"T.I.M.E Stories" by Christophe Lambert, inspired by the popular board game, offers readers a thrilling journey through various epochs and realities. Lambert adeptly captures the essence of time travel and the excitement of navigating through history with a mission. The narrative is fast-paced, filled with puzzles and mysteries that keep the pages turning. However, some readers may find the adaptation from game to novel lacks the interactive element that made the original format so engaging, potentially affecting the depth of character development and immersion. Despite this, "T.I.M.E Stories" is a commendable effort, appealing to fans of the game and newcomers alike who enjoy time-travel tales with a twist of adventure and speculative fiction.

My husband and I have loved the T.I.M.E story games and I was so excited to see that there was going to be a book. It was very cool to read more and get immersed in this world.

"Tess Heiden, twenty years old, born in 1993. A difficult childhood. Mother a junkie. Like you, she had numerous stays in psychiatric institutions. Father unknown… At the age of ten, you were placed with a foster family, the Heidens, who adopted you officially two years later, despite your… unstable behaviour, to say the least. Your adoptive parents died in a car accident in 2010…"

With this report, young Tess Heiden is recruited for a highly unusual, supremely secretive organization - the T.I.M.E. (Tachyon Insertion in Major Event) Organization. She must agree to work for the organization without knowing too much about them or what it will entail. To her surprise, she is teleported into the future and her 'essence' is placed in a new receptacle (human body). There she meets other recruits, brought in from other eras, other times, and perhaps from other worlds (it's hard to tell since they are all placed in current bodies). They must train together and learn to become a cohesive team - appreciating and relying on each others' skills. They train with a timer because once they are sent to a new time, they will be brought back either upon completion of their mission, once their host is killed, or when the time has run out.

Once ready, the team is sent to the past to rectify an error. Once time travel was made possible, changes were inadvertently being created in the timeline and Tess was now part of a group trying to correct the mistakes. Or so they claimed. The more missions she takes the more Tess realizes that there are many others using time travel and all she has is the word of her organization that she and her team are doing 'right.'

I didn't realize it until I started writing this review, but this book is apparently based on a board game. I am not familiar with the game so I can't say how well it fits or defines the game, but it does explain the episodic nature of the book. The team head off on a mission, it probably has to be done more than once, and then off to another mission. There is only the slightest story holding this together and that's the sort of story that is offered up in a board game theme.

I enjoyed the adventures/missions and these would have made some nice short stories. But without a better connecting story and seeing how these missions relate to bigger whole, this pretty much fell flat.

Fun, but not recommended.

Looking for a good book? T.I.M.E. Stories: The Heiden Files by Christopher Lambert has some interesting stories to tell but they need to be bound together with a stronger purpose.

I received a digital copy of this book from the publisher, through Netgalley, in exchange for an honest review.

I have yet to play through the board game of this book. My partner is a huge fan, and I am hoping the board game is more able to grab my attention than this book did.

I should have liked this book more than I did. I just couldn’t get into it, whether that’s the mood whilst on lockdown or I simply couldn’t get into it.

On face value it had all of the right ingredients for a good book.

- some light sci-fi
- time travel
- main character with a rather mysterious back story
- a series of quests and challenges

The plot didn’t flow that smoothly and felt a little disjointed, to the extent where it distracted you from engaging with the characters. More could have been done with Tess’s back story and relationship with her parents, the ending felt rushed and largely unrelated to the build up that had preceded it. The supporting characters lacked depth and substance and you never really got to know them properly, despite one of them being a love interest.

I didn’t hate this book. It’s readable, I just didn’t love it, when I thought I would.

Thanks to NetGalley for a copy of this book in return for an honest review.

Even if I found the story well written the story didn't keep my attention and it fell flat.
Not my cup of tea.
Many thanks to the publisher for this ARC, all opinions are mine.

I'm not really surprised that this is not a great story, since it's based on a game (which I've never heard of) -- the idea of writing a book based on a game rarely works. If you like the game, this might work better.

Thanks for the ARC for review!!

I unfortunately had to DNF this book. I am unsure if the story was lost in the translation but i just couldn't get into it. The premise was intriguing but I just couldn't find myself caring enough about the characters or plot to keep going.

I'm a big fan of the T.I.M.E stories boardgame so the biggest appeal for me was seeing the 'behind the scenes' of that world. I really enjoyed reading about the recruitment and training; I just wish there was more about the agency itself. Following the crew on their first mission was fascinating, and I loved seeing them make mistakes, learn more and try again - that felt very true to the game! The larger plot was a bit lackluster but I was intrigued enough to keep reading.

I'd definitely recommend this for fans of the boardgame.

[Review will be going live at the provided link on 12 May 2020 in the morning.]

A bit of a change of pace for this review. Some time ago, I reviewed a story-based board game called T.I.M.E Stories, or, more accurately, the first scenario in the T.I.M.E Stories series. Since then, my husband and I have played through all the T.I.M.E Stories scenarios as they were released. We liked some more than others and are moderately invested in the overarching story — we would be even more invested if it were better written and plotted. That's theoretically where today's book review comes in. To go with a reboot/upgrade of the game story (the gaming system changed), there is a new novelisation of the story. I was a bit sceptical of it when I first heard about it, since the writing in the games itself has been patchily translated (from French, as has this book). But my husband was very enthused and wanted to read it, so I have let him write the review, which is what you'll find in the rest of this post.

It is the year 2468. Spotted by a recruiter, Tess Haiden passed the many tests required to join a highly secretive organisation with flying colours. But she is in for a shock: T.I.M.E Agency has been sending agents through time for several years. Thanks to considerable resources, they prevent anomalies and paradoxes by dispatching their agents to different eras and places around the world. But over the course of her many missions, Tess learns that they are not the only ones using these time corridors, and she begins to wonder about the true nature of the T.I.M.E agency…

This book is based on the Time stories series of board games. Some background is necessary here, the games are classic adventure games in a box, where the players travel back in time to a scenario where they have to solve problems with the timeline. A number of adventures have been released and the developers recently changed the system, separating the old games into what they call the white cycle and starting the new white cycle.

The main draw of this book is that it helps bridge the gap between the white cycle and the blue cycle of the board game time stories. It mostly serves to introduce the main characters in the new cycle, while explaining some of the unexplained mysteries. If you want to know who all the new characters are in the new games, read this book. If you haven’t played time stories or don’t care enough about the storyline, probably give this book a pass.

The prose is a little strange, with excessive detail used when setting the scene. This is useful in a game where these details are clues, but just slow down the book. There were often asides that didn’t add anything to either the story or the characters.

When the characters were time travelling, a lot of the pressure came from the arbitrary time limit enforced on time travel missions. This is an important part of the game, but doesn’t work so well in a book. A lot of the first mission in particular had the characters constantly updating each other on how much time was left rather than what they were doing.

I’m happy I read this book to get a better understanding of the time stories setting, but that’s the only reason I have to recommend this book.

2.5 / 5 stars

First published: May 2020, Angry Robot
Series: Not yet
Format read: eARC
Source: Publisher via NetGalley

3.5/5

I was actually surprised that I enjoyed this book as much as I did. I was disappointed by certain things and felt like a lot more could have been fleshed out and explained but overall It was a nice ride.