Back to the Future: Dice Through Time
Publisher: Ravensburger || Designer: Ken Franklin, Chris Leder, Kevin Rodgers || Ages: 10+
Back to the Future. One of my favorite movies of all time. A classic. Now a board game???? YES PLEASE!
In Back to the Future: Dice Through Time you play cooperatively to return lost items (Hover Board, Guitar, etc) to their correct location and year before you are “outatime”. But first you have to find the items by dealing with some events from the trilogy of movies (ie. connect the wire at the clocktower before lightning strikes!).
Each player has a set of dice and their own Delorean to move around the board to different locations in different years. The dice symbols dictate what actions you can do, such as move to another location, time travel to another year, punch Biff since he blocks locations, remove a time paradox (which can occur if two Deloreans are in the same spot).
The dice could also be used to complete events that appear on the board after each round. Each event needs matching symbols so you can attempt to complete them on your turn, or leave dice there to partially complete them and someone can finish it up later. Leave too many events unattended and you start to lose time and create more paradoxes. After each event is completed you find an item, which you must then deliver to it’s correct location and year on the board.
A cool time travel aspect is that you can “bury” a die in a location and another player in the same location in the future (not the past) can find it and use it.
Delivering items gets you an Einstein token (Doc’s dog) that acts as an anytime use of the symbol it shows. It’s a little reward for doing well and will help you as the game gets harder over time because events will start to build up.
Dice Through Time is a great cooperative game for the family. It’s not very easy, which is something I like because it forces everyone to think more critically. It involves a lot of team work since you can combine your dice to complete events and deliver dice through time (ohhhh, that’s why it’s called that!). There is a lot of “you go deal with that while I try to get over here to deal with this”. The event cards are nice nostalgic reminders of parts of the movies. It services well to fans of the movies but still provides a good gameplay. It gets a big recommendation for any fan of the movies.
Dice Through Time is currently only available at Target.
