Anachrony

Anachrony is a 2017 worker-placement board game designed by David Turczi and Richard Amann, published by Mindclash Games. Its setting is a devastated Earth in the twenty-sixth century. Centuries earlier, a cataclysm known as the Fracture destroyed much of civilization. The survivors gathered around a ruined capital and developed four distinct ideologies, each represented by a Path: Harmony, Dominance, Progress, and Salvation. Players lead one of these factions while preparing for another disaster and competing to shape humanity’s future.

The central mechanism is time travel. A mysterious signal from the future allows the factions to borrow resources and workers from later turns. These loans, called Anachronies, can provide water, uranium, titanium, gold, or neutronium, as well as specialist workers. The borrowed items help a faction construct buildings, complete research, recruit personnel, and develop Superprojects. However, every loan must eventually be repaid, and excessive temporal interference can create Paradoxes. A time machine and the associated temporal track make this borrowing more than a simple bonus: players must manage when an obligation becomes dangerous and decide whether to stabilize it.

Workers have different specializations, including Engineers, Scientists, Administrators, and Workers, while rare Geniuses can perform several roles particularly effectively. Exosuits are required for many actions outside the faction’s sheltered headquarters. Their limited availability forces players to plan which locations to visit, whether to gather resources, construct infrastructure, investigate the world, or contribute to the capital.

The capital is not merely a scoring area. Its condition changes as the game progresses, and players can gain valuable rewards by helping construct its buildings or by sending people to support its recovery. The approaching impact is represented by a Doom track. When the impact occurs, the game’s tempo and priorities change, and factions must be ready for the consequences rather than treating the event as a distant theme.

Anachrony’s distinctive narrative premise therefore directly informs its systems. The game asks players to exploit future knowledge while accepting the accounting problems that time travel creates. It combines asymmetric faction identities, tightly constrained worker placement, resource conversion, construction, and a visible countdown toward catastrophe. Its name describes both its title concept and its principal risk: changing the past may make survival possible, but it can also leave a faction responsible for contradictions it created itself. Because each faction pursues a different ideology, the same crisis can reward cooperation one turn and ruthless competition in the next game round.