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Icons courtesy of komodomedia.com
There are two major activities going on - a historian who is a supporter of the Union has some very damaging information about Abraham Lincoln that he wants to be available to posterity, but not right now when it will destroy the country. This player is playing the night Lincoln was assassinated and is trying to hide the information in something unrelated that will be certain to make it into the national archives. The other activity is a blocking action by a pop-historian from the present day who knows that this information, which undermines his books' theses and will ruin his entree to the Sunday talk shows, is out there, but doesn't know where. This player is trying to find the information and destroy it. Is it a race against the clock for 2 players? Will there be a third player - a graduate student looking for a sensational thesis and tenure at Harvard - working with player 1 and against player 2? Nobody knows, because there are no rules and certainly no board or pieces of trappings of organization around this. Add some!
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I really like the blocking yourself thing
from a time-based perspective, I mean. Plus it introduces a whole defensive strategy of bluffing other players into going somewhere in one time to get multiple turns in another time. I don't think the version I'm envisioning would have random tiles, though. I know I need to actually work out a rule set to make it make sense, but the only constant I'm actually interested in is the geography, and the interplay of individual efforts and development changes over time. And the geography I'm most familiar with that has any obvious past issues to build a game around is the area around Ford's Theater. Will post rule set soon!
Locations, forbidden futures and required futures.
I like the idea of having a limited number of locations, and of marking the locations as visited or free or required. So if you went to a location 144 years ago, you would not be able to go back there again, unless you saw another instance of yourself, but if you did see that, then you would be required to go back there.
That would create a strategic level of the game where you could find yourself behind of wall of causality where you could not enter certain areas because you know that you are already there and you didn't see another you the first time around, or you might let your opponent got for three turns in a row because your temporal debts come due all at the same time.
Causality conflicts
Earlier, I had thrown out the idea of having a two phases in the game, where players played out the past, then we shift the board forward to the future and finish off the scenario. Your comment about causality-based strategy makes me wonder what would happen if we reversed the whole thing? Play out the future, where players attempt to collect things as if they had been placed in the past. Then, we do a sort of flashback, where we shift to the past and everyone tries to cause the future to happen? This might provide an interesting strategy where we place constraints on our opponents' results in the future, thus forcing them to take certain actions later in the game (in the past).
Setting aside the story for the moment
What makes this appealing to me is the ability to make changes in the past which crop up in the future. Having two separate gameboards, where changes on one are reflected on the other is oddly compelling. Of course, what's strange about using "time" as a method of linking is that it's inherently unidirectional (The future is changed by the past, but not vice versa), and it's only semi-transparent (characters in the past have no view of the future, and characters in the future have only a partial picture of the past). This disconnect makes it pretty hard to play both the past and the present simultaneously.
How necessary is an accurate reproduction of the city itself? If we can accept a fairly large amount of randomization, maybe something like this could work:
1. The board is actually made up of "Present" city tiles (maybe one per block), and "Past" city tiles.
2. Place the "Present" tiles face down on the table, creating a completely hidden, completely random board.
3. Place the "Past" tiles face up on the table, creating a completely visible, yet random board.
4. Play part 1 of the game, whatever this entails. To a large extent, this probably consists of characters trying to hide things for future uncovering.
5. Shift from the past to the present - have some set of rules for removing the past tiles (or not - maybe some types of city block can't change), and have some probablility that anything hidden on that block would or wouldn't transition to the future.
6. Play part 2 of the game in the present day. This would be where the players attempt to uncover what may or may not have survived from the past.
I'm not sure what sort of mechanic one would use for hiding things, though. Maybe we could steal the game pieces from Stratego, where they can be moved about the board but only one player actually knows what the pieces actually prepresent? This could create a sort of bluffing game, where players try to make it look like they're hiding important things in one area, while actually hiding the real prizes elsewhere?
I like the intervening time period idea
but what would their role be? Aren't any post-Lincoln-assassination-night players effectively in the same time? Because a modern or future player would be pursuing effectively the same goals, I would think. Plus, I want the geography to matter somehow, and the difference in the 8 square blocks from the White House to Ford's Theater to the Archives has mostly happened in the last 50 years or so (actually, when was the FBI building constructed?). I'm going to make a board based on the street grid, but where the buildings change based on time-of-player.
For flexible playability
... It would be best if there were options for the number of players. Head-to-head-only games are possible, but I feel it would be better if it was a range: 2-4 players.
I could almost see four goals.
1. Hide in the past, for discovery in the future.
2. Find and expose in the past.
3. Find and expose in the present.
4. Find and destroy in the present.
This makes me wonder how it would work if there were only two players (as I can most commonly get together only a two player game), each playing two roles. #1 and #3 seem the most compatible, as do #2 and #4. This would give both players a reason to care about both times.
There are three goals
... That you have laid out so far: find & expose, find & destroy, or hide. Players can also be divided by the timeline, between now and then. Alternately, the timeline can be broken down into different chunks. Since this is a time-travel game, and the basic premise is people from different eras indirectly opposing one another, we don't want people's lives to intersect. Going with the Biblical 'sever score and ten' as a person's age, that only gives us three possible chunks. As Lincoln died 144 years ago, we have one time-chunk contemporary to Lincoln, one modern chunk, and one 70-year block between them. This all assumes you give players a high level control over their character. Pre-created characters are likely to work better for this project.