Legacy Gears of Time Review

In some board games, you take the role of a farmer trying to cultivate soil and crops. In others, you’re a mighty warlord or warrior attempting to crush your enemies. While in others, you work together with your comrades to solve some crisis. In Legacy Gears of Time, you’re not going to spend your time in one lame era in time. You’re going to be zipping all over the place!

Legacy Gears of Time is a strategic card game of time travel and technology from Floodgate Games. Players take the role of time travelers moving back in time to establish technologies and discover the fundamental pieces that allow them to be invented.

Legacy Gears of Time - Gameplay

The aim of the game is to be the player with the most influence at the end, showing that you were the one most responsible for all of the awesome stuff civilization has! Each player has a hand of cards that they get from drawing out of a communal deck. The deck consists of the various technologies you can play in order to gain influence. There are four rounds in the game, and each player gets four turns in a round.

In the first stage of the game, each player travels backward in time and plays cards from their hands to introduce new tech to the timeline and gain some initial influence. In the second stage, players continue to establish new tech and vie for control of the technologies played in order to take control of them and gain the influence created by them. The changing landscape of the board provided by the game’s mechanics allows for a wealth of replayability. You’ll never be sure just how the board will be laid out and it could change drastically from round to round.

Legacy Gears of Time - Component Quality

The overall quality of the pieces is outstanding. The cardboard used for the board and some of the game components is very thick and sturdy. The player pieces and influence cubes are made of nice solid wood and painted consistently. The art might not be for everyone, but I enjoy it. It’s a sort of steampunk-Esque whimsical art style. It works for the vibe it’s trying to convey. There were only a few negatives I could find. One was the thickness of the cards; they seemed a little flimsy, and we were all worried about bending them. Also, the rules are fairly straightforward once you understand them but it did take my group a little bit to get everything down.

The Verdict

It’s a solid game. It may be a little daunting at first due to the learning curve when first starting out. It might take someone a full game to really feel comfortable with formulating a strategy. This bodes well for it’s replayability though. It’s definitely a game you could play many times without feeling like you’re playing the same game. So, if you enjoy games with a unique premise that let you compete against your friends while screwing them over pick up Legacy: Gears of Time from your FLGS, Amazon, or from Floodgate Games!

TechRaptor reviewed Legacy Gears of Time with a copy provided by the publishers. This review was originally published on 08-12-2014. While care has been taken to update the piece to reflect our modern style guidelines, some of the information may be out of date. We've left pieces like this as they were to reflect the original authors' opinions, and for historical context.