Play the Tabletop Time Travel Game Project ECCO While You Still Have Time

By Cameron Kunzelman | August 28, 2025 | 1:00pm

Tabletop Features project ecco

Play the Tabletop Time Travel Game Project ECCO While You Still Have Time

Time travel is very “in” these days. It makes sense to me. If we could turn back time…if we could find a way…we all have things we would change. Bill Murray got stuck in that loop, Bigolas Dickolas told us all about the time war, and Heinlein wondered where all you zombies came from. Time, and its manipulation, is just extremely available to us in our storytelling culture, and that also goes for journaling tabletop games. Project ECCO takes time, and a day planner, and uses that as a springboard about telling a tale about the end of time.

The play of Project ECCO is relatively simple. You find a day planner from whatever year you want, go to January 5th, and describe that day. You describe where you are. You think about yourself as a character. Then, using a series of prompts and devices, you skip through the year both looking for and dodging ECCO: an Entity of Chronological Consumption and Obfuscation. It’s eating time. You want to try to figure out how or maybe why. The game does not provide those answers.

The good parts of Project ECCO to me might be the parts that are bad to you. I don’t know. You’re a time agent doing an investigation, and you start out by using dice rolls to move through time slowly. The book gives you prompts to answer for the days you land on. Importantly, you have to start making assumptions about the world and your job as a time agent. Project ECCO is just as much a system of getting you to think like an agent as it is a game that puts you inside of an agency position. It’s not Control, it’s a game that makes you create your own version of something like Control.

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I find this to be really exciting. As you play the game, and as you fill out the time travel world you are making, you discover other devices that will allow you to time travel in different ways. The Season Shuffler has you using a deck of cards to select days and prompts. The Temporal Spread asks that you break out a Tarot deck to start divining your travels. There are rules for landing on the same day twice, and there are rules for what happens when you get kicked out of time and have to make your way back. You work with an agency, and every time you take an action in the game, you are both building the fiction of the game and your position within that world. It is elegant, and there’s very little ground beneath your feet other than process, making Project ECCO feel quite a bit different than a journaling game like Thousand Year Old Vampire.

As I said, I think this radical freedom is interesting and pushes me into really difficult places when it comes to writing my journal entries and creating my coherent fiction in the game. It means that contradictions can emerge, which we all love in time travel stories, and that I can use the game systems to think through those contradictions. However, I can absolutely see a player not enjoying that radical freedom and thinking there’s not enough in Project ECCO to keep them going.

This might be where the strength of the villainous ECCO itself comes in to help players orient their play experiences. The ECCO eats time. The ECCO is always after you. The choices you make when prompted to choose dates and write about what happened on them all circle around the dead end of time itself and the possibility that all of this, the whole book you are creating as you play the game, might be gone in an instant. The ECCO forces you to destroy days—destroy your own fictions and writing, even. It destroys the future. It kills the past. It creates this hounding effect where the longer you play, the more likely you are to encounter it and be forced to think about the nature of the end of everything.

And even if this sounds like something risky to you as a player, I think that it’s worth at least a single playthrough so that you can see one of the two possible ending conditions to the game. The endgame is triggered once you encounter the ECCO six times or you return to the Agency that put you into history for a sixth time. Like the rest of the game, you get to make choices about how you interact with these moments. I don’t want to spoil them for you, but I think I can say that they are not happy, and they will unsettle you. This is, after all, Project ECCO; no one said that the entity that eliminates time itself would promise a happy ending.

Cameron Kunzelman is an academic, critic, co-host of the podcasts Ranged Touch and Game Studies Study Buddies, and author of The World Is Born from Zero. He tweets at @ckunzelman.