I contributed to the kickstarter for this game back in January 2014. It has fallen quite a bit behind schedule but having played with the creator at Gen Con, I'm fairly confident it will arrive in one form or another by the end of the year.
Faster and Pulpier
Working from the baseline of GUMSHOE, TimeWatch goes even farther than Night's Black Agents in delivering a simple action packed system.First off it uses a simpler skill set with fewer abilities overall. This means PCs will be even more omni-competent. Everything from riding a horse to piloting a star ship works off Vehicle for instance. The characters are meant to be broadly trained and ready for action in any sort of setting.
Helping them is a more liberal refresh mechanic. In TimeWatch PCs earn stitches which can be traded in for a two point refresh in any ability. They earn them by bringing fun material to the game: jokes, awesome roleplaying, and cool stunts and actions. Both the game master and fellow players can award them. There isn't a limit how often they can be handed out but only three stitches can be held at a time. so remember to spend them.
In keeping with the pulpy nature, there isn't a Stability or Sanity ability here. Instead characters have a Chronal Stability which handles how well a character handles paradoxes and other time travelling hazards.
Also as befits a game about time travel, it also makes it easy to pull off Bill and Ted style shenanigans: leaving weapons or tools in locations where you'll need them later (or earlier in your timeline), setting traps for enemies fleeing you based on future actions, and the like.
How you define abilities is also kept flexible. Is Disguise just skill or are you a liquid metal robot from the future? Are your social abilities really psychic powers?
Most of the rest of the system is pretty straightforward with the exception of initiative. It uses the mechanic where each participant in a combat decides which character goes next. So the first character chooses who gets to act after them and then that character chooses who acts after them. Once everyone has acted a new round starts with whoever went last choosing who goes first. They can choose themselves in this case. So you don't always want the bad guys to go last, since they then get to go twice in a row.
Not Just Time Travel
With much of the game master and background material still unavailable I'm not in a good position to review the full product. But I do know from the kickstarter and the game I played at Gen Con that it will cover many different settings: parallel worlds (like Sliders), X-files style Conspiracy, time war, stranded in time and other classic styles.
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