Time Quake - Critiques Wanted

very very cool! the gameplay seems solid enough, ill have to know more of your intentions and biases to gvie any suggestons though

is there any backstory to why these people are playing around with events in time in our world?

why both players are competing against each other in the same company? because the gameplay suggests they are working together, which i find rather counterintuitive to a competitive scenario. does the company have a code of ethics to their work?

my recommendation would be a limit to how many agents can complete a mission, so a player can uscrupulously sabotage a mission

another suggestion would be sabotage of a particular agent, so you replace an agent currently on the field with the agent you are about to play, probably based on a variable comparison like the sum of the highest 2 variables of the agents

are there any plans to make this game accomodate more players?

the layout could be improved IMO but no ideas come to mind right now

finally got some ideas for layout, this recommendation is more for packaging than gameplay but might helpout with printing woes

you can have the mission cards laid in landscape with the variables shown at the bottom of the card

then you can have the agent cards laid in portrait with the variables laid at the top of the card, and the name at the bottom of the card, maybe some flavortext even to give the agent some character

that way you can have your mission and agent cards differentiated immediately, and not have to give the 2 types of cards different sizes

my main worry about the layout is related to how the players are seated. im assuming players are seated across each other, your layout is good for one person to see, but not the other.

putting the cards sideways gives the annoyance of tilting the head, but i guess its a persistent problem with no real way to solve since changing the layout might make organisation become messy

i still think this game can expand to fit more players, but more players also mean more cards to include. not sure you intend to go for it, but the layout will be a persistent annoyance with more players IMO

still, for me its soemthing i can bear with, user interface is just something i put more effort into than i should. the game's organisation on the field is neat as it is, so i guess change it only if your playtesters really complain about it outright

and for the backstory elements you mentioned, somehow feels like its got some HitchHiker's-Guide-to-the-Galaxy feel to it, probably could throw in a reference there and make ti more light hearted than youve portrayed it in text so far

If you're looking for "period expertise", you could group events during certain ages (age of exploration, bronze age, industrial age), and your agents could be given a bonus to one or more stats if assigned to the appropriate period. As long as your stats never change position (Stealth is always the first number, for example), you could denote the specialty with an asterisk (x*) or enclose the number in a special circle (a bronze coin for bronze age, or a cog for the industrial age) to remind you of their specialty. You could also leave this expertise for named agents. For example, you could have a generic card, like 300 Spartans (because why not?) with set stats, but Henry Ford gets set stats, plus a bonus if he's in the Age of Industry. The whole thing is people mucking with the timeline, so have fun with it!

My next suggestion is after you have your system fine tuned, what do you think of having two agendas on each of your events? For example, one side of the card has "Kill Xerxes" with its requirements and victory points, while the other side has something like "Give Xerxes Helicopters" with its own set of requirements and victory points? Again, you got people time-hopping, so make up some crazy things. A player can commit his agents only to one side, and each side's reqs/VPs could be different, so the strategy would be to assign agents to the side he thinks he could complete quickly, even if that side gives less VPs that its other side.

Lastly, a critique; I like that scoring an event wipes out future events, but I feel like that's just a rough draft idea to something even cooler. I don't think that mechanic is fully fleshed out yet. I wish I had something else, but I don't. I tried thinking of some brainstorming ideas for you, but came up blank.

That's all I got after watching your video. Hope to see more as it progresses.

Chaos Missions: A chaos mission is taken by the anarchists groups of the future. Their goal is to throw a wrench in the Time Lord's plans. Example:

Release T-Rex on the Mayflower. If this Mission succeeds target Mission (within 200 year window) and assigned agents are discarded.

I was going to say the events mirror Smash Up's bases up very much. Was one of the reasons why I suggested dual-statted agendas. Didn't want to mention it because I wasn't certain if the OP had played it or not.
I think you can still stake a claim for yourself if you focus on the following things:
- Events affecting future events. It fits your theme and any mechanics rooted to your theme are always good. I still stand by my statement that you need a more engaging mechanic on this though.
- A different "collapsing" mechanic. Right now both your game and Smash Up have the same method of people dog-piling a place until the threshold(s) is met to score it... actually, by the time you're ready to publish Smash Up might not be popular, so this point is probably mute.

So two suggestions:
Suppose events had a sliding scale/tug-of-war thing going? Say you have the event "Adolf gets accepted to art school" and you're playing agents to either help this happen, or to prevent it, and the pendulum swings back and forth until there's a winner.
Based on the outcome, something happens to the timeline. The card states that all future events with the "war" keyword are replaced if it passes, but if Hitler doesn't get accepted, then all the agents with the "WWII" keyword are discarded.

Another thing to solidify your timeline idea: you can have multiple missions dealing with similar things and once one is scored, the other ones that occur later can't be played. For example, once someone scores "Washington Tells a Lie", any Washington mission that happens later must be replaced.

I like the idea of having larger big strategic goals for the players to pursue. My initial take is that there's a lack of ... interactivity between players.

I like the idea of having opposing factions. Alternatively, you could have agent cards be double-sided with one side having more positive attributes and one side having negative attributes. You'd use the negative side to slow down an opponent's progress on certain missions.

I think having different types of missions (maybe like 3 or so) and different eras may be good. In addition to this, at the very beginning of the game, players draw a Victory Condition card for themselves. It could have things like "Start a war in three different eras" or "Provide advanced technology four times" or "Accomplish 3 tasks in the ___ Age" etc. You could change the VP (currency) and provide different types (war/tech/peace/etc) to match the victory conditions.

This would allow you to expand beyond two players as the game is not simply dogpiling on any mission - you want to pursue missions that are good for you. Or prevent missions happening for other players. Or accomplish an earlier mission to timeshift a later mission that you don't need to potentially make it something that you do need. Or bluff other players (he's really stacking the war missions - he must need them).

I just got another idea that may or may not be interesting.

What if the scoring of your missions were depending on conditions that may be altered? For example:

"$2 unless a war was prevented before 1266, otherwise $4"

or

"$1 for each killed personality earlier in history"

That way the different players will be more or less interested in some of the missions on the board, and that in turn could feel more like player interaction, and also add a strategic dimension to the game. It would also add to the strength of theme in the game where new missions actually have an impact on missions allready cleared.

These rules could be in a separate box of the mission cards, so that players that wish for a simpler game could still use the default scoring system.

Maybe "Father Time" has had enough and puts a kabosh on all the timey-wimey stuff?