Clairvoyance and kleptomania collide in tricksy time-twisting card game A Thief’s Fortune

Any good thief knows that you always need a Plan B. And then a Plan C. Then a Plan D. And so on…

That’s the premise at the heart of upcoming card-drafting game A Thief’s Fortune, which applies a neat time-twisting hook to the central heist pulled off by its main character.

The character starts the game by successfully pinching a mysterious hourglass from the royal palace, which grants them the ability to see their own future. Or, rather: futures.

You see, players each control the same character during their escape from the palace, but in up to four different realities split by the various different ways to flee.

Players lay down locations, events and characters into their ‘future’, gaining resources and knowledge before they gradually pass into the ‘present’ and finally the ‘past’. In essence, they’re trying to work out the right way of escaping, with the foresight of what will happen before it does.

All of this is wrapped up in a competition for players to earn the most fortune points, signifying their parallel dimension as the definitive sequence of events.

Unfortunately, A Thief’s Fortune’s own future has had to diverge down an alternate path after its first Kickstarter was abruptly cancelled, with publisher Artipia Games predicting that it wouldn’t make its campaign target in time.

Artipia plans to relaunch an improved crowdfunding effort soon, insisting that A Thief’s Fortune is still on track for a release at this year’s Essen in October.