Okay, so as promised in yesterday's post, back in April of this year, we tried a new game called Anachrony.
Here's the "plot" of Anachrony, in case you want to know:
"It is the late 26th century. Earth is recovering from a catastrophic explosion that exterminated the majority of the population centuries ago and made most of the surface uninhabitable due to unearthly weather conditions. The surviving humans organized along four radically different ideologies, called Paths, to rebuild the world as they see fit: Harmony, Dominance, Progress, and Salvation. Followers of the four Paths live in a fragile peace, but in almost complete isolation next to each other. Their only meeting point is the last major city on Earth, now just known as the Capital.
By powering up the mysterious Time Rifts that opened in the wake of the cataclysm, each Path is able to reach back to specific moments in their past. Doing so can greatly speed up their progress, but too much meddling may endanger the time-space continuum. But progress is more important than ever before: if the mysterious message arriving through the Time Rift is to be believed, an even more terrible cataclysm is looming on the horizon: an asteroid bearing the mysterious substance called Neutronium is heading towards Earth. Even stranger, the scientists show that the energy signature of the asteroid matches the explosion centuries ago...?"
HAHAHAHAHAHAH OKAY GREAT LET'S DO THIS.
DAY ONE: First of all, Anachrony is a large, complex game with many parts. Katr spent two full hours punching out the individual pieces.
Then Katr and Drtr watched 90 minutes of walk-through video tutorials on how to play the game. Then Katr brought the rule book to bed for some light reading.
DAY TWO: The game took a full 30 minutes to set up. Then we spent 90 minutes going through the rule book together. Then we tried to start the game and realized that, despite all of our research and walk-through watching, we still fundamentally couldn't grasp what the fuck was actually supposed to HAPPEN. Like, we couldn't figure out how it STARTED.
So Katr found ANOTHER walk-through in which a guy and his wife played the game from start to finish. "We'll just watch until we understand how the turns work," we said to each other, "we're not going to watch the WHOLE THING. It's a 2 hour and 45 minute video, for fuck's sake!"
We watched the entire 2 hour and 45 minutes.
By that time, it was dark out and we were tired, so we ordered some Swiss Chalet, watched some Castle on DVD and went to bed.
DAY THREE: Got up. Had breakfast. Made pot of coffee. Put on comfy pants. Sat down at the table. FINALLY READY TO START PLAYING ANACHRONY.
It took us 6 hours.
I did not win.
But I did have fun. And when we played it a second time, I DID win and now I LOVE Anachrony, I LOVE it!
In case you weren't sure that Katr had TOTALLY fulfilled her nerd quotient by buying Anachrony, allow me to inform you that she ALSO bought an insert for Anachrony, which keeps the box more organized and makes for an easier set-up (one assumes - we haven't actually played since the insert was completed).
Did the insert come pre-assembled? NO.
Did Katr spend several days punching, sanding, staining and assembling the insert. YES.
Did she document the entire process in a post on BoardGame Geek? FUCK YES SHE DID LOOK AT IT IT IS GLORIOUS
Here is a look at the finished product:
I love you, Katr. Even if you're always trying to get me to "try new things".
