Doctor Who: Time of the Daleks Review

Critical Hits: Excellent Doctor Who fan service; interesting dice manipulation mechanics
Critical Misses: Questionable design choices; missing content; uneven difficulty; poor quality

It's impossible to avoid disappointment with Gale Force 9's much awaited, much delayed Doctor Who: Time of the Daleks. After a stellar track record of licensed games that combined tremendous attention to theme, setting, and narrative ranging from Spartacus up through Star Trek: Ascendancy, the company made itself a niche for turning out great games based on popular (and even not really so popular) intellectual properties. After any number of not-that-great Doctor Who designs over the years, this was the best hope for a really awesome adventure game featuring ALL of the Doctors from the show's 50+ year history. When it was announced, it became my most anticipated game.

And then a couple of years passed. Expectations faded. It became more a question of "if" the game would ever release than "when".

Official images still show a lot of thngs you don't get in the box. This is bad form.

Now that it is finally in the wild, what we have is an Elder Sign-style dice game- I'll go ahead and call it at least a good one- that feels hobbled by the excision of content, uneven production quality, and some questionable design choices. Make no mistake, if you grin like the Fourth Doctor (Tom Baker) at the notion of sending the First Doctor (William Hartnell) to square off against Sutekh with Clara Oswald and K-9 at his side, then you are going to get some fan-level enjoyment out of this title. If you needed the actor's names in parenthesis to understand that sentence, then there are probably better adventure games and dice games out there for you.

The figures are really very nice. Too bad Davidson and Tennant didn't make the cut.

Each player represents one of the Doctors, and the goal is to reach Gallifrey before a Dalek ship does. Oddly, the game has that old timey "everybody is the main character" conceit so it is competitive. But everyone does lose if the Daleks make it to the Timelords' world first so there is an incentive to help other Doctors along the way. On your turn, you select a Dilemma to go travel to in hopes of resolving it through icon-based die-rolling to get a reward, which may include moving your TARDIS marker along the track toward Gallifrey. However, in the design's most inspired touch, you may not actually go where you had planned. The TARDIS may decide to take you where you need to be, not necessarily where you want to go. This is straight from the programme, and you must roll a TARDIS die to determine where your jaunt actually winds up and this may require drawing a new Location tile to play to the board. So a trip to Earth's past to confront Zygons might wind up with your Doctor landing on Skaros to face The Master.

Once there, a Dilemma token along with its location determine which die faces you need to resolve it. These include things like running (of course), negotiation and strategy. Your die pool is built from your Doctor, any companions you have, and any equipment you are carrying. Further, some of those elements may allow you to "focus" dice. Your base pool is comprised of black dice, all of which have one of each of the six faces. But green, blue and red dice each specialize in two of the categories so being able to choose dice for better odds at desired results adds a nice decision point. And of course there are also rerolls and face-changes granted by assets and you can also pay Sonic Charges (a kind of currency) to enact one of those if you come up short - as long as you are not on a Fixed Point in time or in a Time Lock. Succeed, and you get rewards. Fail, and a Dalek marker is added to the location which takes away dice from future attempts and you are hit with a penalty.

If you just don't think you can pull it off, you can also signal another Doctor to come to your aid. You pay a Sonic Charge (as does the target Doctor) and they may either assist from where they are or come directly to you, at the additional cost of moving the Dalek ship. This way, you can gain access to die focus and other abilities you might not otherwise have available. The catch is that the assisting Doctor is rewarded as well, so you've got to decide how much you actually want to help a rival.

Having the Doctors meet and work together is on point, and it is totally appropriate - and I really like how you can call on the other Doctors to either help you from wherever they are in time and space or to come directly to your aid. The former provides less help and smaller rewards, the latter pushes the requested Doctor's TARDIS along the time track in exchange for a higher degree of assistance. But really, it kind of doesn't make sense that the Doctors can refuse to help and can even thwart, well, themselves. It seems like this design would have worked with the source material if it had been a straight co-op.

The Dilemma and location tiles are cool. Dilemma is spelled correctly, by the way. I checked.

The game also lacks a feeling of escalation, which means the end game doesn't have any skin-of-the-teeth drama like the best Doctor Who serials and episodes offer. The first Dilemma isn't materially more difficult than the last one, unless there are Daleks present from previously failed attempts or other effects to lower the maximum number of dice in your pool. Like many dice games like this the difficulty has more to do with die results than with actual challenge. Bad luck makes the game more difficult. Good luck makes the game easier. There is a Time Anomaly mechanic, which seems to be something of a fix for this issue as it periodically introduces special adventures that do "Mythos Card"-like things like lock up certain colors of dice, but their impact is usually too easily mitigated.

So the mechanics are fun, decent, and with some neat twists but they lack refinement. As far as production goes, the four Doctor miniatures are really quite nice, as is the K-9 figure, but the rest of the product ranges from decent to outright poor quality. The cards are flimsy as all get out, there are numerous very basic editorial mistakes (Traken is mispelled "Tarken" multiple times), and the image choices are sometimes baffling- surely the BBC has a better photo of Louise Jameson's Leela that GF9 could have used.

Turning away from some fairly severe production and design missteps to get back to what the game does right by the setting, I'm fond of how the game provides linkages between specific Doctors, companions, and equipment. When you draw companions - a function of resolving a Dilemma - if you have a link to a specific character and you are in the right place (meaning Earth for most humans, other places for aliens) you can just fish that one out of the deck. So the Fourth Doctor has a link to Sarah Jane, the Eleventh Doctor to Amy Pond, and so on. And many companions provide extra bonuses or effects for being paired with the "right" Doctor. But this doesn't keep any of them from "guest starring" with an off doctor! But all of this leads to another serious issue.

Captain Jack also not included. Says so in the rulebook.

As a "classic Whovian", I am especially happy to see that the game includes a little of everything for fans both new and old. However, it is also quite clear that Gale Force 9 made cuts to the content late in development. I'm not too happy to see an 11th hour sidebar that tells me to not be alarmed that the examples show Captain Jack Harkness but that he is not actually included in the base game. The cuts were most likely for MSRP reasons, but the planned inclusion of the Fifth and Tenth doctors leaves holes- and this is a game where having certain characters and equipment is important to the setting and narrative. In fact the Regeneration mechanic depends on having extra Doctors available so that when a game effect causes you to do so, you regenerate into the next highest numbered Doctor. But if you play with four, there's not one. And the regenerations are hard-written into the cards. It's assumed that GF9 will release expansions in 2018 and beyond with the other Doctors, but I'm not so sure this game will sell enough for us to see Pertwee, Troughton or McCoy.