Ok, details / review. TL;DR; read OP; it's great.
I'm not much of a reviewer; so I'll just talk about what the game is for those who don't know, and what I like about it.
So Temporum is Dominion with good theme (the theme being time travel). Ok, not really. It's nothing like Dominion, other than some sort of familiar "feel" to it. The game comes with a lot of cards (dunno how many); and you choose 10 for each game. So every game is different; and lots of potential for expansion. The 10 cards that were chosen for the current game don't act as cards; they just act as something that makes up the game board; they determine what the 10 actions are available for that game.
On top of those 10 cards; there's another type of card; which is a large deck containing 2 each of lots of cards. These are the cards that you are drawing, playing, and scoring. All from 1 common deck; each player has a hand of cards; but not his own deck. So the object is to score 30 points before anyone else. As soon as someone scores 30 points, that person wins (at the end of his turn. Dunno if it's possible to get to 30, but then lose 1 before the end of your turn. If that happened; you wouldn't win, because you check for victory at the end of turn). So of course if the start player wins; it means he had an extra turn. But this is balanced the same way Lords of Waterdeep is; by giving each player more starting money the later he is in turn order.
One great mechanic to the game is that you don't automatically draw cards or refresh your hand at the start or end of your turn. If you want to draw cards, you need to actually go to one of the 10 spaces that has a "draw cards" as the action that you take there. Same goes for playing cards. You can't just play a card on your turn, you have to go to a space that allows you to play a card. I suppose that in itself isn't new; Ticket to Ride and others do that. But where it's different is that your choices aren't "draw a card" or "play a card". You have to choose 1 of the 10 board spaces that allows you to do so, and the "draw" spaces all allow you to do different variations on "draw a card".
Then there's a part that reminds me of Race for the Galaxy a little. Every card (in the deck of cards) has both a thing that happens when you play the card, and it also has an amount of points it can score. If you play the card for the action, you can't also score the card for the points, and vice-versa. So you always have to choose what to give up, the points on the card or the action on the card. Like how in Race you have to choose whether to play a card for it's benefit or spend a card as currency to pay for a different card. I suck at making those kind of choices; but it's still a lot of fun.
So the scoring itself is really unique and awesome. Perhaps there's other things like it, but I haven't see it. It's not just a score board where you move up to 30, or collect VP chips until you have 30. Instead, you have 10 markers that each need to be moved 3 times. So like Backgammon. I guess that's another thing like it. So when you score 4 points, you get 4 point movements, which can be the same one multiple times, or 4 different ones 1 time each, or any combination of that. And it matters because you get special benefits for having the majority in each of the 4 possible score locations (including the starting location where all 10 of your points are sitting). So if you're the first person to score, and you move 1 marker twice and another marker once, then you now have the majority in 2 of the score places.
There's attacks, but they don't say "attack." So I dunno if there will be reactions. There's cards that you play for a 1-time immediate action, and other cards that you play in front of you which have an ongoing benefit. This means lots of combo potential. But slow buildup because you can usually only ever play 1 card per turn.
So while I'm sure I could play the base set several dozen times without getting bored with it; I'm already curious to see how expansions would work. It's easy to release more cards that are the ones you just choose 10 of; to make each game more different. And if I know Donald X, he already has a bunch of those planned. But then, what about the main deck that you're drawing from? You could release more of that type of card as well, but I'm not sure how it would work. Combining an expansion deck with the base deck would probably be bad. First off, you would just have a deck that's twice as large now; and you won't really see more cards per game anyway. Second, you lose a lot of possible combo things then, because you'd be unlikely to get a certain 2 cards out. Like combining all the Agricola decks together. So probably in an expansion you would just use the expansion deck instead of the main deck.
So now I'm just rambling. Feel free to ask specifics if you want to know more!
