Tempus Alatum: Playing Through the Branches of the Timeline

This paper presents Tempus Alatum, a card-driven educational game designed to teach chronology in introductory university history courses by combining timeline mechanics with technology-tree structure. The authors, researchers at Mid Sweden University, argue that students entering higher education often lack a solid grasp of chronology, which they regard as essential for understanding causal explanation, and that games can make this learning engaging. The work is framed as the first iteration of a Design Science Research project, focusing on problem explication, requirements gathering, and initial design, while also drawing on pedagogical action research given that one author is the course's main teacher.

The game consists of roughly 40 small timeline cards in four thematic colour categories (society, politics, culture and religion, economy), twelve large question cards for higher-order analysis, a six-sided die, and a rules sheet. Players place events in chronological order and advance to broader questions once they accumulate enough cards of one category. The design is deliberately low-cost, produced with a home printer and scissors, and intended as a do-it-yourself template that teachers can adapt and that is transferable across analogue and digital media. The course context involves a global survey covering more than 5000 years of human history within a single month, which the authors cite as the core motivation.

Evaluation was preliminary and small in scale. Four teachers reviewed a first version, and nine teacher-training students played a second version over roughly 35 minutes, finishing a full game in that time. Participants found the small cards useful as exam preparation and reported that the game was quickly understood, though they identified wording issues, a need for limits on card acquisition, and a difficulty gap between the small and large cards. The authors conclude that the two-tiered structure matches the course's learning objectives, and they plan further revisions, live classroom use, and an app version for distance learning.