The first time I played this game it did not go well. The rules explanation was confused and all of us — me in particular — played poorly. I was willing to chalk it up to a learning game, but my gut feel was that this was not a game I was likely to fall in love with.

Well, we played a five-player game recently and I’m happy to report that seldom has my opinion of a game changed so drastically from its first to its second playing. Tempus is very good. No, it isn’t Civ-lite; it isn’t even a civilization game. The trappings are there, but the execution is too abstract and generic; at no time did I ever really feel like I was building a civilization. It actually feels more like Risk without the battles (if that makes any sense) or maybe a themed version of Go. You occupy areas, you use your actions to try to spread your influence, and occasionally, you battle other players for choice real estate. The game itself is actually quite abstract, but the theme is sufficiently strong and the actions and cards sufficiently varied that it never feels like you’re playing a pure abstract game.

This is very much a “so much to do, so few actions to do it with” game. You always want to do more than you’re allowed to. Figuring out which actions to do and when to do them is easily the best part of the game. The actions are quite basic, yet making the most of what you have is a very enjoyable challenge.

Using the cards you draw optimally is another fun task. Generally, I think the wisest course is to use your cards freely. Some of the players in our game clung to what they viewed as critical cards, waiting for the perfect moment to spring them, but the players who slammed them down and then drew more tended to outperform them. This is good, because it’s more fun to play cards than to hoard them. But using them well is still an interesting challenge.

I think the key rule of the game is that cities can’t be adjacent. This, combined with the plethora of mountain spaces means that potential city sites are precious. Even after my first game, I was aware of this and was able to cordon off a section of the board with many prospective sites. But I wasn’t aggressive enough in getting tokens out to them (did I mention that there’s always other things you want to do?) and was soon beset upon by evil poachers, which doomed me to a middle-of-the-pack finish. That in no way diminished my enjoyment of the game, though.

There wasn’t much combat in our game and I suspect most games will play that way. However, there seems to be a great deal of indirect moves you can make against a player. Moving into a nearby potential city site is the most obvious one, but even a simple action like making babies or drawing cards can profoundly affect an opponent’s move. The game didn’t seem to suffer at all from too little interaction and I thought the amount of attacking was just right.

I continue to be bewildered about the complaints with the endgame. There were a few attacks and people spread out, but there wasn’t anything like this orgy of attacks I’ve heard about. The last turn wasn’t all that much different from the ones that came before it. I really don’t understand what the problem is supposed to be here.

Are there some issues with the game? A few. The physical design is somewhat disappointing. The cities can be hard to distinguish. Including both purple and black was idiotic and is an issue in less than optimal lighting. The cards have a weird coating and may be easy to damage. The components certainly don’t kill the game, but they do make it harder to play than it should be.

I’m not sure that five is the ideal number of players. The fifth player served to make the game longer and the last player to place at the start was a bit squeezed, but I didn’t see any corresponding value added by the additional player. The game still played fine with five, but given my druthers, I’d limit future games to four or fewer participants. Our game was a bit on the long side, although I probably contributed to that a bit by not being quite as snappy with my play as I should have been.

Then there’s the dreaded Three Hex Rule. One player (unfortunately, my nearest neighbor) kept his forces to three hexes or less for practically the entire game and finished second. With slightly better play, he might have proved to be a serious challenger for the win, but then again, we might have been more alert with our play and made indirect encroachments into his territory. I have heard from more experienced players that the Three Hex strategy is doomed to fail and that might well be the case. However, the problem might be that it’s attractive enough that players will be tempted to play it. The issue then isn’t whether the strategy can succeed, but the effect it has on their opponents. It’s very frustrating to be unable to attack a player who seems to be doing better than you. At one point in our game, both of my neighbors fell to three hexes, which greatly limited my options for expansion. Evidently, the rule was inserted by Wallace late in the design process, but its intent was not to provide an alternative path to victory, but to protect players from early elimination. Frankly, I’m not sure this precaution is necessary. Early play should be devoted to expansion and building up your population and card holdings; I would think early combat would be detrimental to both sides. Given that the rule only seems to have unintended effects, and negative ones at that, I’d give serious consideration to either eliminating it or playing with some of the proposed variants (like allowing attacks on a 3-hex player’s cities, but not his stacks). However, I also don’t think this is a major issue, so I’d also happily play with the rules as written, as long as the rule doesn’t get abused too often.

I am nowhere near finalizing my feelings about Tempus. But after my two games, I’m definitely feeling bullish over it, despite its somewhat abstract play. Right now, I’d rank it as my third favorite Wallace design, behind only Age of Steam and Pampas Railroads, and that’s pretty rarified air. My rating is wavering between a 7.5 and an 8, but I’m still feeling good about the game a week after playing it, so that sounds like an 8 to me. I’m looking forward to playing again sometime soon.