Trouble On The Tempus: Minor Disaster Games launch time-travelling Kickstarter (exclusive pictures)

At last year’s UK Games Expo, Minor Disaster Games showed off a cooperative time travel disaster management board game called Trouble On The Tempus. Now, even as UK Games Expo 25 opens, the publisher has launched a Kickstarter for the clever game.

Geek Native has exclusive pictures and an interview from the Minor Disaster team to share. First, though, let’s take a look at the crowdfunding pitch.

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The game can be played in about an hour to an hour and a half and suits two to five players.

The Tempus is an experimental time machine, and its maiden voyage has not gone well. The good news is that, even as the disasters spiral out of control, there is a handy time machine to reset and start over.

The game comes with eight character sheets and standees, five hyperdrive cards, 12 paradox cards, 33 disaster cards, item cards, tokens, a board, and the rulebook.

There are no stretch goals in the campaign. Minor Disaster Games are keeping things as straightforward as possible, but expansions are available through the crowdfunding rewards system.

Backers who pledge £45 or more will unlock the first edition of the board game as a reward and get access to add-ons.

Then, at £59, backers get the board game and the Extreme Circumstances expansion. Alternatively, in a different tier, backers could get the main game and The Illusion of Time.

Minor Disaster Games are not forcing people to choose which Trouble On The Tempus expansion they want, as there is a pledge tier at £ 69 that offers the core rules and both expansions.

There’s a Kickstarter-exclusive version with upgraded parts and both expansions at £85. This tier is proving to be popular in the first 24 hours of the campaign launch.

The Kickstarter runs until June 26th, and Minor Disaster Games estimates delivery in April next year for the game.

Trouble on the Tempus interview

Minor Disaster Games will be at the UK Games Expo this weekend and at booth Hall 2 – 787. It’s a chance for people to see the game will help with publicity but it’s also a lot for the indie studio to squeeze in all at once!

Despite being busy, the team kindly agreed to an interview and even dug up some previously unseen photographs from prototype gameplays.

So you’re launching a Kickstarter and heading to UK Games Expo on the same week. Isn’t that a lot? Aren’t you courting some sort of… minor disaster?

Caley (She/Her – Communications Director at Minor Disaster Games);

We hope not! Our plan to do it this way is that we know that the first 48 hours of a Kickstarter campaign are crucial and we wanted to make sure we could focus all of our energies into the campaign in this time frame before we go to the UK Games Expo, where two of us will be on the stall and one person will be looking after the Kickstarter. We also know that after the first 48 hours we are going to go into the mid campaign slump and what better place to be than at one of the biggest board game conventions in the world! We are hoping it will give our campaign a boost. 

What’s the pitch for Trouble On The Tempus? How would you describe it and sell it to tabletop gamers?

Liam (He/Him – Design Director at Minor Disaster Games);

It’s Groundhog Day in space! Have you ever had one of those moments in a game where you think “if only I had done that”? What if you could travel back in time to give yourself a second chance? Trouble On The Tempus is a disaster management game where you can push your luck to learn as much about the future, before trying again with the added knowledge of what’s going to go wrong and when in order to engineer your perfect scenario. That’s provided you can remember everything!

I love the concept of fixing a time machine by resetting time/the board. Is there a story behind the game’s conception?

Kristian (He/Him – Creative Director at Minor Disaster Games);

The story is that my old gaming group played Pandemic to the point we could beat it comfortably on the hardest difficulty setting so we branched out into harder and harder coop games, and I got to thinking about the moments in those games where you’re faced with a tough choice, or when you can see where you went wrong in a previous turn. What if you could turn those moments into a mechanic where you could go back and try multiple strategies to test your ideas.

Thus time travel was always at the core of the game, everything else was built around that.

Trouble On The Tempus is a unique game, but I’m a fan of Amazon’s “If you liked this product you might also like this one…” approach so I wondered if there was a famous game that you suspect would be a good “if you like this then…” match for it?

Caley;

As we said our game was inspired by Pandemic and that is the one game I think, if you like Pandemic you will like our game.

You were at the UK Games Expo 2024 with an earlier version of Trouble On The Tempus. How has the game changed and evolved since then?

Caley;

We launched the game at last years Expo, we had a starter stand with one table and the first printed prototype of the game. It had with a neoprene matt, several print outs of actions you could do in certain rooms of the ship and a separate one for actions you could perform on the bridge, a spelling error on one of the rooms on the ship that we didn’t notice until after the Expo had finished and little pawns, all of which was packed into a cardboard box with our flyers and the matt was rolled up into a tube. Since then we’ve fixed the spelling error, changed the design of the board to include the actions on the board, have standees and a rule book, all of which fits into our games box and we have box art. It all looks a lot more polished now, more like the finished product. 

Will people be able to play the game at your new stand this year?

Caley;

Yes, we have a bigger stand than last year so we can run two games. We also have exciting UK Games Expo exclusive components to give to our Kickstarter backers. If our backers can come to our stand, Hall 2, 2-787 with proof that they have backed us on Kickstarter they can either get an exclusive character card or a Hyperdrive, but we don’t have many of these so it will be first come first served. We are also collaborating with game table company Arcadia Game Tables so we will be running our game on their amazing board gaming tables and you can find them in Hall 2 – 2-693a.

On the theme of time, how has UK Games Expo changed for you over the years?

Kristian;

I’m probably the best to answer that I suspect as I’ve been attending the expo for nearly it’s whole existence, I can remember when the expo’s exhibitor space took place entirely within one function room at the Hilton, which seems impossible to imagine now.

The expo expanding slowly out into the NEC itself almost feels like it happened overnight but truth is I’m much older now, haha. So I’ve been coming to the UKGE for what feels like forever and Trouble On The Tempus was playtested there a decade ago when it was all scribbles on cardboard. I feel like the expo had a lot more cosplay back then, but that’s maybe just because it was so small it was easier to find the cosplayers, and it was perhaps more about roleplaying than board games.

I started exhibiting as part of the Blood on the Clocktower team so I had a few years experience of working behind the scenes before Minor Disaster Games, but more and more I’ve seen the growth of the indie market and how valued small creators are by people attending UK Games Expo, which is why it’s just such a joy to be there.

It’s a huge convention by any standard. Are Minor Disaster Games little fish or do you have a good relationship with the team there?

Caley;

I think we are definitely a little fish, it is only our second time exhibiting and our first as Minor Disaster Games so we are looking forward to building up a relationship with the UK Games Expo team.

We also are part of a indie board game community called Board Game Protohype so feel slightly less alone, knowing we are surrounded by fellow indie creators that are going through similar experiences.

Do you have any tips for people exhibiting at UK Games Expo for the first time? 

Liam;

Be prepared to be busy! The expo is vast and the crowd is big. If you’re a small team there is a possibility you won’t get much time to step away from the stand, so have everything you need to hand. That being said there’s so much going on at the show so be sure to engineer time off. Not only are there other games you want to play, but also manufacturers and distributors that are helpful to meet with, talks from publishers tailored for designers, networking events etc. There is so much you can get out of the show for all aspects of your business! Research the show, plan a schedule, know where you need to be, wear comfy shoes, and talk to everyone you can.

Quick Links

• Kickstarter: Trouble On The Tempus.