Temporal Distortion

Higher number takes. Every take strikes again.

Temporal Distortion is a single-player board game of hex pebbles: think Triple Triad on a hex board, with the exact, readable turns of Into the Breach. Every pebble has six edges, and every edge a number. Place a pebble, then turn it to strike: the higher number takes the lower, and every pebble taken strikes on with its own edges, wave after wave, until nothing more falls. Run the chain into the enemy's home row and their HQ cracks.


No dice, no hit chances. Every strike is exact, and you see what it takes before you turn. Each campaign level deals the same way every time, so every loss teaches you something.

Turn to strike

• Placing positions, rotating attacks. Each 60° turn costs an action point and strikes all round. Where you put a pebble decides what its numbers can reach; how you spend your few points decides what falls.
  
• Chain reactions. One good turn can flip half the board. Line your pebbles up so that each one taken sets off the next.
  
• Breach the HQ. Run a chain into the enemy's home row, or past an empty slot of it, and their HQ loses integrity. Bring it to zero and the game is yours.
  
• Blanks and the zero point. A blank edge never strikes and any number takes it. A 0 takes a 9. Every edge matters, even the low ones.

Distortions

Five cards lie face up beside the board: two for you, two for the enemy, one in the hourglass. Shatter a pebble and place yours in its slot, turn one to stone for three rounds, make one of yours furious or wither one of theirs, swap two, recall one to your hand, rewind a capture, mirror a 9 into a 0. A card you cast goes to the hourglass, and whoever casts next takes it, so the strongest card on the table may be the enemy's next turn. In the campaign the stranger gives you two after each world's boss, and from the ice world on every match deals five.

Learn it in minutes, sharpen it for hours

• An eleven-lesson tutorial: the stranger reminds you of a game you once knew, one idea at a time on a real board.
  
• Fifteen puzzles, each a single turn with a goal and just enough action points, proved solvable and with hints when you need them.
  
• Free matches against an AI at three levels, with the Distortions or without, that reads the board exactly and looks ahead at your answer.
  
• A threat overlay that shows which of your pebbles the enemy can take next turn, what a move would leave open, and on the Caldera when the mountain erupts next and what the lava will take.

A stranger, a board, and all the time in the world

The Halcyon came down in the dunes, and you lay down in her shadow to wait for death. It didn't come. Then you noticed a board under your hands, and someone across from you, and that you were already playing. The stranger is in no hurry. Between games it sets a scene: a town in the desert, a girl in her wedding blue, waiting in the square for someone who never comes.

Four worlds, and time slipping between them

Beat a world, and time slips: the table turns to ice, to spore forest, to ash, and the stranger is already waiting with the next story. You were a trader once. You moved whatever you were paid to move, and never asked what it was for. You'll remember.

• Crash Site, the sand world. Where it starts: ten levels that bring in every kind of pebble.
  
• Glacier Shelf, the ice world. Slick ice turns a pebble twice, frost stops a chain cold, and thin ice cracks under every turn until it swallows what stands on it.
  
• Spore Thicket, the bio world. Roots bridge the gaps in the board, spore pods burst when a chain runs past them, and clouds of gas drift round the middle and soften whatever they touch.
  
• Caldera, the volcanic world. A ring of heat round a crater: pebbles on it hit harder and break easier, the mountain erupts every third round and turns them, and the lava claims the ring, slot by slot.

A campaign told in tales

• Forty-seven levels: ten on each world (matches, breaches, one-turn puzzles, sieges to survive and races against the clock, each with a bonus goal, and a boss at the end), then a final chapter that takes you back across all four boards.
  
• Five tales, told a part at a time after each win: the people of each world, and what happened to them, and why. The ledger keeps every telling.
  
• A piece of the story for every level. A strip of wedding blue, a sealed crate, a ticket that wasn't enough: each laid in your hand and kept in a case you can open and turn in your hands, with thirteen relics, stronger versions of the pebbles you hold.

Sixteen pebbles, three roles

• Attack: Cores with the strongest numbers, Sparks that overcharge through equal numbers, Breachers that hit the HQ directly.
  
• Defence: Aegis plates that no chain can take, Wards that harden everything beside them.
  
• Utility: Gyros that spin for free, Gears that turn their neighbours the other way, Amplifiers that make a 7 into a 9.

Who stands next to whom is half the game.

A board game on four worlds

Every match is played on a printed survey map of the world it is set on, at a table among the dunes, the ice, the spore forest or the ash: resin pebbles with printed faces, cards with foil seals, coins that flip as you spend them, tracks round the rim of the board. Bright as a table under lamplight.

What it is not

• Not a roguelike or a deckbuilder. A hand-made campaign of forty-seven levels, each the same every time you play it.
  
• Not a game of dice. Shuffled decks decide what you hold, never whether a strike lands.
  
• Not online. Single-player, no accounts, nothing to buy inside the game.