Maybe the title is not as deep as something Rustin Cohle might say, but I hope that season 2 of my blog isn’t like True Detective. Nevermind.

I’ve already written about Timeline in my filler entry. But to be honest, it was one of the first games I was thinking of re-skinning for the purposes of Judge Games.

The mechanics of the game are simple – choose one of the cards in front of you and put it chronologically correct in the… timeline. If it’s correct, you’re one card closer to winning. Otherwise, you pull a new card. As the game progresses, there’s more card in the timeline, so it’s harder to put card into it.

How about some Magic?

I thought about options for the Magic timeline, but decided to settle on the easiest (or richest). That was of course the Magic sets. To raise the bar a little bit, you could only use the expansion symbol and I included all the available supplementary sets (Commander, Beatdown, Duel Decks) as well as MODO-only sets – as long as they had an expansion set.

How did it play?

I debuted the game at the 2016 Polish judge conference. It was a nice diversion. Timeline obviously plays fast and is easy to explain. You’d think you know all the expansion symbols and can place them in order, but… First, I used all sets that have an expansion, so this includes the Duel Decks, From the Vault, and some online sets. Second, I for one, after 20 years of playing Magic see it as a blur 🙂 Finally, you can figure out the year often, but if you have to add a month and place it versus some strange releases – it really adds to the difficulty.

Expansions galore

One of the characteristics of Timeline is the multitude of (standalone) expansions. I myself have 5 or 6 and pick a new one up every so often. With a bit of research, you could create multiple expansions with different themes:

• famous players “Jon Finkel becomes World Champion”, “Kai Budde inducted into Hall of Fame”
• policy changes “Error of Commission introduced into IPG”, “JAR published”
• events from the judging world “Emeritus judges”, “First class of Judge Hall of Fame introduced”

I’ll leave those to the reader to create (and maybe send my way).

Download a PDF of the front and back of the cards.