Trouble on the Tempus is a game about travelling through the depths of space in a lovely spaceship … as it catches fire and the electronics explode and it falls apart around you. You're pretty much doomed. Luckily you're in a time machine, part of an exploratory mission to test the latest time traversing technology, but you pushed the ship too far and things have gone horribly wrong.

Players must work together to keep the ship in one piece and when failure seems inevitable they can use the ships time machine to reverse the effects, time travelling back to the beginning of the game to try again with the added knowledge they have gained about the future of the game. Players must push their luck to learn as much about the future as possible before trying to win on a second, third, or fourth time jump, 

But time travelling isn’t an exact science and if you cause too many paradoxes the ship may find itself trapped in a fate much worse than exploding in the depths of space, if such a thing is possible.