Toy Fair provided an opportunity to take a closer look at About Time. It’s a trivia game where the goal is to be the closest guess to the year of an event. On top of that it has a lot of chrome for a trivia game. There’s a roll-and-move component with the board spaces determining the subject for the clue to the year. Also, there are spaces that put players at risk of losing half their accumulated points, either back to the pot or to another player. There’s a 30 second sand timer to add a sense of urgency in answering the questions, a time-line sheet for recording the answers, time cards that give players special bonuses (like extra time to guess), and a special question card holder (to keep players from revealing too many clues at once). The game also comes with eight pawns with caricatures of historical figures like Gandhi and Genghis Khan, but those don’t affect game play.

Publisher Circa Circa arranged newspaper-sponsored editions in the UK and Germany, which involved using miniature reproductions of the newspaper front pages as hints. The company is working on similar deals in the United States. Until now, About Time has been a Barnes & Noble exclusive. Good for them.