trust in the power of collaboration, especially with the creative minds here. So I'm gonna share the details of the game I've been working on for a few years and see what ideas y'all have for making it work. I'll try to be brief, but there's a lot of details to give, so bear with me. Feel free to criticize any part of my process.

The game is called Paradox Shift and is based on time-travel. It started as a trading card game (TCG), switched to a deck building game (DBG), and ended up as who knows what. I'll try to cover that arc.

The central focus of the game is the timeline. It's the creative part I've hung on to throughout the whole process. In the TCG, the timeline was a place where players took turns playing cards called EVENTs. All EVENT cards had locations and dates associated with them. Most also had time travel triggers. When you played an EVENT card, an ability would trigger based on where you traveled from. For instance, "+: Draw a card" would mean that you'd draw a card if you traveled from the past to the future. Since all players played their cards to a shared timeline, their card's usefulness would dynamically change based on what cards their opponents would play. There were other cards, basically enchantments and sorceries, that you could play in conjunction with EVENT cards. Rather than a normal resource system, these enchantments and sorceries had timeframes. You could play one a turn as long as the current EVENT's date fell within that card's timeframe.

The problems I had with this version:

1. The game ended once X events were in the timeline. That X was a number I never quite settled on. The winner was the player who had the most events in the timeline. In all of the playtest games, it never felt like a logical way to end the game. It came off as somewhat arbitrary and no one was ever that satisfied with it. I never found another win condition for this version of the game.
2. Playing cards to a communal location is problematic in regards to ownership. How many times have you during a game of Magic accidentally taken an opponent's aura? In my experience, it's a very easy mistake to make, and a very common one. I felt this feature was a rather large detriment to this being a workable play system.
3. TCG's aren't very marketable anymore. You have all the grandfathered survivors of the TCG stone and the TCG revival, but very few games still exist, and almost none that got their starts within the last decade. Not that I'm thinking only of the monetary accomplishments, but there's a bit of resistance to make a game for a marketplace that is in some ways extinct. Now, both this and the last point can be solved by becoming an online only game. I hadn't heard of Hearthstone at the time I switched tactics and hadn't even considered that as a solution. Still, I'd need a fix to the first issue.

I stumbled upon the idea of changing the game to a DBG, mostly to solve the card ownership problem. (I was also playing much more Dominion than Magic at that point.) The timeline idea remained similar, with abilities triggering based on where you traveled from. More focus was put onto rearranging cards in the timeline. I developed a separate point system by using achievement cards called PARADOXes. They were fairly simple: separate cards that awarded you points for completing a task, like ordering part of the timeline in a certain way, eliminated EVENTs, and so on.

The problems I had from there:

1. I was never satisfied with a card distribution system. I thought about copying other DCGs, but that never seemed to work. The Dominion pile system didn't offer the variety you'd want from a timetravel game. An Ascension line-up worked better, but at that point I needed a resource system, which required a reworking of what timeframes meant and basic resources and the whole ordeal was just really messy and just didn't fit in any natural way.
2. Most DBGs keep the cards you acquire, hence the whole deck building and replaying process. But this game requires you to add to the timeline. This became difficult to sustain in any reasonable way other than drawing from a giant shuffled pile. But at that point, it didn't really feel like deck-building.
3. The complexity felt to high. Needing to know the composition of the entire timeline has been a feature of all versions of the game, but with the paradoxes, extra moving around of events, and constant drawing of new hands, it became rather unwieldy.

The last idea I was attempting involved using the timeilne as both a resource line and the central hub of interaction it had always been. I didn't actually get far with that before moving on to other projects, but it felt like it had promise.

Anyway, I don't know what exactly to do with all of this work, but if you have any ideas, I'd love to hear them.

Legacy: Gears of Time had something similar to this, I believe.

I don't see how you thought deckbuilding would work. I could maybe see if it you took cards from the timelines to add to your deck, but persistent cards in a shared space feels like a big no-no.

I don't understand how the player was supposed to move on the playing field. Did every event move you, and then add to the board complexity?

You should probably look into other ways of determining the winner, and then base the game around that, I think. I guess the three variations on victory conditions are 1) Achieve {something}, 2) Do better at {something} or 3) Be the only one not to {something}
• Racing game where you want to either reach the beginning or the end, and the cards played make doing so into a puzzle.
• Hidden role game where you try to line up certain types of cards in a specific pattern to win.
• Victory point game where you get points for whatever you determine.
• Competitive game where you must strand every other person in the past. (Player elimination)

Have you played the Back to the Future card game? That had a fixed timeline with "ripple effects" that could change large swathes of events, and each character's goal was to create a particular future, then make it permanent by undoing the invention of time travel.

I'll check it out.


In theory, it solved the ownership problem. If the game was communal, then there's not problem with the timeline share cards. I didn't account for the other problems it introduced and designing around that has been very awkward at times.


One of the other reasons I liked the idea of a DBG is that those tend to not have much interaction. I realize that the supply is the main interaction point and that 's one of the facets that make DBGs so enjoyable, but I figured there was a way to add more interaction. The last version I had of the game was gonna treat the central timeline as a supply pile that you could play into [i]and[/u] draw from, and I still think that has some merit.


Let's say the timeline has 5 events in it, which we'll call from bottom to top 2000, 2002, 2003, 2004, and 2005. Say I play the event 2001 onto the top of the timeline. The card would have two triggers on it: one for when you move backwards in time, and one for forward. Since I'm moving from 2005 to 2001, the backwards trigger would occur, giving me some specific benefit. That's how the basic mechanic worked.

The paradox cards would then trigger if a specific condition was met, such as "Whenever you travel back in time: +1." That +1 being a victory point or a resource to buy victory points.


I'm not sure that really helps with this problem. The only thing I absolutely want to keep is the timeline: a place where players play cards that all have effects on one another. I suppose I could make it an Uno style game where running out of cards is the goal.


I have not but it sounds awesome.

Why not remove player control from events? Instead using a common pile of events. Each player instead have action cards that they use to win events (and move them in the timeline), whoever wins more events, wins the game. Not necessarily with a symmetric value to each event.

Common events could work. It's similar to DC's supervillain mechanism.

Honestly, I don't really know what the problem is. You have a simple concept with a multitude of different ways to implement it. Regardless of what the title says, it seems more to me like you want me to give you a game concept, because I'm not seeing anything I would call a "Game", "Design" or "Flaw".

Would you be able to post a few cards that is in the current game.

I am not sure I grasp the idea of "playing cards to timeline" and moving forward/backward in it.

I also played a time travel game recently called chrononaut.

It had a pre-set timeline of 32 cards that you can temper with.
You draw from a communal deck every turn 2 cards, and play 2 cards.
You win by setting up the timeline a certain way or collect 3 specific artifacts from the deck.
It was really simple but decently fun. (I think it's based on FLUXX or from the same designer)


Also, I want to know what the deck building element contribute to your game? You said you add cards to the time line, so I imagine you "buy" cards to add to your deck but shortly after you draw them, they "leave" your deck again, probably permanently?