by Kristian Amundsen Østby

Kristian’s Origin Story

One time, when I was 11 years old, my father came home from a business trip in Canada. He had bought a gift for me. I was a little disappointed when I saw the beige, dull-looking cover. But despite its dull look, it was indeed a computer game. And in Norway in the nineties, you appreciated any computer game you could get! So, I booted it up, and while the digital 8-bit theme music sounded, white letters appeared on the screen, spelling out Sid Meier’s Civilization. The game started, and I quickly got to move around a piece that I thought looked like a pair of scissors (I would later learn it was a settler wagon). The cover hadn’t lied: This *was* dull.

Still, this being 1991, I as an eleven-year-old nerd did actually have time to read the manual over the next days. And I gave the game another try. And over the next weeks and months, I gradually learnt the important lesson to never judge a game by its beige cover.

When I later started designing board games, civilization games had become a holy grail to me.

Kenneth’s Origin Story

Since I discovered the joy and magic of board games, I have had a spark inside, a dream of making a board game with the ultimate theme: building a civilization. Back in 2007 I did my first take on it. A card game with three ages and a lot of cards. On my way to SPIEL in Essen, on a ferry between Norway and Germany, I met a board game designer, Kristian. To make a long story short, the game itself was not very good. But from that failed design came something much more valuable: a friendship built on respect, affection, and endless creativity.

For me, the motivation to make Timespan came from a lecture in Venice. It was about how the Italian city had once been a center of world trade. It was about how trade throughout history has driven development and technological progress, and about the impact of individuals who influenced their contemporary era. Right there and then, I knew I wanted to make a game about that. And above all, a game about historical figures and how they shaped both their own time and world history for generations.



Kristian & Kenneth: Time to Megazord!

The best part of a civilization game is often the first turns, where things are tight and every move matters: the first movements of your scissor-like piece, or when you increase your production with that one extra crucial piece of food. However, building an economic engine is fun, but as you get more and more resources, this resource inflation sometimes makes you care less. Similarly, building and customizing your actions is fun, but sometimes specialization forces you into a specific strategy that you end up following the whole game. And for a civilization game to feel epic, the game must develop and change. Is it even possible for players to get an “epic feel” without the game lasting six hours?

Ok, let’s try to design a civilization game.

We have previously designed two games together: Automania and Bad Company. We share the idea that games should be fun, streamlined, efficient and playful. And we don’t want to waste the players’ time. We played with the idea of making a game that spanned the entire human history, from the stone age to the space age.

One of our first game design dilemmas occurred quite early. How could we compress the entire history of humans into a 90-minute board game experience?

If all players were to have meaningful, epic experiences in such a game, a lot of the players’ decisions had to be carried out simultaneously, and we had to reduce direct interaction. We decided on a two-phase structure: In the action phases, players act simultaneously, building their civilization and performing actions without waiting for turn. Then, we would focus most of the player interaction in a separate exploration phase. With simultaneous play, we managed to cut the playing time from 360 minutes in the early tests to 90.

Another dilemma in our search for a epic gaming experience was the focus on an aggressive vs peaceful experience.

In civilization games we *love* building our economy, developing our culture, exploring new technologies and sciences. Having your economy and buildings torn down is not as satisfying. We decided we would design a civilization game that celebrated the peaceful, constructive and positive sides of humanity: The culture, the science, the economy. No warfare this time - there are enough games covering that.

Building a peaceful, harmonious civilization became the goal, and in the mentioned exploration phase – the phase with most of the interaction – players would act in order of their peace level.


We also wanted the player interaction to be mostly friendly. In Timespan, players build wonders with powerful effects that can really impact the game, and you may benefit from other players’ wonders by visiting them with your camel caravan. When your wonders are visited by other players, you score points, so you wish to build them early to attract more visitors. You will of course find the classic wonders: the Pyramids, the Great Library etc, but there are also Stonehenge, Templo Mayor, the Oracle of Delphi, and even Area 51 (finally a civilization game that Erich von Däniken might have approved?).




The resource system was streamlined from one of Kristian’s previous prototypes (a variant of this was also used in Saltfjord). This system helps with the potential problem of resource inflation. Timespan has several levels of resources, and each resource can be upgraded to one on the next level. As the game advances through three ages, we made sure cards from newer ages would require resources of higher levels. The early resources don’t become worthless, but you’ll often want to upgrade them for use in later ages.


The most important breakthrough in the development of this game was the realization of how we could simulate time while also adding interesting dilemmas to the gameplay.

Each player plays cards into their own “timeline”, consisting of four spaces: When you play a card, you place it to the left, pushing other cards to the right, eventually moving cards out of your timeline, into your graveyard. The four cards visible in your timeline can be activated with your workers. As the game progresses, the actions available to you will therefore change.


This means that players cannot simply do the same actions over and over, and your strategies will change. In one period your civilization may specialize in exploration and the movement of your ship, in a later period your civilization may switch to focusing on science.

We also wanted the cards in themselves not to be static. When you play a character into your timeline, we wanted it to still feel “alive”. So, we came up with the luxury tiles. Luxury tiles are mainly acquired through exploration and represent rare or exotic resources. Most of the cards in Timespan request a certain luxury tile. If you place the given luxury tile onto the card, you gain a bonus whenever you activate the card with a worker. Each luxury tile has a different bonus, meaning you are effectively customizing your own worker placement spaces. For example, Nefertiti wants pottery. You can simply activate her card for some nice effects, but if you first deliver pottery to her, she will also provide science.


If you build up a strong card effect with luxuries, why would you ever want to pass time and move that card into your timeline? This was solved by giving all luxuries a passive income effect whenever they are moved into your graveyard. This creates a dilemma: Do you want to keep your strong worker-placement effect, or move it into your graveyard to build your economic engine with passive income? For us, this was the final breakthrough in the design, and the responses from the play testers were great: We now had a very strong game that provided lots of variation and interesting dilemmas in a short playing time.

Side note: One of the more exotic luxuries can only be acquired in outer space. Its name, "Umulium", is an obscure reference to Norwegian pop-culture from the 1980s.

What if?

Developing board games is largely about asking creative questions. Sometimes the ideas don’t work, sometimes they become new, fun features in the game.

Players begin Timespan with a few cards representing the stone age. Then the game goes through three ages: antiquity, renaissance, and modern. But what if you could draw cards from the future? Would that be fun? Of course it would.

Most often, you are gaining cards from the current age, but every now and then it is possible to have a “breakthrough” that lets you draw a card from the next age. This allows you to change history: What if the printing press was available in the antiquity? What if Einstein had been born during the renaissance?


The game lasts for three ages, but since you sometimes get to draw cards from the next age, we also needed some cards of age four. Designing a game built on history can sometimes feel a little restrictive, so we really appreciated the freedom of coming up with next-gen technologies for the age four deck. We could draw inspiration from interesting thematical concepts, or we could come up with specific effects and then find thematical concepts that worked well with those. We do for example have the obvious “Interplanetary travel”, the more esoteric “Human cloning”, but also the “Dream recorder”, which was a new mechanism relating to your workers when they are in your sleeping area. The game system felt like a playground where we could really be creative with the cards’ effects.



A game is never truly finished until it has been refined, polished, and tested, again and again.

In October 2025, at SPIEL in Essen, we met with Richard Ham (Rahdo), and we told him about our new project. We showed him the prototype, and his reaction was enthusiastic: He loves conveyor belt mechanisms, and the timeline seemed like such a fun conveyor belt. He was right. We hadn’t thought of the timeline as a conveyor belt. But of course, it was. And of course, we should add more “conveyor belt effects” to the game, for example cards that become stronger as they move through your timeline. We also added the book luxury, which activates the action box *below* the activated card, meaning the effect of a card can drastically change depending on when you activate it.


The name of the game was also not yet determined. We discussed “Timeframe”, but it didn’t really hit. “Timeline” was already taken. And we finally landed on “Timespan”. This name wasn’t taken. Or was it? There are some well-known games with titles ending in “-span”. So maybe we should ask, just to be sure? Arnaud Charpentier (of Matagot) put us in contact with Jamey Stegmaier, and we explained the situation. He kindly replied that he had no issues with us using this name, as the games in question are obviously very different.


An epic game deserves an epic look. We searched the internet for talented illustrators, and about six months before we finalized the game, we were lucky enough that the extremely talented Nilanjan Malakar agreed to make the box and card illustrations. For a game as big as this, we needed to get the illustrator started working before we were done with the game design. Nilanjan began illustrating, every character, wonder, invention, and construction, in great detail. In such detail, in fact, that we started getting worried:

Could he possibly manage to get all the illustrations ready in time? (Nope)

And would people believe this was AI? (Yep) ..more about this later.

Luckily, we also got another great artist onboard, Gjermund Bohne, who we have been working with before, both on Automania and Bad Company, and also more recently on Revive and Recall. He is excellent and flexible, and he would do all the additional art for the game, the iconography, the luxury tiles, and all the graphical design and layout. We worked with the two artists in parallel: Gjermund preparing new cards as soon as Nilanjan completed another illustration. As we were nearing deadline, we had increased the number of cards in the age four deck and were lacking a few illustrations. But this was fine, as this was the deck of next-gen technologies that allowed us to be creative. The “Gravity inverter”, the “Black hole generator” and the “Invisible Yacht” were born out of this. We also added some references to previous games with “Robot factory” (Sparks) and “Modern Boardgames” (Automania).


With regards to the quality of the illustrations, this was so much better than what we had dared to hope for. But this level of detail also made some question whether the illustrations were AI, and the first thread on the game’s BGG forum also asked about this. But, no, Nilanjan has shared his process on art forums and Facebook along the way, and if you zoom in on his illustrations, you will see that they are simply beautiful and very high quality. Also, he has hidden easter eggs in many of the illustrations, which I hope you will enjoy discovering.


In total, we had to come up with about 160 history cards, spanning these four ages. We have four main categories of cards: persons, inventions, constructions and special.

In a historical game, most of the featured characters will have lived a long time ago. One exception to this was the primatologist and anthropologist Jane Goodall, which is probably most famous for her work with chimpanzees. She unfortunately passed away in 2025, but as she was an impressive scientist and human figure, we wanted to include her in the game. We contacted the Jane Goodall Institute, asking for permission to feature her in Timespan. We showed them the image Nilanjan has made, which is inspired by a photograph of Dr Goodall carrying a chimpanzee. Their reply was that they did not want us to use that image. It was too late for our artist Nilanjan to make a new illustration, so we either had to use this image or drop Jane Goodall from the game entirely. While we had just seen the illustration as a beautiful image of the connection between Goodall and the chimpanzee, the Goodall Institute was worried: because humans should never treat chimpanzees like this in the wild. This particular image, however, was of Goodall treating an orphan sanctuary chimpanzee. We therefore asked if we could still use the image if we included a disclaimer, explaining this, and they were kind enough to agree. So, this is the reason why this card has additional text.


As we write in the game’s rules: Throughout much of history, pursuing the arts or sciences was a luxury not affordable or available to everyone. People who were economically or politically oppressed – such as cultural minorities, women in general, and those oppressed by colonization – simply had fewer opportunities to make their mark in these areas and are therefore underrepresented in large parts of recorded history. We have tried to include a wide range of historical people in our game, but we also do not try to pretend that this oppression never happened. Being from Norway, a small, Northern European country, we are fully aware that our game is built from a Western perspective.

Human history is full of atrocities and serious issues. Creating a “fun game” within this framework is not always an easy balance. There were so many historical figures we wanted to include out of respect, but we of course also needed to pay attention to the gameplay. Rosa Parks is one such example. All Norwegians learn about the American civil rights movement in school, and Rosa Parks was one of many great figures from that time whose fights and suffering deserve our deepest respect. Her character serves as inspiration to opposition against oppression all over the world, and we hope that including her in our game is seen as an expression of our respect, and not as a banalization of her impact and importance.


It has been hard to balance our many aims here: We wanted diversity, both in gender and ethnicity, but we also needed to have a balanced number of the different types of cards in each age, and also the effects of the various cards, to make sure we have a balanced production of science, culture and resources. On top of this, given our perspective, it is easy and intuitive to come up with fitting effects for Einstein and Newton. It is not as obvious how to find a fitting effect for Chien-Shiung Wu, honoring her extensive work on particle physics.


Despite these many potential issues, we hope that we have managed to make a respectful and enjoyable game that can be played by anyone.



And we sincerely apologize to everyone for the Power Rangers reference in the earlier heading. That was absolutely unnecessary and uncalled for. We are deeply ashamed.


Best wishes from Norway,
Kenneth and Kristian


Further reading: At one point during the design process we were contacted by the Norwegian national broadcaster as they wanted to write an article about game design and our work on Timespan and other games. You can read the article here.