T.I.M.E. Stories - Estrella Drive

 T.I.M.E. Stories - Estrella Drive

So here's my thing: I appreciate failure. I've spent a ton of time failing. I've lost countless games, certainly way more than I've won! As an actor, I've auditioned I don't know how many times, and absolutely missed out on more than I landed. I've lost debates when I couldn't articulate a point as well as my opponent, and I've lost volleyball matches and football games and come in dead last in track meets. Most often, though, I view failure through the lens of an artist and of a gamer these days. I've hit a point in my life where I appreciate failure if it happens at 100 miles per hour. If I see a production of KING LEAR (my favorite Shakespearean play) that I don't particularly like, I can still respect it if I walk out of the theater saying, "I disagreed with some fundamental artistic decisions they made, but they fully committed to it, and I can respect that." As a gamer, I can play a game and say, "I see what they're doing, and while I don't think it works the way it's supposed to, good on them for running at that wall as hard and fast as they did (from a developmental or production standpoint, I mean)." Because one of two things is going to happen: the wall will either hurt a lot when they hit it and send them tumbling backwards, or the wall will break or topple. It's spectacular to see that kind of commitment either way, because at 100 mph, we really don't know which way the wall will go until the moment of impact. Additionally, we tend to learn far more from failing or losing than from succeeding or winning! I'm far less likely to dissect a win and look for ways to improve than I am a loss, because I don't want to repeat the loss and clearly need to do something different.

But I cannot abide tentative failure. I've been guilty of it, for sure! Been unsure of a choice, not wanting to look silly I don't quite commit to it. So I fail softly. Quietly. Like walking into the wall expecting to fall on my ass, and sort of kicking against it to rebound and land on my feet instead. Teddy Roosevelt said, "The unforgivable crime is soft hitting. Do not hit at all if it can be avoided; but never hit softly." It's not a direct parallel, but it's close enough.

Why do I mention all of this? Because I think Estrella Drive fails at 19 mph instead of 100, and that just sets my teeth on edge.

You're pretty cute, guy. But at that speed, I'm pretty sure you won't be knocking down any walls you run into...

**SPOILERS AHEAD - Estrella Drive and Core scenario**

I'm not going to lay out the entire story or go through choice by choice because that's tedious and doesn't really make my point. Instead, I want to focus on comparing two experiences I've had with the game: one from the asylum scenario included in the base game, and one from the Estrella Drive expansion.

I had the good fortune of playing both scenarios with the same group of people, minus one. So it's a decent comparison between scenarios. By the time we reached the final puzzle of the asylum scenario, we had five stars, five symbols, and five numbers. We had also stringently collected clues throughout the game, unsure of what was relevant and what was not. Sure, it was frustrating sometimes to try and keep track of it all, but we felt as though we were unraveling a mystery, and so we really had to bend our minds toward solving the whole thing. Especially because we desperately wanted to avoid dead ends like the plunger. I don't know anyone who has played the asylum scenario who doesn't remember the dead end the plunger presented. I had to play through that twice! The first time with Biff and Cushman, the second time with another group of friends. As I had already played the scenario once, by the time I was playing with a second group, I withheld any decisions that were based on prior knowledge, which included the plunger. We were SO close to not taking that route! And then somebody decided it was probably important to check out. So we did.

And sure, it's a dead end. But it's an amusing one, and sure, nobody wants to lose time like that, but it's memorable and makes for a more fun play experience. And it meant we were on the lookout for more time-wasters like that because it came so early in the adventure. By the time we reached the gate at the end of the quest, we felt pretty locked in, but it was getting to be lunch time and we were struggling with the puzzle. We knew we had all the information, but just weren't entirely certain of how to implement said information. I went upstairs to start making lunch (as it was my day to do so during this gaming weekend), and I don't even know how long we stared at it. We had come up with a bunch of possibilities, but kept worrying that we were overthinking it. When we finally came up with the answer, it was a triumph, and we were all happy to read the conclusion after conquering it. We debriefed over lunch, talking about our close calls, the tough combats, and most of all, where we had gotten stuck. Each of us had some clue or other that we'd keyed into so hard that it was hard to pull away from feeling as though *that* was the key we needed to solve the whole thing. We felt accomplished and were glad we had taken the time to get through it. We were so excited about this game that we started the Marcy Case that very weekend (too late to really get too far into it, but we just enjoyed the game so much that we thought we'd get started on it).

Flash forward several years later to the Estrella Drive expansion. Cushman had since moved quite some distance away, and so our gaming weekends were fewer and farther between. He and his wife had met someone with whom they could play T.I.M.E. Stories, and so they did! They played all the way through to Estrella Drive. Biff hadn't played since that one weekend, and I had since played the Marcy Case (which I enjoyed well enough, but didn't love) and Prophecy of Dragons (which I didn't really enjoy). Additionally, in that window of time between the first session several years ago and the Estrella Drive play-through this past weekend, we had attended GenCon, gotten to test drive the new version of T.I.M.E. Stories (TIME Stories Revolution) just before it released, and then Cushman and I had played our way through The Hadal Project back in...I wanna say it was November 2020? But anyway, when Biff and I visited Cushman, we decided to take a break from Lord of the Rings: Journeys in Middle-earth, and Cush said he still wanted to wrap up the original T.I.M.E. Stories with the next mission he had to play. I was happy to play, as I thought it would be a nice change of pace, and I had enjoyed the previous scenarios well enough that it was worth getting back to. Especially because with Cush being so deep into the story, I could appreciate wanting to finish the whole game! So after checking online, Cush determined that the next scenario he had to play was Estrella Drive. We got ourselves set up, picked our characters, and got into it.

We anticipated investing a lot of brainpower into this scenario given our past experience with the game. And sure, scenarios are a mixed bag and different people like or dislike them for different reasons. But this was different: I didn't walk away from it saying, "Yeah, I got it, but I didn't love it or anything." I walked away saying, "This was so lazy and such a waste of time." Why? Well, a couple of reasons. The first was the plethora (a literal PLETHORA) of typos. Words omitted, misspelled, words that were likely close to what they intended but not the word they intended...just lazy lazy lazy. The kinds of mistakes that never should have made it to the printer, but evidently did. I mentioned previously that one of the things we really like about this game is the fact that we don't always know what information we really need to key into, so we often dissect way more than we necessarily need to. It can be a bit frustrating sometimes to fall for a red herring, but it always feels like an intentional attempt to derail us or slow us down, and I can really appreciate that. But that particular element of the game was lost to us because how important can every little detail be if there are SO. MANY. TYPOS?!

If editing wasn't important to the makers of the game, why should we impart any significance to the clues we receive? It became more about trying to decipher what was meant when a word was omitted than about being able to stay locked into the game. And make no mistake: this is a game where locking into the fantasy is vital for the game to be worth a player's time. So that break with previous scenarios we played was really disconcerting and frustrating.

But beyond that? The one thing you never want to do in a role-playing game is railroad the players. That is to say that players should feel as though** they have agency and actively impact the outcome of the story. Our decisions have benefits and consequences when it comes to how the story unfolds, even if the storyteller has a master script for the direction in which the story is proceeding. If I don't have any agency and cannot impact the story, then why am I playing the game. To that end, I'm aware that when we fail on a T.I.M.E. Stories run, we get reprimanded for "not taking the situation seriously" or some such, and then go back in with maybe a small advantage, such as getting to keep a piece of the map we had previously acquired, or getting more Time Units in which to complete the mission. But I've never before felt that we have had a victory handed to us by the game. But that's exactly what happened here: we failed once in the 80s (I believe) at the top of the game, and we failed once when we reached 1969. So it was for our third run overall (but only our second run in 1969) that we were gifted with more Time Units, information, and the ability to lay traps for the big combat encounters we knew we'd be facing in our quest for important artifacts related to the mass murder we were investigating.

It doesn't even feel like I should use this meme for this situation, given that the koala was cute, but we were really angry that the game would give us such an easy out...

The reason why co-op games are some of the hardest to design is because it's a fine balance between the game being so easy that nobody wants to play it or it being so hard that nobody wants to play it. Either way, it ends up feeling like it's not worth an investment of time because the outcome will be the same no matter what the players do. So while we're trying to work our way through this story, we're now automatically put on easy mode and feel as though there was no point in trying for the first couple of runs unless we were going to get through and win the game on our first run. Which we've never done, and I don't think people are expected to do until they've played all the way through at least once before. So why bother investing the time and energy if we're just going to be handed the win?

Sure enough, we breezed through the next run, got to the end, and just sort of threw our hands up. This win was wildly different from our first win with the asylum scenario: we weren't celebrating; we were just done. We complained about the game (typos, easy mode, not really having any puzzles to solve persay because we felt like there was an inevitable conclusion to the game and the only "mystery" to be solved was which knife was the artifact we needed - which knife of two, mind you) as we cleaned up the game, and did not feel accomplished in the least.

THAT'S A PROBLEM.

We feel good after we solve a puzzle of some sort because that behavior is rewarded with a hit of dopamine from our brains. The bigger or more complex the puzzle is, and the more energy we put into it, the better we feel at having solved it! I can't think of any co-op games that aren't a sort of puzzle in one form or another. We finished Estella Drive and didn't feel good about it at all because it was handed to us. We all like to win, but the vast majority of us prefer to earn it rather than have said win be gifted to us. Estella Drive gifted it to us. And almost worse than that? They were actually onto a decent story! I preferred where this story was headed to Prophecy of Dragons and The Marcy Case (2 of the 4 total T.I.M.E. Stories scenarios I've played)! But with so much downside, I couldn't even appreciate the story because the game didn't deliver on what it promises (per the publisher): "T.I.M.E Stories is a narrative game, a game of 'decksploration.' Each player is free to give their character as deep a 'role' as they want, in order to live through a story, as much in the game as around the table. But it's also a board game with rules which allow for reflection and optimization."

That description is what the previous scenarios felt like; this scenario felt like a story in which everything was pre-determined. There wasn't 'decksploration' so much as a clearly prescribed list of locations to visit. It didn't matter how deep we went into the role of a character, since we were just being escorted through the story at the game's own pace. And our reflection meant almost nothing because short of making it through on our first run, we would've ended up in the same place we ended up for this play-through.

All of this to say that we should be allowed to fail on our own when playing a game, because that risk of failure is what makes victory satisfying and rewarding.

**Originally, this read "thought" instead of "though." A friend pointed out the typo given how hard I hammer the game-makers for typos. Fair enough! And I appreciate the eagle eye because typos bug the hell out of me. I need to be better about double-checking my posts before I publish them, so I appreciate your patience and understanding. I also didn't charge y'all $30 for this blog post 😂**