Time travel

Travelling into the past to alter the future is a fascinating concept, but has a unique set of problems and issues ...

Several existing games feature time travel:

• All Things Devours (Half sick of shadows)
• First things first (J. Robinson Wheeler))

Rules of time travel

The "rules" of time travel vary by game, but here are a few common ones.

• You past self may not meet your future self. In All Things Devours, "time unravels" if this occurs.
• No contradictions allowed. If there was a potato in the pot at 10:00am and you go back before that time and remove it, the same potato (or an identical looking one) had better be back in the pot again by ten o'clock. (An unusual solution to this problem is just to close your eyes so that you don't see the it in the first place).
• Alternatively, contradictions may split the universe in two - one future in which an event does not happen, and one in which it does. The problem then may be to go back and undo the damage, restoring the future to the desired one (as in the movie Back to the Future II).