Table Press

Free print-and-play card games and an open game-design curriculum.

Prompt Refinery · history.boredgames.site · History Bored Games · PLY

LONG BEFORE

No years. 2–4 players · 25 min · ages 8+ · 52 events + 3 table cards. A wheel, a telescope, a vaccine — not a riddle. Build a line, left earliest. Swap a rumor, ask which came first, or shout the name of the game. First true line wins.

Play / simulatePrint the 9-up poker sheetShare the introAvery 5388 (3×5)MPC poker PNGsBack to Make
Thesis: This game is about claiming the true order of a private history before anyone else dares, felt as the itch to shout while a neighbor’s stare might still save you, decided by whether you spend a turn stealing one relative fact — and leaking it — or lock the Line and say the name.
What the crude pitch was:Chrono Quest — deal the whole deck, sort in secret, first to shout, sit out if wrong, 8th-grade giveaways, dates somewhere on the card. That is Order It wearing a shout. The refinery killed the quiz and kept the verbs: sequence, ask, swap, shout. Sibling game (shared time only goes forward): Nonstop.

Downloads

How to start

Put the 3 table cards out. Give the Judge the Key (print page, Avery last sheet, or the Judge panel below). The Judge does not play — at four seats with no extra adult, one person hosts the Key and sits out. Give 8 each. Four extras sit face-up as Rumors. Two Ask coins each. Each person lays a line, face-up, left = earliest. Youngest starts. No dice.

A turn

Fix your line. Then swap, ask, or shout.

Swap — trade one line card with one Rumor. Put a new Rumor out from the pile.

Ask — spend a coin. Name two cards on the table; at least one is not in your line. Judge points to which happened first. Everyone hears. Two asks each round.

Shout — say LONG BEFORE. Judge checks left to right. All true: you win. If not, count true cards from the left, then sit. Keep going until someone is all true, or everyone has shouted (longest true start wins; tie goes to the earlier shout).

If you cannot swap and have no coins, you must shout. That is not a stuck game.

Sample turn

Ana swaps a mystery into Rumors and takes Pillars Before Farms — temples before planting, so the hill sits left of her wheel. Bo asks that hill against his pottery; the Judge points at the hill; the table just learned a fact. Cam shouts too soon and sits with true start 1. Ana locks a true line later and wins.

2 people

10 each, 4 Rumors, 3 asks. Cover the Key with paper; look up only the two named cards.

Print

9-up poker sheets,Avery 5388, orseparate front and back imagesat 822 × 1122 px, 300 DPI, PNG for a print shop (zip under a few MB). 55 faces: 3 Reference + 52 play. Sleeve the 52 if you want; leave the 3 Reference cards on the table. Faces have no years. The Key is a separate sheet.

Design record (mean 9.05, world-class gate pass) lives insrc/games/long-before/. Events from theinfinite timeline— short sentences, a picture you can see in your head on every face, no dates in the titles. Future archives can swap another 52 from a pool of ~600; print a matching Key.

Playtest hypothesis you could lose: if I watch three first-timers with the table cards and no designer, they will complete a legal first swap without asking “where is the year?” by minute 8, and at least one ask will name a card not in the asker’s line. Watch without helping.

Live rules: https://game-design-pi.vercel.app/long-before/rules/ · Shareable intro: https://game-design-pi.vercel.app/long-before/

I am the Judge — reveal the Key

Cover unused rows during a Probe. Point to which is earlier. Never read a year aloud. True order, earliest to latest:

  1. Air That Rusts Rock — Great Oxidation Event · ~2.4 bya
  2. Armor in the Sea — Cambrian Explosion · 541 mya
  3. The First Trees — First forests · 385 mya
  4. Almost None Remain — Great Dying · 252 mya
  5. The Supercontinent Splits — Pangaea breaks up · ~200 mya
  6. Flowers Feed Insects — Flowering plants · 130 mya
  7. Fire All Night — Fire controlled · ~1.9 mya
  8. People Leave Africa — Out of Africa · ~70–50k BCE
  9. People Reach Australia — Humans reach Australia · ~50,000 BCE
  10. Wolves Become Dogs — Dogs domesticated · ~12,000 BCE
  11. Pillars Before Farms — Göbekli Tepe · ~11,000 BCE
  12. Clay Baked into Pots — Pottery invented · c. 9000 BCE
  13. Someone Invents the Wheel — Wheel invented · c. 4500 BCE
  14. Writing on Wet Clay — Writing in Sumer · c. 3400 BCE
  15. Straight Streets and Drains — Indus Valley cities · c. 2600 BCE
  16. Law on a Stone — Hammurabi's Code · c. 1800 BCE
  17. The Sky Goes Dark — Volcanic eruption destroys Thera · c. 1450 BCE
  18. Only the Sun-Disk Is God — Akhenaten's monotheism · c. 1350 BCE
  19. Cheaper Metal — Iron Age spreads · c. 1000 BCE
  20. One Rule in India — Maurya Empire · 305 BCE
  21. One Script, One Measure — Qin unifies China · 221 BCE
  22. Paper, Lighter Than Bamboo — Paper in China · 105 CE
  23. A Book of Arguments — Talmud compiled · c. 500 CE
  24. The Chariot Stadium Almost Wins — Nika Riots · 532 CE
  25. Leave Mecca for Medina — Hijra · 622 CE
  26. Tax on Every Ship — Srivijaya maritime empire · ~800 CE
  27. Many Ports, One Wind — Swahili city-states emerge · ~900 CE
  28. Two Churches, One Split — Great Schism · 1054 CE
  29. A Stone Mountain for a King — Angkor Wat built · 1113 CE
  30. Granite, No Mortar — Great Zimbabwe flourishes · ~1200 CE
  31. Limits on a King — Magna Carta · 1215 CE
  32. Gold Cheap as Dust — Mansa Musa's pilgrimage · 1324 CE
  33. Eagle, Cactus, Lake — Tenochtitlan founded · 1325 CE
  34. Manuscripts in the Desert — Timbuktu flourishes as a learning center · ~1330 CE
  35. Plague, Then Higher Pay — Black Death reaches Europe · 1347 CE
  36. Treasure Ships, Then Silence — Zheng He voyages · 1405–1433 CE
  37. Earth Goes Around the Sun — Copernicus · 1543 CE
  38. A Telescope at the Sky — Galileo turns telescope on the sky · 1609 CE
  39. Each Ruler Picks a Church — Peace of Westphalia · 1648 CE
  40. Apple and Planet, One Law — Newton's Principia · 1687 CE
  41. The First Vaccine — Smallpox vaccine · 1796 CE
  42. Haiti Founds a Country — Haitian Independence · 1804 CE
  43. A Book of Kinship — Origin of Species · 1859 CE
  44. Japan Copies the Factory — Meiji Restoration · 1867 CE
  45. Empty Boxes on a Chart — Periodic table · 1869 CE
  46. Women Vote First — New Zealand suffrage · 1893 CE
  47. Mold That Stops a Wound — Penicillin discovered · 1928 CE
  48. New Countries Meet — Bandung Conference · 1955 CE
  49. A Beeping Ball in Orbit — Sputnik · 1957 CE
  50. The Poison Cloud — Chernobyl · 1986 CE
  51. Pages That Link — World Wide Web · 1991 CE
  52. A Number for How Warm — Paris Climate Agreement · 2015 CE