Theming Question Related to Time Travel

My initial opinion of this is that when I play a "time" game, I want to manipulate time, not go on vacation.

Are there any consequences? What are the objectives?

TBH, if I were you, I'd choose a different theme instead of Biblical. I believe you can make a great Biblical themed game, just not as a time setting (see Commissioned the card game). When I heard your pitch, I thought more of a convention setting. Go to a convention but you can't see everything. You have a time limit and you and your friends have to get as many points as you can doing things around the convention before the convention ends.

But that's my opinion.

It's a bit of an odd combination to mix a biblical theme with time traveling vacations.

Presenting biblical events as historic facts might also spark controversy.

My advice would be to focus just on the time traveling vacation, having fun in the past. That way you can reach a larger market too instead of focusing on just christians.

You pitched this one a few months ago, right?

I recall tachyons and quantum tunneling as being the in-thing last time I looked at time travel theories (I was trying to find a use for the box my water heater came in, so time machine, obviously). I hate to recommend a Michael Crichton book, but he does more work sharing his research in Timeline than he does developing his characters, whereas most time travel novels that just involve getting lost in some mist and the heroine emerging in medieval Scotland for a lusty romance. Then again, your time travel agency could lease that particular patch of Scottish moorland, because seriously, I've read at least a dozen stories by legitimate, non-bodice-ripping authors who use this trope. It must be science, because it looks like magic, and as Arthur C. Clarke said, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." Ultimately, there is no way of making a time portal "make sense" since the concept is still magic to us.

Since "Using a time portal" is really the only explanation a board game needs, none of these questions matter, but out of sheer curiosity: Do I understand right that it is a one-way portal, so the Romans can't conquer our world? People can't affect history, so they couldn't use advanced technology to change the course of history and elevate Simon Magus to pope, for example? What protects visitors from virulent diseases, like smallpox and plague? One of the worst possibly byproducts of time travel would be the reintroduction of disease strains that we have little resistance to in modern times, or vice-versa. For me, the actual tourism is less interesting than the profound geopolitical changes that such an invention would have. In terms of "buying the story," that's what I most think about. What a messed up world that would be.

What are your plans in terms of Biblical scholarship? I'm assuming that the time travel tour is going to leave out gray areas, like who actually wrote many of the books, but what translations will you be using? Does your game approach the Bible as inerrant? Certainly what is Biblically accurate for a King James-literalist is going to be markedly different from the expectations of other Christians. Also, assuming that you are approaching the subject from the perspective of a Christian, how do you manage to interject reverence into the topic of these voyeuristic tourists going on vacation to watch Jesus Christ get crucified? It can get cringe worthy pretty fast. That is a subject of particular interest for me as scripture is so often treated like Trivial Pursuit among Cultural Christians.

Will you be including events from the Apocrypha and/or the Psuedepigrapha? The problem, of course, is that this is as much a selling point for Catholics and Orthodox Christians as it would be shocking and confusing for charismatics. A supplement, perhaps. Flavius Josephus is a wonderful source to draw on though. I'm always curious when people make Bible-themed games, what process of scholarship goes into it or if it is just reflexively based on the denominational market of the author.

I think your theme sounds OK, and the mechanic is fine. It's your time travel, so they are your rules about how it works. As long as the whole thing is self-consistent, I'm willing to suspend disbelief on your major mechanic. (Connie Willis has a series of time travel stories with the "no changing time" limitation. The science-y justification is that the "temporal field" collapses if, in going back in time, you affect something that would cause you or the time machine not to exist or not to be in this present in order to send you back in time. Given the butterfly effect, you really have to affect almost nothing, or you just don't go.

(In fact, it's pretty silly. Given the butterfly effect, just breathing is enough to change the weather around the globe 10 years from now, which probably means somebody lived or died who wasn't otherwise going to, etc. But you get the idea.)

The big question about a mechanic is whether it creates the appropriate decision tension, and I think that this could. You want to weight the cards so the later ones are more points. This means that I get a really valuable card early in the game, and the decision tension is whether I hang on to it for several turns until it is playable (clogging up my hand) or do I just use it as fodder to score some medium-point card right now?

This is similar to San Juan, in which the same cards that you play are the ones you use as fodder to be able to play them. I think it works quite well, and could do so for your game, too.

I suggest that you have a range on the cards of how costly they are to play, as well. For instance, to "See any of the direct descendants of Abraham" you could play that cheaply in any of 4 centuries, and it isn't worth very many points. To "Observe Moses as a child in the house of the Pharaoh" you need to be in the right century to play it cheaply, but you have a 15-year span that you have to hit, so it's not that expensive. However, to "Witness the Sermon on the Mount" you need to be at a very precise place on a specific day and time, so even in the correct century you would have to use up several cards in order to score it. But, of course, it's worth a lot of points.

The other aspect that I think your game will need is player interaction. (Maybe you have this and just haven't mentioned it, yet.) I should have actions that affect my opponents' ability to play certain cards or do certain things. Perhaps players can control regions, so other players can not act in those regions. Perhaps as simple as getting the opportunity to steal cards or make their time adjustments more expensive. Without the interaction, the game is just 4-player solitaire, which gets boring pretty quickly.