time travel board game kickstarter

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trekking Through History

What is Trekking Through History? 

A beautiful, time-travel board game built for families

Featuring 108 remarkable historical events from around the world

Play & learn about real life events

Easy to learn & teach 

I want the real experience.

Watch the Overview Video

Go with remember things

Learn more about the creation of this game: , why did you choose to create this game, how did you pick which events to include, what makes this game unique, watch reviews & playthroughs.

Time Editors: A time travel themed board game Kickstarter Spotlight

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This looks intriguing. I cannot think of anything like it. Definitely backing.

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Timelancers - Time Travel Board Game

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Play as a freelance time traveler revising history in this sci-fi steampunk board game.

last updated 6 months ago

Funding Progress on Kickstarter

Daily Funding on Kickstarter

Daily backers on kickstarter.

Waddling Panda’s ‘Timelancers’ Brings Time Travel to Kickstarter

Posted on June 28, 2023

Categories Board Games , Crowdfunding , Kickstarter

Waddling Panda has launched an exciting Kickstarter campaign for its new board game, ‘Timelancers.’ The game combines elements of time travel, set collection, resource management, tableau building, and features a modular game board.

As of today, ‘Timelancers’ has raised over US$ 16,429 out of its US$ 20,000 goal, with 331 backers supporting this venture. With 28 days left until the campaign ends on July 27, it appears set to meet its fundraising target.

‘Timelancers’ envisions a 22nd-century world where time travel is a reality and political factions wage war over the future by altering the past. Players assume the role of freelance time travelers, or ‘Timelancers,’ hired by these factions to change historical events and reshape the future.

The gameplay revolves around gathering resources from Janusburg, the city of the future, and using a time machine to revise or repeat historical events across different eras. However, players must be wary – other Timelancers are also attempting to modify the future, and their actions can impact your progress. The race is on to be the first to accomplish your goals, adding a layer of urgency and competition to the game.

“The concept of time travel has always fascinated us,” said a spokesperson from Waddling Panda. “With ‘Timelancers,’ we wanted to bring that fascination to the tabletop, allowing players to rewrite history and shape the future in an immersive and competitive game.”

The game uses worker movement for resource collection and a modular game board that keeps the gameplay dynamic and engaging. Players strive to earn victory points by traveling back in time and collecting real historical events.

‘Timelancers’ is an innovative addition to the board game industry, and with its ongoing Kickstarter campaign, fans of time travel and strategic board games can be a part of bringing this exciting concept to reality.

Sunday 2nd of July 2023

Sad.. this project was cancelled yesterday.

Raising Geek Generation 2.0

Kickstarter Tabletop Review: ‘Design Your Destiny: Running Out of Time’

Natalie and Charlie have been sent to the future with a task: track down and destroy a time machine!  You have been given a task: fix the games based on Natalie and Charlie’s story!

What Is Design Your Destiny: Running Out of Time ?

Design Your Destiny: Running Out of Time isn’t a typical game: it’s actually a workbook that includes a time-travel story, along with several broken or incomplete games to play as the story’s characters, and some game design exercises to fix those games. It’s currently seeking funding on Kickstarter , with a pledge level of $40CAD (about $30USD) for a copy of the game, or $60CAD (about $45USD) for the deluxe edition. There are also tiers for an educator edition and options to add a copy to donate to a local educator.

Design Your Destiny: Running Out of Time was designed by Blaise Sewell and Jay Cormier and published by Fail Faster, with illustrations by Allan Ohr and graphic design by Sebastian Koziner.

New to Kickstarter? Check out our crowdfunding primer .

Design Your Destiny: Running Out of Time Components

Note: My review is based on a prototype copy, so it is subject to change and may not reflect final component quality. For instance, the meeple tokens shown in my photo are a generic meeple, but the ones that come with the game will look like the characters.

Here’s what comes in the box, which will be a tuckbox rather than the usual box-and-lid:

• Spiral-bound book
• 7 wooden character tokens
• 10 Boot tokens
• 12 Number tokens
• 10 Clock tokens
• 10 Snowflake tokens
• 4 foldable cards
• 12 Movement tiles
• 16 Obstacle tokens
• 20 blank cards
• Wet-erase marker (not shown)

The deluxe edition replaces the cardboard tokens with wooden tokens, and also uses a 2-piece box rather than the tuckbox. Stretch goals reached during the campaign, like extra wooden cubes and tokens, will only apply to the deluxe edition.

Since  Design Your Destiny is as much a game design kit as a game, the components are designed to be used for multiple purposes. There are meeples for some of the games, but the wooden discs are particularly important for the dexterity flicking game. The various tokens can be used for thematic effects—the snowflake for the freeze ray, for example—but can also be flipped over to be used as generic counters. (The backs are colored but also have different patterns to be color blind–friendly.) And, of course, the blank cards with the wet-erase marker give you even more flexibility when creating your own game.

The story is longer than I had expected. If you’re used to a paragraph or two to set the scene in most board games, you may be surprised that this is more like a chapter book, with two chapters between each game design challenge. (You can read the first chapter for yourself here .) While you can play the games and do the design exercises without reading the story, it’s a fun little time travel story about two siblings, Natalie and Charlie, who get zapped into the future with a mission to find and destroy a time machine.

There are a few full-page illustrations to accompany the story, and they remind me a little of those old Rat Fink Hot Rods—not as grungy, but with the bugged-out eyes and gaping mouths. It’s maybe a little intense for a kids’ book, but that’s just my personal taste.

How to Use Design Your Destiny: Running Out of Time

As I said, this isn’t your typical game, so instead of my usual “how to play” section, I’ll explain how the book works. After reading the first two chapters, you’ll get to your first game: Natalie and Charlie are running through a parking lot, pursued by a guard with a freeze ray. The first page explains how to play the game: players take turns rolling the die and moving their pawns—the guard always shoots a freeze ray straight up at the end of his movement, leaving ice patches that can send the kids backward if they land on them. Their goal is to escape off the top of the page before the guard catches them.

Now, this is a pretty simple roll-and-move game that doesn’t give either of the players any choices: they just roll the die and do what it says. After a single play, most people will be able to tell that it’s not a very fun game, and doesn’t seem balanced between the two players. So then you get a chance to fix the game. The next several pages have spaces for notes, some explanations about the sorts of questions you should ask, and some ideas about what you could change in the game, whether it’s changing elements of the board itself, changing the way that characters move, or tweaking the way the freeze ray works.

You’re encouraged to change a single element of the gameplay and then try it again—and then see what worked and what didn’t. There are three questions that are highlighted (and repeated throughout the various sections):

• Is it more fun?
• Is it fair?
• Does it add meaningful decisions?

Each game gives you several tasks: change a rule, fill out the Playtest Notes page, make a change that adds meaningful decisions for the players, and so on. For each task you complete, you get a sticker for that section of the book. At the end of the book, there’s a sticker sheet and a page representing the time machine. Each sticker is an element of the time machine, and as you work your way through the book, you’ll eventually complete the time machine and unlock the story’s ending.

The sample game designs get more complex as you progress. You go from a one-track roll-and-move to a multi-directional roll-and-move to a game that uses various tiles to determine your movement. Then there’s a flicking game (played on the table surface rather than on a page of the book). The last challenge sets up the story and the objectives, but you have to come up with  all of the rules yourself, and then playtest it!

Why You Should Play Design Your Destiny: Running Out of Time

Jay Cormier is the creator of Fail Faster, a game design program with a focus on iteration and playtesting. As he explains in  Design Your Destiny , “the goal is always to fail as fast as you can when you’re designing games so that you can move onto your next version of the game.” Design Your Destiny is a kid-friendly—and, I should note, cheaper—introduction to Fail Faster’s concepts. He’s no stranger to game design, either—he has over 20 game designs published, many of them that I reviewed myself for GeekDad!

Near the end of fourth grade earlier this year, my youngest daughter told me she’d been working on a board game design. I saw the single-track board and thought to myself, “Oh, has she designed a roll-and-move?” It was a bit of a surprise because she’s played a lot of different games and I think she knows the importance of giving players a bit of choice. As it turns out, movement was done using a hand of cards, and she came up with a mechanic that was actually a bit like  Gravwell , with cards moving you toward or away from the closest other player. We sat down to play it, and then afterward I was helping her with ideas about how to improve it, just doing my best as somebody who has played a lot of games but hasn’t had a lot of experience with actual playtesting.

So when I first heard about Design Your Destiny , I was immediately excited about it: this is something I can share with my daughter so we can learn game design concepts together, and it’s done in a more systematic, incremental way instead of my scattershot ideas. While we haven’t made our way all the way through the book (I read ahead for this review), we did sit down to play a game, then made tweaks and played it again. The book really walks you through the process in an easy-to-digest way that isn’t overwhelming, and the fact that you do work on the same game at least 5 times to earn all the stickers is a good reminder that good game design generally takes more than two iterations!

There’s an educators edition as well for anyone who wants to use this for a class. Instead of the text boxes for people to write directly in the book, those are removed and there are downloadable workbooks and a teacher’s guide. And for those using the regular book, once you’ve gone through it once and filled out the book, you can also download the PDFs to go through the process again. (Instead of a sticker page, the PDF includes the last page as a coloring page so you color in the sections as you earn them.)

Although the story and exercises are kid-friendly, this isn’t something that’s  only for kids. Anyone who has played some games has probably had an experience where they felt like the game could be better with a few changes, and there are a lot of house rules that exist because of that. But house rules don’t always get playtested, and sometimes they may make games worse in different ways that weren’t considered. One thing I like about Design Your Destiny is that it shows you the sort of work that goes into refining a game design, and also teaches you that you can do it! If you’ve always wanted to design a game yourself but didn’t really know where to start, this is a cool way to jumpstart that journey. The deluxe edition—especially if the stretch goals are reached—will be a particularly useful kit, with its extra components.

Of course, this being GeekDad, I want to note that it’s a particularly great game to consider if you have kids. Design Your Destiny is a project you can do with your kids, and get them thinking about different aspects of game design whether you’re playing through the exercises in this book or a favorite game from your collection. What makes a game tick? Is it fair? Is it fun? I think it helps you appreciate great games even more, getting a peek under the hood to see how they work.

If  Design Your Destiny: Running Out of Time does well, the idea is that there will be more Design Your Destiny titles as well, so I look forward to trying those if that happens! (Alas, my own time machine was destroyed so I can’t go check now.)

For more information or to make a pledge, visit the Design Your Destiny: Running Out of Time  Kickstarter page!

Click here to see all our tabletop game reviews.

Disclosure: GeekDad received a copy of this game for review purposes.

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The Past Is A Weapon

In the 22nd Century, warring political factions hire freelance time travelers to go back in time and revise historical events in order to reshape the future. These freelance time travelers are known as TIMELANCERS.

Timelancers is a time travel themed set collection board game that utilizes worker movement, resource management, tableau building, contracts, and a modular game board. Players gather resources and travel back through time collecting real historical events to earn victory points.

Funded on Kickstarter on day 1!

2023 Cardboard Edison Award Finalist

Recognizing Great Unpublished Board Games

Revise the past.

Change the Future.

Defeat your Opponents.

“This game does time travel in a real and meaningful way that is thematically strong and a lot of fun to boot.”

“I love how the time travel theme fits with the mechanisms in the game. A ripple in time has repercussions.”

– Grant Lyon

Late Pledge Manager Opening Soon!

GAME OVERVIEW

Each player is a Timelancer and their goal is to gain the most merits to move up the ranks of the Timelancer hierarchy. Timelancers gain merits by capturing events and adding them to their time machines, completing faction goals, completing side jobs, adding time locks to events, upgrading their time machines, and by collecting money and resources.

The game is played over a series of rounds, with each player taking one turn each round. A player’s turn consists of making up to three moves – either in the city of Janusburg, their time machine, or a combination of both.

While in the city of Janusburg, players will move from city tile to city tile collecting resources needed to capture historical events.

When a player has enough time gems and resources, they will go to their time machine and revise or repeat events in order to capture them and add them to their time machine.

There are 4 types of historical events – Cultural, Military, Science, and Social. Each event will give the player money and also give the player special abilities that will make capturing future events easier.

For a traditional game, as soon as any player completes their faction’s 4 end goals OR captures 9 events, the end game begins. Each player that has not taken a turn during the round will take their turn. As soon as play gets back to the first player, the game immediately ends and players add up their merits. The player with the most merits wins.

Read the Rulebook

What people are saying

“This game does time travel in a real and meaningful way that is thematically strong and a lot of fun to boot.” – Rahdo

“Love the time travel theme, and trying to puzzle out the timeline orders to your benefit. Had fun playing!” – Meeple University

“We freaking love that game!” – Jamie

“I’m a big history guy, so it’s really cool to see those events come out and they’re like actual events that happened. Thematically I very much enjoyed Timelancers.” – Jeff

“I love how the time travel theme fits with the mechanisms in the game. A ripple in time has repercussions.” – Grant Lyon

“It’s easy to learn. And once you get going there’s a lot of different strategies with simple rules and I like that.” – Mark

“ This game is superrrr coooll! I was excited to see they were actual events like: the invention of the wheel, the completion of the Taj Mahal, gulf war and the JFK assassination. Revising the events causing an actual ripple effect changing the events of other timelancers and locations in the map. Overall this game will definitely fulfilled your time travel fantasy with its creative and clever mechanics. Highly recommend it!” – V

“Timelancers is a brilliant game of strategy which embodies its underlying theme of time travel like no other game we have seen before.” – Meeples Abroad

“The most clever part of it for me is the combination of adjusting the state of the board and adjusting other players time machines when you revise events.” – Devon BoardGameCo

“I love the game. I really felt it flowed really well. I love those different events. I love the different discounts. I love chaining them on there because it’s really cool chaining those up to get your discounts to make things cheaper, better, or easier to get and it makes the game go faster and faster as time goes by which I really, really appreciate.” – James

“The steampunk setting paired with strategic time travel is a huge win!” – @board.game.dad

“The game has some really great design behind it with time being a resource as my favorite!” – Justin @tabletopjables

“This is a really fun game. It’s super. It kind of like mind blows you.” – TableTop Vibes

“It’s a nice strategy game which is fairly easy to learn , but I feel like it’s very nuanced as well so there’s a lot of strategy involved in this, a lot of depth.” – Adam

Play on Tabletop Simulator

Play the current prototype version of Timelancers on Tabletop Simulator. It includes all of the components from the game needed to play a 1-4 player game. We will continue developing the game until we confirm the production process with the manufacturer, so please let us know your thoughts after you’ve had a chance to play!

Timelancers Playthrough

Kenny and Lee are two of the creators of Timelancers and they’ll show you a full two-player playthrough of a traditional game. Kenny will be playing as Kylin and Lee will be playing as Laran. You’ll get to see Timelancers gameplay in action, plus they will help to explain some gameplay rules as they go along.

SOLO Playthrough

Kenny, one of the creators of Timelancers, will show you a full solo playthrough of a traditional game. You’ll get to see Timelancers solo gameplay in action, plus he will help to explain some gameplay rules as the game goes on.

Playtesting at Gen Con

We had a great experience playtesting Timelancers while at Gen Con 55. Over the course of the event, we held eight different two-hour play testing sessions.

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Timelancers - Time Travel Board Game

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We’re living in a golden age of Star Wars board games. Here are the best ones

Epic strategy games, fast-paced card games, miniatures games, and more

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Share All sharing options for: We’re living in a golden age of Star Wars board games. Here are the best ones

Always in motion is the future of the Star Wars universe... at least when it comes to movies and television , where well more than half of the projects currently in development still have no publicly available release date . The world of Star Wars tabletop games, on the other hand, is a bit more predictable. Both this year and last, it seems like new releases have been coming down the Pyke just about every few months. Taken together with some excellent older titles still in print, it’s clear to me that we’re living in a golden age of Star Wars board games — especially if you roll in card games, TTRPGs, and miniatures games as well. Here are the very best ones.

Best Star Wars board game — Star Wars: Rebellion

Corey Konieczka has had a hand in loads of great Star Wars-themed board games, including the Star Wars: Imperial Assault dungeon crawler and the popular Star Wars: Destiny dice and card game. But his crowning achievement with the license is the epic strategy game called Star Wars: Rebellion . For fans of the original trilogy, it simply doesn’t get any better than this.

Cracking open the big, square Fantasy Flight Games box, you’ll first encounter more than 150 tiny plastic miniatures, all cast into the shapes of familiar Star Wars vehicles. Next come the 25 character standees, representing everyone from Princess Leia to Grand Moff Tarkin. The gang’s all here and ready to rock, and the setlist contains nothing less than the greatest space battles in franchise history — fleet-cracking engagements like the Battles of Yavin, Hoth, and Endor.

At its core, Star Wars: Rebellion is a high-stakes game of hide-and-seek. One player takes on the role of the evil Empire, searching relentlessly for the hidden Rebel base. Meanwhile, the Rebel player builds up their strength while launching daring hit-and-run raids on Imperial interests all across the galaxy.

Just to give you a sense of the scale involved in these battles, the game contains not one, not two, but three miniature Death Stars, all of which can be brought to bear if the Empire plays their cards right. It’s a knock-down, drag-out fight for galactic domination with a delicate ruleset that all but promises a blowout fight at the end. Just be prepared to spend two or three hours at the table.

Star Wars: Rebellion

Prices taken at time of publishing.

• 2-4 players, age 14+

• Playtime: 180-240 minutes

• Similar games: Twilight Imperium 4th Edition

• $110 at Fantasy Flight Games
• $90 at Amazon

Best Star Wars TCG — Star Wars: Unlimited

Star Wars: Unlimited surprised me when I first played it at Gen Con in 2023 . The trading card game is quick and punchy, with two lanes for combat — one in space and one on the ground — that provide for interesting player choices. Do you go all-in on vehicles to wear down your opponent, or do you strike quickly with powerful character abilities? Ultimately the choice is yours, both in the development of your custom deck and in responding to the random cards that show up in your hand once the game begins.

But where Star Wars: Unlimited truly showed its mettle is inside its booster boxes filled with packs of random cards. I find TCGs to be extremely intimidating, both in their theming and their rules. But this game excels at graphic design, yielding cards that are easy to read and easy to organize into winning decks. Toss in a smattering of gorgeous alternate art cards to chase, and it’s one heck of a compelling card game.

Note that because the game was only recently released, stock is fairly limited at this time . If you simply must shuffle up and play a Star Wars-themed card game, you can’t go wrong with Star Wars: The Deckbuilding Game , another excellent yet mechanically unrelated offering from Fantasy Flight.

Star Wars: Unlimited - Spark of Rebellion Two-Player Starter

• 2 players, age 12+

• Playtime: 20 minutes

• Similar games: Magic: The Gathering , Disney Lorcana

• $35 at Asmodee
• $35 at Amazon

Best Star Wars miniatures game — Star Wars: Shatterpoint

Atomic Mass Games, a newer imprint of Asmodee’s ever-growing stable of development studios, was lucky enough to inherit Star Wars: X-Wing Miniatures Game just after its 2.0 relaunch. While that larger fandom continued chewing on its adjustments, the studio also began cooking up a high-concept miniatures skirmish game called Star Wars: Shatterpoint . The result is a smash hit, one supported by a laundry list of excellent expansions.

I first encountered Star Wars: Shatterpoint at AdeptiCon 2023 , where the team at Atomic Mass was just getting ready for Star Wars Celebration in London . The gorgeous game features larger-than-average miniatures, meaning they’re a lot easier to paint. Better still, a viable squad only requires a handful of little plastic figures — around three to five on each side of the table. That means you’ll spend less time clipping, gluing, and painting and more time playing matches with your friends.

And the gameplay itself is excellent, with thematically distinct units from all across the history of the franchise. From the Bad Batch to militant teddy bears , masters to apprentic e s , there’s something here for everybody.

Star Wars: Shatterpoint Core Set

• 2 players

• Playtime: 90-120 minutes

• Similar games: Cyberpunk Red: Combat Zone

• $106 at Amazon
• $165 at Asmodee
• $132 at Miniature Market

Best Star Wars tabletop role-playing game — Star Wars: Edge of the Empire Beginner Game

The current iteration of the Star Wars Roleplaying Game can look pretty intimidating from the outside — especially given that it uses custom dice and a uniquely story-focused system that won’t play nicely with standard math rocks. But by far the hardest part of getting started is making sense of the game’s more than 50 sourcebooks . Those run the gamut from the Age of Rebellion series, which details settings and plot hooks from the original trilogy, to the Force & Destiny series, with lots of resources for building high-powered Jedi and other Force users.

For new players, however, the clearest point of entry is the Edge of the Empire Beginner Game , a boxed set with a simplified core rulebook, pregenerated characters, a set of those funky dice, and a starting adventure. The Edge of the Empire product line is my favorite subset of the SWRPG. They give games a feel more in line with the gritty, localized personal stories of The Mandalorian rather than the chaotic, galaxy-wide adventure of movies like The Phantom Menace . Those sourcebooks lay out stats, abilities, gear, and so forth for games centering on bounty hunters, smugglers, explorers, mercenaries, and other fringe-dwellers. They give you plenty of details on playing all those scum-and-villainy types who don’t fit into the pat, standard Jedi-versus-Sith or Rebels-versus-Empire dynamics.

In other words, it’s the area of the game where you get to play the most colorful characters, with the most variety, the most personal stakes, and the most room for creative play in all the corners of the Star Wars galaxy that the movies and TV shows have mostly ignored until recently. Star Wars: Edge of the Empire Beginner Game is a very simplified introduction to that product line, but it’s a good launch point for understanding how the Star Wars Roleplaying Game works, and why its system is easy to pick up and full of story-generating nuance that goes far beyond the usual “succeed or fail” game mechanics. —Tasha Robinson

Star Wars: Edge of the Empire Beginner Game

• 3-5 players, age 10+

• Playtime: 60 minutes

• Similar games: Dungeons & Dragons Essentials Kit

• $40 at Amazon
• $40 at Asmodee

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29 people were also taken to police stations. Among the arrested were citizens of Kyrgyzstan.

A mass brawl involving over 100 employees and security personnel broke out at the Wildberries warehouse in Elektrostal on Dec. 8.

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What America’s first board game can teach us about the aspirations of a young nation

Professor of American Literature, Iowa State University

Disclosure statement

Matthew Wynn Sivils does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Iowa State University provides funding as a member of The Conversation US.

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In 2023 alone, the board game industry topped US$16.8 billion and is projected to reach $40.1 billion by 2032 .

Classics like “Scrabble” are being refreshed and transformed , while newer inventions such as “ Pandemic ” and “ Wingspan ” have garnered millions of devotees.

This growing cardboard empire was on my mind when I visited the American Antiquarian Society in August 2023 to research its collection of early games .

As I sat in that archive, which houses such treasures as the 1640 Bay Psalm Book, the first book printed in British America , I beheld another first in American printing: a board game called “The Travellers’ Tour Through the United States.”

This forgotten game, printed the year after Missouri became a state , has a lot to say about America’s nascent board game industry, as well as how a young country saw itself.

An archival find

Produced by the New York cartography firm of F. & R. Lockwood, “The Travellers’ Tour Through the United States” was an imitation of earlier European geography games , a genre of educational game. Geography games generally used a map for a board, and the rules involved players reciting geographic facts as they race toward the finish.

“The Travellers’ Tour” first appeared in 1822, making it the earliest known board game printed in the U.S.

But for almost a century another game held that honor.

In 1894, the game manufacturer Parker Brothers acquired the rights to “The Mansion of Happiness,” an English game first produced in the U.S. in 1843. In its promotional materials, the company declared it “ The first board game ever published in America .”

That distinction ended in 1991 when a game collector found the copy of “The Travellers’ Tour” in the archives of the American Antiquarian Society.

A new game for the new year

By 1822 the American market for board games was already becoming established, and middle- and upper-class parents would buy games for their families to enjoy around the parlor table .

At that time, New Year’s – not Christmas – was the holiday for gift giving. Many booksellers, who earned money from the sale of books, playing cards and other paper goods throughout the year, would sell special wares to give as presents.

These items included holiday-themed books, puzzles – then called “ dissected maps ” – and paper dolls, as well as games imported from England such as “ The New Game of Human Life ” and “ The Royal And Entertaining Game of Goose .”

Since “The Travellers’ Tour” was the first board game to employ a map of the U.S. , it might have been an especially interesting gift to American consumers.

It’s difficult, however, to gauge just how popular “The Travellers’ Tour” was in its time. No sales records are known to exist, and since so few copies remain, it likely wasn’t a big seller.

A global database of library holdings shows only five copies of “The Travellers’ Tour” in institutions around the U.S. And while a handful of additional copies are housed in museums and private archives, the game is certainly a rarity.

Teetotums and travelers

Announcing itself as a “pleasing and instructive pastime,” “The Travellers’ Tour” consists of a hand-colored map of the then-24 states and a numbered list of 139 towns and cities, ranging from New York City to New Madrid, Missouri. Beside each number is the name and description of the corresponding town.

Using a variant spelling for the device, the instructions stipulate the game should be “performed with a Tetotum.” Small top-like devices with numbers around their sides called teetotums functioned as alternatives to dice, which were associated with immoral games of chance .

Once spun, the teetotum lands with a random side up, revealing a number. The player looks ahead that number of spaces on the map.

If they can recite from memory the name of the town or city, they move their token, or traveler, to that space. Whoever gets to New Orleans first, wins.

An idealized portrait of a young country

Though not necessary to play “The Travellers’ Tour,” the descriptions provided for each location tell historians a lot about America’s national aspirations.

These accounts coalesce into a flattering portrait of the nation’s agricultural, commercial, historical and cultural character.

Promoting the value of education, the game highlights institutions of learning. For example, Philadelphia’s “literary and benevolent institutions are numerous and respectable.” Providence boasts “Brown University, a respectable literary institution.” And Boston’s “citizens … are enterprising and liberal in the support of religious and literary institutions.”

As the game pieces meander toward New Orleans, players learn about Richmond’s “fertile backcountry” and about the “polished manners and unaffected hospitality” of the citizens of Charleston. Savannah “contains many splendid edifices” and Columbia’s “South Carolina College bids fair to be a valuable institution.”

Absent from any corresponding descriptions, however, is any mention of what John C. Calhoun called America’s “peculiar institution” of slavery and its role in the fabric of the nation.

And while four entries briefly reference American Indians, no mention is made of the ongoing dispossession and genocide of millions of Indigenous people.

Though it promotes an American identity based on a sanitized version of the nation’s economic might and intellectual rigor, “The Travellers’ Tour” nonetheless represents an important step toward what has become a burgeoning American board game industry.

Two centuries later, board game culture has matured to the point that new titles such as “ Freedom: The Underground Railroad ” and “ Votes for Women ” push the genre to new heights, using the joy of play to teach the history of the era that spawned America’s first board game.

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