True story: Our neighbors picked up this game at a garage sale, figuring it might be worth a try for our weekly game night. After one excruciatingly long play, they decided that it would go into their next garage sale. Like the proverbial Christmas fruitcake, this just needed to be passed on and on, over and over...

Time: The Game is a trivia game, designed to take up as much of your time as possible. Players can play in teams or individually, but this should only be attempted by Mensa-level trivia junkies with eidetic memory. On your turn, you roll and move to a new space that will determine what kind of question you must answer. You also roll a third die to determine the difficulty level of your question. Questions are divided into categories (People, Places, Arts, Sports, etc.) as well as eras (ranging, in our edition, from the 1920's to the 1980's). The third die determines whether you get a true/false question (worth 10 points), a multiple choice (20 points), or a fill-in-the-blank (worth 30 points). Thus, you could get a true/false question on People of the 1960's, or a multiple choice question on Sports from the 1920's, and so on.

The questions, and their answers, are found in four "magazines" - booklets designed to look like a very thin copy of Time magazine. To ask your opponent a question, you simply skip to the proper era, then find the appropriate category, then find the right column for the question's difficulty. Sound clunky? It is, and it adds a significant amount of time to the game play.

If you get the answer right, you get the appropriate amount of points for that era. If you're lucky and landed on a double points space... well you can guess what happens then. Points are doled out in slips of colored paper that closely resemble Monopoly money. The goal of the game is to earn a total of 60 points in each era (it doesn't matter what categories you answered, just to have earned enough points in each era). The person or team that does so is declared the Supreme Grand Master of the Esoteric, and everyone else thanks them for finally ending the game.

Just kidding! It's unlikely that you'll actually find someone that can actually answer enough questions correctly to get to an end, so you'll more likely do what we had to do - put the fate of the game on "whoever gets the next question right", which still took four tries before anyone hit on a right answer.

To be fair, the true/false questions actually are pretty easy - but not because they center on knowledge that people might actually possess. They are easy because they are all posed in a pattern that tells you the answer:

- If there are fewer than 2 variable parameters, the answer is likely true.
- If there are more than 2 variable parameters, the answer is likely false by reason of one or more false variables.
- If there are only 2 parameters, the answer hinges on how outrageous the statement is - more outrageous means highly likely true, reasonable means highly likely false.

For example: Herbert Schmollenoller was elected to the New York State Senate in 1928. True or false? You don't have to know the answer. You simply note that there are four variables: "Herbert Schmollenoller," "New York", "State Senate", and "1928." The answer is therefore false, because at least one of those parameters has been altered to render the entire statement false. (That is, maybe he was elected to that post in 1923, or it was 1928 but a different office, or it wasn't New York but New Hampshire, or it was his half-brother Frank Schmollenoller, etc. etc.)

The multiple choice questions are trickier because they don't fall into a predictable pattern. They do, however, generally have at least one answer that you can eliminate reasonably, leaving you with a 50/50 shot at the right answer. Which leaves the tougher fill-in-the-blank questions... for which, you just have to hope either a) you never get that roll, or b) if you do, you actually happen to know the answer because no amount of guessing will help you.

The edition we encountered was obviously not from 1979 because it included questions on the 1980's. To give you an idea of just how far out and esoteric the questions are: every one of us at the game table had lived through and grown up in the 1980's. We collectively struggled to bat .300 for this era.

On the BGG scale, I would have to rate this a 3/10. It does not defy the definition of a game, and there are possibly a handful of other "games" that would provide a more excruciating experience than this. But not many that leap to mind immediately.

You're likely to only ever find this at thrift shops, garage sales, and maybe eBay or craigslist. Don't even bother paying $1 for it. If you do pick it up, say for 50 cents, you're likely to get more use out of the box to store components for other games, or to prop up the leg of a wobbly table.

If you do play it, you now cannot say that you weren't warned in advance by the only review of the game in existence.