It's tough for board games to convey a sense of horror, but sometimes, you cross paths with one that haunts you. These games carve a twisted path through your psyche, targeting anxieties and grief that are already all too real. The Time We Have, a two-player storytelling card game by Elliot Davis, is such a game. To play is to spend an hour tormented by difficult questions and impossible choices.
It's emotional. It's evocative. It's excellent.
If, like me, you think the best board games are those that make you suffer, you might want to track this one down for Christmas. Just don't expect to feel very merry afterwards.
"What does it feel like?"
The Time We Have takes place during a zombie apocalypse, and it tells the story of two brothers caught up in the crisis. In our modern, post-zombie-craze media era, this pitch might bring to mind a chainsaw-swinging quipfest, or the kind of gory slapstick reserved for the most violent, corny videogames on the market.
This is not the zombie apocalypse you will face.
A zombie may never even shamble in during your playthrough. Instead, the spotlight is shone on the two siblings, each sitting on opposite sides of a closed door. You, the players will mimic this setup, and physically divide yourself before play begins.
Each brother holds a separate deck of cards. One is infected, with six days left to live. The other stays with them for that time, near and yet incredibly distant. Eventually, the surviving brother faces one final, grueling question: 'Do you open the door?'
During setup, my buddy and I scoffed at this. We were zombie movie scholars, and we knew there was no logical reason to open a door with a hungry zombie behind it.
And then we began to play.
"Where do I go from here?"
At the start of the game, you must choose the kind of door that divides you. The Time We Have offers a range of gorgeous illustrations as inspiration, each defining a different kind of zombie apocalypse. Yours might take place in a WW2 bunker, a futuristic city, or even a world where geese are the primary vectors of this strange new disease.
Our story began in the office of a startup company. Both players work in media, so we could vividly picture a 'hip and trendy' office space, even one plagued by the undead. The small prompt on the card mentioned a bean bag section and a 3pm cake and snacks party. An absurd, yet very relatable place to begin.
Prompt selected, we were confined to our sides of the door. The game's rules are explained by the decks of cards themselves, with each player drawing and reading alternating tutorial cards. After that, the remainder of each deck gets shuffled, and the 'survivor' brother asks the first question.
"Why did you wait to tell me?"
The Time We Have aims to feel like a conversation that would arise naturally. When both brothers fall quiet, that's the prompt for someone to quietly draw their next card. This creates a fluid back-and-forth dialogue that feels less procedural and more human.
Most of the time, the card you draw presents a new question. You're free to define childhood memories, past arguments, shared dangers that you've faced since the virus broke out. You might upset and misunderstand each other. You might beg for hard truths, like 'will you promise to survive when I'm gone?'
Gradually, we fleshed out our characters, and our subconscious minds began to bleed into the narrative. We shared rueful jokes about still answering Slack messages during the apocalypse, watching civilization itself fall apart and still being expected to clock into work. We unpicked our difficult relationships with our parents, and we debated whether to even tell them what was happening. We wondered with fear if this virus had spread beyond our office block - and if help was even coming.
"The infection is getting worse"
There was a third character involved in our game of The Time We Have. This was the silence of my friend's empty flat, which lay heavy on my chest between each question. Long pauses punctuated painful sentences. I'd demand silence to avoid the attention of a wandering zombie.
Even longer pauses denoted the passing of time in-game. Days were slipping by, and my brother did not have long left.
There wasn't always silence, though. Some of the decks' prompt cards represented sounds other than speech, or even smells. These cards, passed wordlessly through a crack in the closed door, were especially prevalent in the infected brother's deck.
My companion would describe a disturbing new physical symptom, or I would smell blood from their side of the door. Sudden laughter or singing would hint that my brother's mental state, too, was becoming unstable. His sentences would become stilted, his perspective unreliable.
One thing was clear: things were getting worse. The threat, whether it be external or internal, was creeping closer, and The Time We Have was upping the tension in visceral ways.
"Do you open the door?"
When the end began, my brother had begged me to live. He wanted to know that I would do everything I could to survive after the disease took him. I choked out the promise, knowing it gave him peace, even if I couldn't live up to it.
But after a few days, he changed.
At first, he only dropped hints. The room was cramped. He was afraid They might be able to get in. I tried to reassure him, to distract him with questions about happier times.
But he could not be sated. Eventually, he began to beg. Please, I don't want to be alone. Open the door.
If the door is opened at any point, the game is over. This prompt, shuffled randomly into a lower part of the infected brother's deck, is designed to usher in that decisive climax. Whether the survivor says yes or no, the narrative comes to a close.
My brother, near death, was pleading with me to stay with him. How could I leave him to suffer this alone? The only family that mattered to me, who went with me everywhere, was dying on the other side of that door. I almost opened it.
Then, a scrap of paper slid through the door. This wasn't a card from the game; it was a scrawled note. In my brother's handwriting, the words: "DON'T LISTEN TO ME".
My stomach, and my worldview, flipped upside down. I began to imagine a parasitic virus, eating away at my sibling, forcing him to say words he did not mean. After more agonizing seconds of silence, I made up my mind. The door stayed closed.
After the game, I commended my friend for his creativity during play. The people we created and the horror of their situation seriously affected me. The pair of us needed a comedown after playing, a debrief to bring us back to normality.
We were both left thoroughly impressed by The Time We Have. It's far more cinematic than similar storytelling games like For the Queen, whose questions feel more procedural, lighthearted, and less impactful when the game reaches its finale. Perhaps the magic would be lessened if we played a second time, but the shuffled decks and their various doors offered plenty of variety for future scenarios.
The Time We Have is a bleak way to spend an evening, but it's also a unique form of catharsis. It understands that horror at its best is a metaphor, an open door to discussions about our deepest fears. The kind of fears that actually keep you up at night - not zombies or vampires, but an unstable job market, a toxic home life, or just the thought of losing someone you love.
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