Sojourn

Have you ever found yourself journeying through time, when the Timesphere that allows you to target specific dates malfunctions and shatters into four pieces that get scattered randomly across the timeline, leaving you lost on your sojourn through time? I know I hate when that happens.

Well, Wyvern Gaming has taken that totally mundane situation and made it exciting again in their solo game, Sojourn: A Journey Through Time.

Sojourn is a surprisingly fast solo game, in which the player will be revealing new destinations in time, and travelling to them in the hopes of finding the four fragments of the Timesphere needed to find their home time. You lose the game in two ways, either run out of health (meaning, you’re dead) or you have no way to travel to a new Destination (thus leaving you stranded in time).

Now, this is that point I might say something like “on your turn blah blah blah.” But in Sojourn, there are no set turns. Instead, you may take any action, at any time, in any order, so long as you can complete the action.

The first action is to play a Timestream Card from your hand. This is a deck of 30 cards, with five copies of six cards. Bandage heals you, Temporal Battery recharges you, and the rest change the cost of travelling to a destination in different ways.

The second action is to open a new Destination in the timeline. When you draw a new Destination Card it is placed above the destination you are at, or if there already is a card above you, to either side of that one. If you draw a Time Fragment, draw again and place the Fragment on that new Destination to collect. Now, there are two ways to accomplish this. First, you can spend one Temporal Charge to draw and open a Destination. The second is to travel to a new Destination, which automatically opens a new Destination above it at no additional cost.

This brings us to the third action, Traveling to a new Destination. A moment ago I said that when you Travel it opens a new Destination at “no additional cost,” and that was very specific wording. Because, when you travel in time there will always be inherent risks and costs. Every Destination Card shows a series of instructions to follow, in order, to travel there. First there is a Drop Cost, discarding a number of Timestream Cards from your hand. Second is a Temporal Charge Cost, discarding that number of blue charge cubes. Once those costs are paid you move your meeple to the new card. Once there you must assume the Risk of that Destination, by rolling over the Risk percentage of the card on two ten-sided dice (2d10 or D% to avid gamers). If you fail, take the listed damage. Either way, if you survive you arrive at the new Destination and draw the listed number of new Timestream Cards.

This continues until you fail or find and retrieve four Time Fragments, and travel to your home time of April 15, 2040 A.D. (18 years and 1 day from the date this review goes live.)

I started the review by saying Sojourn is surprisingly fast. The first time I played, I thought I screwed up. After the second time I played I looked at the box where it gives a 5-20 minute playing time. The game doesn’t FEEL like a 5-minute game. To be perfectly honest, I’m still up in the air on whether that is a pro or a con to the game. Another unexpected thing is how much table space the tarot-sized cards can take up. All the necessary information is on the bottom quarter of the card, so you can technically collapse things down quite a bit, but something about that felt off for me.

Included in the game are the components for a pair of two-player variants, that each requires a second copy of the game to play. A head-to-head “Chaser” variant and a Cooperative variant. I only have a single copy, and so I haven’t played these, but I wanted to at least note that they exist.

Sojourn is a great game, but I really do think it could be more. Not precisely better, just… more. Maybe the opportunity to play those variants would fill the missing something. Maybe it needs an expansion to give it a bit more gravitas. I can’t quite pin down what it needs, because it’s not like it’s actually missing anything. But feel free to let me know your thoughts if you get the opportunity to play it. An opportunity you should certainly seek out.

You can find Wyvern Gaming online at wyverngaming.com or on Facebook at facebook.com/WyvernGaming.TableTop.