The era: the 1990s. The Art: hairdressing. Three hairdressers are trying to make it in the strip-mall. Their store, Bangin'. There's Rhonda, the sassy black one (Drew), Madison, the blonde Valley Girl (Robin), and JT, the flamboyantly gay guy (Neil). Their rent is months overdue, the rival chain-store haircut place is undercutting them, the mall rent guy and the chain-store haircut guy are in cahoots, and on top of this there is epic cheating-boyfriend drama.

...and into their lives drives Vogue. Vogue has his every hair individually positioned to pre-programmed perfection by antigravity fields, and appears blown by an unseen wind. Everyone in the future will have hair this great... unless the heroes fail, in which case it's a grim future of unisex crew-cuts.

So the heroes journey through time to gather historical figures, makeover their hair, and assemble a photoshoot: Samson, Cleopatra, the Beatles, Elvis to fix messing up the Beatles, some random guy in China who they mistook for Ghengis Khan (who ended up becoming Ghengis Khan anyway when they abandoned him in Mongolia in the epilogue).

This was a lot of good stupid fun, but the very loose rules made things tricky at times. In retrospect, having three Heroic Characters in a five-player game put too much work on the Historical Characters player, while spreading the limelight too thin on the Heroes and their relationships. It was also probably a mistake to have the facilitator be the Timeagent - given how nebulous TEA is, it'd have been helpful to be able to focus more on the antagonist/guardian angel role and less on the facilitator job of drawing the players out.

We also developed a system of demerits for making historical-accuracy corrections (interpreted broadly: 'why is Samson in Greece?' counts). This was pretty effective until people started trolling for reactions.

This was a pretty fun game.

The one thing that is sitting a little poorly with me is I felt like the story kinda took third wheel to the historical tropes and having fun with the characters almost to the point where I really wasn't vested in the story at all. The story did help give a little background to the characters, but other than that... if you want a engaging story you'll probably have to put a lot of effort into it. But that being said, I still had a great time because we made up for a weaker story with strong interesting characters. Ultimately it didn't matter why we needed to pick-up Fake Ghengis Khan. "Because" was a good enough answer to keep the game rolling.

Probably the most similar game I've played was Braggarts­. There the plot doesn't matter at all, you just have a bunch of awesome people fighting awesome historical figures in awesome scenes and it works well because when a magical lion is fighting Carmen San Diego on a steam punk airship you really don't need any substance to the plot.

I think where this succeeded though was keeping the heroes as a united team. (As they also learned in the story), alone I think JT Rhonda and Madison are each somewhat interesting, but they were far more interesting as a group. But if you're going to try and have an actual plot, while you don't need it to have substance to have a good time, it does hurt the game a little when you don't. Maybe only two heroes would've helped there? Or maybe more focus from the antagonist role? I'm not sure. Overall it was still a fun time and that's all that matters.