Towers in Time CCG

Towers in Time is a sprawling time-travel CCG where your deck represents a faction of temporal combatants and every match is fought across multiple eras at once: you might have a Roman legion fighting a Victorian spy fighting a cyberpunk netrunner all on the same table.

The game

Published in 1995 by Black Dragon Press, Towers in Time CCG is a two-to-four-player duel built around building Towers in different Ages (Prehistoric, Ancient, Medieval, Renaissance, Modern, Future) and defending them against temporal raids. Combat resolution uses a proprietary timing system where later-era tech can intervene in earlier-era fights, which is where the game gets its name.

The context

1995 was peak CCG proliferation and many independent publishers were trying to stake out a mechanical niche no one else had. Black Dragon Press leaned into a hard cross-era theme that was unique at launch and still unusual today. Card art ranged from workmanlike to genuinely striking, drawing from a freelance roster that would go on to more famous genre work.

The collector angle

The base set and two small expansions (Strike Force and the rarely-seen Final Towers) complete the English print. Distribution was spotty; it showed up heavily in the Pacific Northwest hobby stores and barely at all in the Southeast, so regional availability is a real factor in how collectors assembled their sets. Sealed boxes are rare enough that opened-lot completion is more common than set-sealed purchases. The Cyber Samurai and Victorian Ghost rares are the most commonly requested chase cards.