TIME Stories: Expedition Endurance Expansion

Let’s Do The Time Warp

Wrap up warm reader, we’re heading to the frozen wastes of Antartica in Space Cowboys exciting TIME Stories expansion: Expedition Endurance. The year is 1914 and you are tasked with taking on the role of the crew of the Endurance. History tells you that the crew of this ship perished when they attempted to cross the continent and failed. That’s not all she wrote…

As always, I will do my best to avoid spoilers and only hint at the adventure that lies within this particular expansion. That being said, I will be touching on the mechanics that are used, what’s inside the box and giving my final thoughts on the overall expansion.

It becomes clear from the beginning that this adventure won’t be like the others. Bob is flustered, the modern machinery is broken, and so we are stuck with using the older model for this adventure. In short, your task is to prevent the intervention of the supernatural forces that have interfered with the expedition: endurance; and get safely out of the other side.

I was really pleased to discover that the flow of this expansion is different to all of the others I’ve played so far, and it’s beautifully refreshing. It contains all the usual twists and turns that you’d expect from a time stories expansion, but has a few unexpected additions that develops this adventure into one of the best expansions in the series so far.

Time And Time Again

The contents of this expansion are minimalistic as always. When you open the box for this expansion, you’ll find two decks of cards. Don’t let that fool you though, there’s one hell of an adventure contained within.

A high standard of component quality, design and art are to be expected and I wasn’t disappointed. The cards are thick, the game design is flawless and intriguing at the same time; and the art style is beautifully thematic throughout.

Throughout this Expedition Endurance adventure, tests will use a combination of strength, instinct, intelligence and willpower. Therefore it’s wise to pick a team of receptacles that cover a wide variety of these four skills. Additionally, make sure to read the character’s abilities thoroughly before making your choice. If you don’t; you may find yourself going barking mad!

The main mechanic for this expansion is sanity, or the lack thereof. When setting up the game, you’ll set 6 insanity cards aside and take note of the sanity tokens on your receptacles. As the game progresses, if your character gets a number of sanity points equal to the character’s max, you go insane and draw an insanity card. It goes without saying that these will add an extra challenge to the adventure, so hold onto your sanity for as long as you can.

I must admit that it was nice to see a wider selection of characters/receptacles to choose from than there have been in previous expansions. More character choices means that your selection has more of an impact on how certain parts of the adventure play out. As I mentioned earlier, be sure to read all the details on the character cards carefully before making your choice. However, I also recommend making the most of being able to change receptacles between playthroughs as you’ll discover different interactions by doing so, and perhaps even open areas that were previously unexplored.

Lastly, don’t peek at the choices you didn’t make, no matter how tempting it is. It adds to the ‘what could have been’ of the game, and ruins the surprise if you did decide to play through the game again at a later date.

Final Thoughts

In summary, whilst not giving anything away, I would have preferred more closure from this adventure. There’s no completion like you’d usually expect from an expansion, however, it does lead beautifully into the next expansion. When it comes to story laden adventure games, I like the feeling that I’ve achieved something, and that was missing from this particular adventure.

That being said, this is easily one of my favourite Time Stories Adventures so far, second only to asylum. Some of the themes were more mature than other expansions have been, and the choices you made throughout felt like they really mattered. Additionally, there were some unexpected twists that really made our group think about what we did and what might have happened if we had done it differently.

If you haven’t already, I definitely recommend playing through the previously released expansions before tackling this one Primarily because some of the previous narratives and features lead to this adventure. But mostly because they are great fun to playthrough, and it’s exciting to see how the game mechanics evolve as the designers become more experimental with the themes.