Take Time BGG ↗

Take Time · French/English edition · (2025)

Your rating: 8.0

My BGG Comment

2026 After 4 plays. This is a very beautiful and refined offering from Libellud. There are number puzzles sorted into 10 chapters of 4 puzzles each. 2 to 4 players share a total of 12 of 24 cards numbered from 1-12 in two suits (day and night) that need to be placed around the puzzle. The puzzles are clock faces with six slots in which cards are placed. This is a restricted communication game. To solve the puzzle each clockface has certain conditions and once players have picked up their cards they cannot talk to each other anymore. Only a limited number of cards may be played face up to give each other obvious clues. The basic condition that is (almost) always present is this: the sum of the cards placed in a slot has to be equal or larger than the previous slot and may not be higher than 24. It's quite simple. If you have played The Mind you may have experienced the kind of gaming magic already. You can place the cards just so without talking to each other. And through repeated play you can feel your way to a solution or you can discuss it in depth to try and develop a scheme to give each other clues through clever placement of cards. We played through the first chapter just fine. The strategy is pretty straightforward. But in chapter 2 there are new conditions that obviously make for more complex puzzles and my feeling on this was that we should approach it like we would a session of The Gang where over repeated hands played we get a feeling for what other people are doing without the need of a lot of words (not quite, there are usually lots of post-hand discussions). However, my partner insisted on finding a strategy but the randomness of the card distribution can make a puzzle much harder to solve in some cases (here it reminds me of The Crew) and at two players additional entropy is added as each player obviously has to play 6 cards but starts off knowing only 4 of them and picking up the remaining two only after having played 2! Rating 8 Unlike The Mind, play order is around the table once the first person has played a card. So some of the tactics of that game will not be valid except for the first play. We definitely need to try this at 3 and 4 players as keeping going at two has been ruled out for me.