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The Play's the Thing

by Geoffery Peterson

Within Fractured Time comes a few new additions to Second Edition game play; the Decay keyword, the Future icon, and the Alternate Universe icon. The Play's the Thing is the only Fractured Time card that uses both the new icons and keyword, and if you want to make better use of the other verb cards in Fractured Time, The Play's the Thing can go a long way to help.

At 0 cost, you will end up paying for The Play's the Thing with its Decay:3 keyword (since you will lose any cards stacked on the event when it Decays away), but there is a moderately easy way to avoid paying this cost. At the start of each of your turns, you must place a card from hand on The Play's the Thing, with no negative effect if you are unable to do so. With that, as long as you are able to free your hand of all cards by the start of your turn, you can circumvent that text requirement, and prevent The Play's the Thing from Decaying away.

When you play The Play's the Thing, you select to give all the personnel you own who cost 3 or more either an Alternate Universe, Past, or Future icon. To be clear, this includes any of your personnel in play, in your draw deck, and in your discard pile. So, if you play The Play's the Thing, and choose the Future Icon, you could use The Edge of Forever to download from your draw deck and place into play any cost 3 or more personnel you could normally play.

The last great thing about The Play's the Thing is that it's not unique, so when you get three in play, every cost 3 or greater personnel that you own can have the Alternate Universe, Past, and Future icons, and if you are able to use all your cards each turn, they can have those icons for the entire game! This works especially well with Fitting In, allowing you to share any skills or attributes from higher cost personnel, and Quantum Incursions, a great new hand manipulation Event requiring you to have an Alternate Universe personnel in play.

August 12, 2004