Timeline: Science and Discovery

About a month ago, Luke at Start Your Meeples mentioned Timeline: Diversity, one of the many games in the Timeline series from Asmodee Games. This prompted me to pull out, yet again, our copy of Timeline: Science and Discovery, a game that we play infrequently but regularly.

In terms of rules, all of the Timeline games are the same. Each player is dealt 4 cards with the date side down and the rest of the cards are left in a pile in the middle of the table (date side down). Turn over the first card and then the players take it in turns to pick a card from their hand and place it in the timeline (leftmost is the earliest event and rightmost is the latest). If you place your card correctly, well done, if not the cared is discarded and you have to draw another card.

The first player to get rid of all of their cards wins the game, but the competitive part of the game takes a very long second place to its ability to provoke discussions.

What happens is this: Someone picks a card and says something about what event they are sure it happened before or after. At this point everyone else starts jumping in with their own best guess as to where the card should be in the timeline. This will continue until the player turns their card to reveal the date, at which point we all say either Aha! or Oh.

With 110 cards in the deck, it’s not possible to memorise all of the dates so the game forces you to start thinking about when discoveries happened in relation to each other (was bacteria discovered before or after the arrival of The Mayflower, for example).

Timeline is not a game that we play particularly often, but when we do it can trigger a conversation (and often, much Googling) for the rest of the evening.