Timespan

Players: 1–5 players
Play time: 90 min
BGG rating: 8.1

Timespan is a streamlined, friendly and highly varied civilization game from the designers of Automania and Bad Company. Combine one of six asymmetric civilizations with one of six unique technology boards, and customize your civilization further by recruiting among 175 historic persons, buildings, technologies and wonders. Large parts of the game are played simultaneously, allowing you to lead your civilization from the stone age to the space age in about 90 minutes. There is no warfare: Timespan focuses on the peaceful sides of civilization building, the exploration and on building an economic engine. >>> The game is played over 5 rounds. Each round consists of an exploration phase and an action phase. In the exploration phase players take turns (in order of their positions on the harmony track) to draft cards and discovery tiles from the current age. Then, players move their camels, possibly visiting the other players' wonders for various effects and rewards. Then follows the action phase, which is played simultaneously by all players: Each player has a civilization board with a timeline, where they can play up to 4 cards. As new cards are played, older cards are pushed out of the timeline, and goes into the player's heritage. Players use their workers to activate cards in their timeline, as well as action boxes on their civilization boards and their own wonders. All activations provide various rewards such as resources or advancements on the culture track (to gain wonders and new workers), on the science track (to unlock technologies on the player's technology board), or on the ship track, the flight track or even the space track (giving access to various rare luxury resources). Luxuries can be used to upgrade your cards' effects, and when luxuries are moved into your heritage, they continue to provide permanent passive income. At the end of the second and fourth round, a new age begins, and new cards and discovery tiles are introduced to the players. —description from the designer

How to play

Setup, how a turn works and how the game ends, summarised from the rulebook by Eko, Meepzy's rules assistant.

Here is a general overview of how to play the game, based on the provided rules.

To set up the game, place the main board in the center of the table and set up the decks and stacks for history cards, wonder cards, vision cards, discovery tiles, luxury tiles, gear tokens, workers, and upgrade tiles (p. 10). Each player takes a civilization board, a technology board, a storage board, storage cubes, starting resources, player markers, a camel, ship, balloon, spaceship, starting history cards, workers, and wonder/vision cards as specified by their chosen faction and setup rules (p. 8, 21).

The game is played over three ages, with each age consisting of alternating phases: Income, Discovery, and Action, tracked by an hourglass on the time track (p. 3).

Income Phase: Players simultaneously gain visible income effects and adjust/score points on the peace track based on visible peace symbols in their play area (p. 3, 20).
Discovery Phase: Players take turns in player order (determined by the peace track) to pick offers consisting of history cards and discovery tiles (p. 3, 7, 28).
Action Phase: All players act simultaneously, beginning with camel movement and followed by worker activation (p. 3, 5). During worker activations, players can play cards from their hand into their timeline, activate action boxes using workers, and perform support actions (p. 9, 11).

The game ends after the fifth action phase, concluding with final scoring where players update the peace track, gain income, and tally their points (p. 12).

(Note: The provided evidence mentions that the player with the most victory points wins at the end of the third age (p. 18), but the exact point calculation details beyond basic scoring tracks are only partially covered in this sample.)

This summary was written by Eko from the game's own rulebook. It covers the essentials, not every edge case. For a specific rule, ask Eko and get the page it came from, or open the manual in the Archive.