This is going to be my first review. English is not my first language, so please be patient

First of all, I would like to get you in the right attitude towards this game.
Remember that "civilisation game in under 2 hours, blah blah blah"? Well, FORGET IT. I want you to free your mind of all the hype and expectations around this game.
Now, I want you to forget about serious ancient civilisations, invention of the wheel and that sort of stuff.

And now, imagine a great sea, on which lies an island made of hexagonal tiles. And imagine a lot of big, wooden discs of different colours bouncing around that island. Some discs jump onto the grassland, eat some grass and then divide into two. Some discs sit around busy inventing things and have big question marks hovering over their heads. Other black discs are busy gathering bricks from hills in order to advance quicker than their purple neighbours (well, hills contain bricks, don't they?). Got it? Okay, so now you are ready to enter the world of TEMPUS.

COMPONENTS
So, what do you get with the game? Well, a lot of nice but sometimes TERRIBLY made stuff.
You get a medium sized board with big blue sea divided into hexagons on on the left and rounds track on the right. The round track depicts various "eras" through which you advance and says what you can do on your turn. Overall, I find the board very nice and functional.
There are land tiles, quite well illustrated, unfortunately they tend to bend and it can be hard to keep in one place.
There are the discs - heroes of our saga - in five colours with purple instead of green. While it is sometimes annoying, most often I can tell purple from black and it is always nice to have purple in a game. One disc is big and white - this is the first player marker. It looks like calcium c, or gigantic aspirin.... whatever.
There are cubes for each player to keep track of eras (six for each player, while there's need for only one. Hmm...).
There are five small boards containing player aids and action spaces, and a set of action tiles for each player. These spaces are where you put your tiles to indicate that you made an action. This is completely useless, unless you have weak memory and want to remind yourself what you did a minute ago. Other than that, these player aids are nice and contain useful information.
There is a set of city tiles for each player, as well as two extra city tiles of completely different colour and value. These can be used as a decoration on the otherwise simplistic blue ocean.
Finally, there is a deck of cards that tend to stick to one another, have dull illustrations and undistinguishable backgrounds from time to time.
And, I almost forgot, there is a cloth bag. It's there because a serious eurogame must have a cloth bag and lots of tiny wooden thingies. Settlers of Catan have that, Tigris & Euphrates has that, Tempus needs to have it to.
In general, the components are nice but the publisher should be put into jail for their quality.

GAMEPLAY
The game is very simple. On your turn you get several action tiles and you spend them in order, one at a time, to perform actions. You can move your diskies (I thought of "temple" - tempus people or "disciples" -disky people, but these names aren't cute enough), you can make new diskies (remember the grass eating?), you can build a city (several diskies change into a big dotted tile that helps them invent things), you can take idea cards (remember the big question marks?) or you can attack other diskies and cities. The idea cards can be used at any suitable time for their special abilities, or can be spent for attacking or making "progress".
In order to advance to the next era, a great White Disc God comes from heavens and looks which diskies gathered more necessary resources (bricks for example), built more dotted hex tiles and played more cards. These diskies advance to the next era, and all others fall behind for one round.
You get victory points for occupying hexes, building cities and inventing flight. The person with the most points wins.

The game has several very interesting mechanisms. Combat is quite well done, you can play cards to increase your strength and you may bluff as well. There is a clever mechanism of advancing to next eras and falling behind. The player that did not so well on one turn, can still be the first on the next, and thus there is no situation in which one player is always waaaaaay ahead, and others are desperately trying to catch up.
There is no downtime, all the actions are quick and simple, yet there are some tough decisions to make and you always seem to have one action tile less than you need
There are minor rules issues, like the infamous don't-attack-player-with-less-than-3-hexes-with-tokens, but I didn't find this very disturbing.

CONCLUSION
This is not a serious civilisation building game. This is a family game, and a very good one, an EXCELLENT one I would say. There is a fair deal of strategy, little luck involved and TONS of fun with diskies jumping around and having babies. A hardcore civ-building strategist that expects (White Disc) God knows what will probably NOT enjoy this game, as it has extremely simple rules and the civ-theme is rather thin.
That said, if you get rid of all expectations and clean your mind like I told you at the beginning, you can have some really great time with Tempus. I highly reccomend this game.