Ever had that fantasy where you have the ability to go back in time and do cool stuff, like stop the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center or kill Hitler? Perhaps you could prevent JFK from being assassinated, or save John Lennon from Mark David Chapman - or perhaps, stop the Titanic from sinking. All these things are possible and more in Chrononauts, a card game from Looney Labs.

Players take the roles of different time travelers (Chrononauts), who come from alternate time lines. These Chrononauts must travel through time to change true history into a modified history in order to return to their own time line. As members of an elite group of people capable of doing just about whatever they want, each Chrononaut has a fantastic mission to complete (anything from collecting fake paintings and future sports almanacs to collecting history's most ancient and sought after artifacts like the Ark of the Covenant).  Finishing these missions usually involves collecting various artifacts from the past or the future. The first player to make it to their home time line, to complete their mission, or have 10 cards in their hand wins the game.

Chrononauts feels like a direct descendant of Fluxx, and in fact, many of the ideas of Fluxx are present in Chrononauts. The base game stays the same - draw a card and play a card. What's changed is the game table. Instead of having one giant row of rules that modify how the game is played, Chrononauts uses four rows (and with the expansion pack, five rows) of history related linchpins and the events in history that they affect. Players then use "inverters" to change history at these linchpins in an attempt to change the world's history to match the one that's on their ID card. To do this, one of the original history events has to be the same, but two have to be the fixed versions of a paradox. Players fix paradoxes with "Patch" cards.

The original Chrononauts game goes all the way up to 1999 with the Columbine shootings, and with The Gore Years, moves up to 2008 with the hotly contested 2000 election, the fall of the World Trade Center  in 2001, and other recent events. It also adds new IDs to the mix which focus on the new row of histories. The additions to the timeline are a cool extension of the game, and it's an interesting take on recent world history.

The card construction is high quality, like any Looney Labs card game, and the full color art is a nice addition. The layout is Fluxx-esque, so it's nothing all that new, but it's functional for the game. I do wish the back of the Paradox cards was a bit more attractive - it looks like someone scrubbed a black hole with bubblebath.

One of my biggest issues with Chrononauts is its strategy, or rather, its lack of strategy. The relatively low amount of cards you get to draw in a given game gives you far less option to do what you need to do, and winning and losing the game is about as random as a game of Fluxx. That's really not as fun as it  sounds. Where Fluxx is intentionally a random game (which provides most of its entertainment value), Chrononauts sets itself up to be a real strategy game. It unfortunately, doesn't deliver. Victory is almost entirely random, which is a real disappointment. If you go into the game knowing that it's more of an evolution of Fluxx into a neat time-traveling game, then I suspect you'll have a lot more fun than you would if you were trying to be an elite strategist.

The best thing about Looney Labs games is that they're generally good with non-gamers, girlfriends, and younger players. Chrononauts is a little more heavy due to the large amount of cards on the board, but getting the linchpin flipping mechanic is pretty simple. The game is better in a big group - I wouldn't play it without 4 or more players. Lower than that, and the games seem to drag on longer than they should. Less emphasized rules can be hard to remember, but for the most part, it's an easy game to play and learn.

Preorders for Chrononauts and Chronauts: The Gore Years have been pushed back to mid-November due to a printing issue, but will go back up in mid-November. Gore Years isn't the first Chrononauts expansion  - Lost Identities added new IDs and a Mission to the original game, but The Gore Years is the first expansion that adds a new line to the board.  Both of the expansions are worth buying because they're fairly cheap additions that give a sizeable amount of content to the game. They're nice if you get bored of the original content that comes with the game.

Chrononauts is an interesting game with a few flaws that keep it from being great. Still, it's a good game to play with non-gamer friends, or as a filler game between more difficult or complicated fair. It'll be a hit with history buffs and children, and it is a quick little game that's got enough entertainment value to keep you coming back.