Echoes of Time: the combo you get to savour three turns later

I brought it back from Essen 2025 in my suitcase, grabbed in English on the Cranio Creations stand while Intrafin's French edition was barely out of its boxes. On paper, one more card box signed by Simone Luciani. My first game, though, comes down to a single word: grumbling. I spent the whole session muttering, "no, I've mistimed it again, my combos aren't landing together." It was only over the following games that I tamed this conveyor-belt effect, and there, freed from the timing, I could finally focus on what makes the whole thing sing: the choices. Hard choices, because you have to commit. And committing is something I love, even though I'm hopeless at it, so badly do I want to do everything at once. Echoes of Time is a game where you plant seeds that only explode three turns later, and where the real pleasure lies in that permanent dilemma.

Duration: 30-60 min · Age: 12+ · Players: 2-4 · Publisher: Cranio Creations (original) / Intrafin (French) · Designers: Simone Luciani & Roberto Pellei · Art: Giovanni Calore

Four factions and a visual slap

The setting is an elemental fantasy split into four factions, the Oceans, the Night, the Forests and the Underground, and it is Giovanni Calore holding the brush. Opening the box, it breathes: each faction has its own palette, personality and creatures. This is a long way from anonymous cardboard, you want to spread the cards out just to look at them.

The theme itself stays an elegant veneer laid over a very abstract engine, but a veneer that does the job: you recruit a company of creatures to seize ancient Sources of power, and the dressing is enough to give flesh to what remains, at heart, a pure optimisation exercise.

The Time Plate, or the art of playing on a delay

Here is the heart of the beast. In front of you sits a Time Plate: a conveyor belt of five slots. When you play a card, it does not activate. It climbs into the waiting room, right at the far end of the track. Every time time advances, the tiles slide one notch towards the exit, and only once ejected off the track is your creature finally "summoned" and added to your active army.

On your turn, you take two actions out of four: draw, play a card into the queue, advance time to push everyone towards the exit, or head off to conquer and fortify a Source.

Nothing tricky in the rules. The vertigo is elsewhere. If you know Ancient Knowledge and its ageing cards, you will find the same idea of temporality here, but with far sharper teeth: you steal Sources from one another, you wreck each other's plans, and a few well-aimed cards land you a punch in the gums when you least expect it.

What lands: the dilemma, over and over

What I love in a game is being forced to choose between two options I want both of. Echoes of Time does almost nothing else. Two actions a turn, and never enough: do I advance time to finally summon that dragon I've been waiting three turns for, or do I play a new card now, knowing it will take an age to come out? Do I rush to grab a Source while it's free, or shore up my engine at the risk of having it snatched away? Every turn is a small sacrifice. You don't play what you want, you play what you can afford to give up, and that is where the game becomes a drug.

Add to that the diesel-engine build-up, calm at the start then a fireworks display of combos towards the end, and you get that very particular thrill of the plan unfolding exactly as intended. Wiring a sequence across three turns so that everything goes off at once is the famous "I'm a genius" rush (before remembering, the following turn, that you're not quite that clever).

Where it snags

Let's be honest, the first game is disorienting. This gap between an action and its effect catches the brain off guard, and until the click comes, you feel like you're playing into the void. With over a hundred unique cards, you also spend your early sessions with your nose in the rulebook translating icons that, at first, all look alike. And with four players, you wring the deck out a bit too fast: the combos come round again, the uncertainty drops. The game is clearly at its best at two or three, where every contested Source counts double.

Verdict

Echoes of Time is a clever, fluid combo game that asks you to think ahead and accept sacrifice. If you love planting seeds and savouring the delayed explosion, if the word "dilemma" lights up your eyes more than the word "brawl", you'll have a feast, especially in a duel or at three. If your favourite strategy is still "hit first, think later", walk on by, this game rewards the patient and the calculating.

My score: 8/10.