by Justin Bell

“I mean…how are you DOING all of that???”

The exasperated player to my right had finished their turn, and they were staring at my player board as I was finishing up a very long turn of my own. The game we were playing: Timespan, the upcoming SPIEL Essen release from the team at Alion—by Dr. Ø…the same publisher that gave us last year’s strategy title Recall.

As profiled by the designers themselves in a recent Designer Diary posted here on BGG, Timespan is a peaceful, simultaneous play civilization game. Now that I’ve played it, Timespan has a few similarities to the recent “conveyor belt” civ game Ancient Knowledge.

While I enjoyed Ancient Knowledge, I think Timespan is the game that will connect with more players, in large part due to its excellent—and exceptionally clean—action and resource management systems, its setup variety, a unique batch of cards, and a very straightforward teach.

That, and the combos. Oh my goodness, the combos.

As I placed Timespan into the permanent collection—seven plays in, it’s safe to say that Timespan is a keeper—I looked at my other games that offer sexy, combotastic things I look for, especially when the player count stays low.

The player count bit is worth noting, because as much as I love combos, I don’t like to wait for every other player in a four-player game to finish combos of their own. So, give me my combos, but all I need is enough time to figure out my next series of combos…ideal for a two-, maybe three-player operation.

The loaded combo plate game I come back to the most is Tiletum, a Board&Dice release designed by Daniele Tascini and Simone Luciani. I love Tiletum because I love dice and I love combos…but, I generally avoid Tiletum at its full, four-player count. Two or three players? Perfect. That way, I can wrap up a turn, start milling on the ways I can attack my next turn based on the dice left on the action wheel, and by the time I have a few thoughts, bam: I’m up again.

It’s the moment during any combo-rich turn, when you unleash your genius on the rest of the table (stay with me here), that I love most. “I’m going to take the light blue die, which gives me six iron, but only one action point, to take the Merchant action. But thanks to that move I made earlier, I have a +3 bonus action point marker for Merchant actions, so that gives me a total of four action points.”

At this moment, your friends might be giving you the side-eye…but, no matter. Remember: you are a genius.

“I’m going to use a bonus tile to take a two-point Architect action, so that I can move into position to use the iron and some stone I picked up on a previous turn. Then, I’m going to hoover up a couple more action tiles, then build this pillar in Firenze but also fulfill a contract with that iron I just picked up…”

And on and on. In a game of Tiletum, there will be three or four times—maybe more, depending on the players’ skill levels—where you feel like the queen of the world, the king of the castle, a noble of distinction, as you round out a turn with a final, massive VP salvo of scoring bombs that will make you say something out loud akin to “the prosecution rests, your honor.”

And it will feel good. No…it will feel great.

Sometimes, it’s not even about winning the game. It’s about setting up the massive combo plate that you will deliver late in the third round of a four-round epic, by—depending on the game—moving your pieces into place at just the right moment to sell everything you can all at once, or spend six workers across two action areas to fulfill two huge public milestones and trigger end-game scoring for the card tableau that’s been waiting to explode for a few turns now.

Now, watching another player’s combo can lead to mixed emotions, certainly like what I mentioned at the start of this article. “Track envy” might kick in as you watch another player’s combo land them at the end of a 15-space track that you have no chance of reaching. Or, you might celebrate another player’s huge turn with an envious, mocking round of applause as you wonder how that player was able to accomplish so many crucial game elements with a single worker. Or, you might just nod in approval, as you wrap up combos of your own.

I have called out my love affair with Rats of Wistar here before; SETI: Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence is another combo plate special. Sometimes, the combos are small, but I still love them, in games as varied as En Route, Inventions: Evolution of Ideas, or Yokohama. When one thing gets me even a single other thing that allows me to trigger an action I otherwise could not, I want to taste that moment…because I want to feel clever as I can.

Combos give you that. And Timespan…Timespan has a LOT of that.

Like the best combo-rich environments, Timespan offers a very nice, slow burn that crescendos into a final round that many of you will need to experience in order for it to be believed. I’ve now seen games where it feels like reaching 75 points will be a struggle before the fifth and final action phase…then the game ends, and you look up to see that you have 133 points. Or maybe a lot more.

It is for this reason that I think many players, media, and industry types will have Timespan on their end-of-year top 10 lists. As the Diary indicated, Timespan is the kind of medium-weight Euro with zero direct conflict. As much as I love direct conflict in other games, Timespan is very clearly going for a different angle—”peace” is a trackable, scorable resource—and many people in my network are looking for a game that can be just as robust solo as it can be with other players.

So, come for the setting and the theme as a race through history, although I would admit that Timespan doesn’t really feel like a civ game. Fine, but stay for the combos.

During one of my multiplayer games, I showed the new players how a first round could look, and even during that sampling of gameplay, the two other people sitting with me began to see the magic of getting resources, then using the upgrade system to buy basic resources like wood or spending them to upgrade different resources, to then have enough resources to buy that card you thought was out of reach in the game’s first round.

With an expanded worker pool and an action tableau unique to each player, Timespan dials up the combos to fever pitch even by its third action phase. From time to time, I would look up and see other players literally giggling with excitement as they were messing around with their tableau. Luxury tiles boost action strength. Advancing on any of the game’s five tracks (science, culture, spaceship, balloon, and ship) might offer bonuses that change the scope of that round in real time. A player’s tech board might have a one-time bonus that feeds the start of a new combo.

Getting all of this into a 90-minute package (or about an hour when playing solo) is quite a feat…but, again, simultaneous play changes everything. Now I see why so many designers are coming up with ways to squeeze these efficiency engine-building experiences into tighter timeframes: everyone loves the puzzle, and no one likes the waiting.

Love a good combo? I’d love to hear from you. What are some of your favorites? And do we need to add a “combo” family to the BGG categories we use to track games?