Took this card in a campaign and it's great fun. I would venture to say it's a little underrated.

Aside from the obvious synergies with Pay Day, The Red-Gloved Man etc., this card provides a few subtler benefits, for example...

• Saving up your actions when you draw Frozen in Fear so that you can do the Willpower test at the end of your turn, and hopefully get rid of it before your next turn.
• Saving up your actions if you have an inkling that your mystic is preparing a Delve Too Deep turn.
• If you're at the same location as a team member, sometimes it's worth it to end your turn at the same location as them (for card commits and card abilities) instead of moving away. Using Borrowed Time, you can stay at your teammate's location for safety and just do the move action that you would've done this turn on the next turn instead.
• It's easier to avoid ending your turn at certain locations to avoid nasty "end of turn" location effects - again, just save up that move action you would've used this turn for next turn instead.
• A lot of treacheries affect you only for a certain round, like Dissonant Voices. Borrowed Time can help you save up actions during those rounds so that you can do more useful things with the same 3 actions next turn.
• Giving yourself extra actions to make your Chicago Typewriter super accurate, or your Kukri extra damaging.
• Making it easier to trigger action intensive, time-sensitive cards like "Let God sort them out...".

I think this card offers a more interesting opportunity than simply allowing you to defer one turn's worth of actions in their entirety, so your next turn can have six actions. You can certainly do that, but you can also build towards your six-action turn in a different way. This card can also be used to give you multiple (in theory) six action turns over the course of a scenario, or a few four (or five) action turns.

You may be forced to remove clicks off this card at the start of a turn, but if nothing during your turn is forcing you to lose actions, there's nothing stopping you from spending those bonus actions on clicks again, and continue deferring the action.

So if you have a turn with an action, but nothing optimal to use it on (the times when you're thinking of drawing a card, or gaining a resource anyway), you can use your action to put a single click on your Borrowed Time. Each turn after that you can decide if you want to use the fourth action, or put it back on the Borrowed Time. If you run into a second turn that's going to have another sub-optimal action, you can defer it to the future as well.

I don't think this card is going to have the same massive payoff that Ace in the Hole does, but I think the ability to consistently defer sub-optimal actions to a future turn when you may need a fourth (or fifth, or sixth) action is quite powerful. Is it worth 6xp? Not sure, but I'm looking forward to finding out!

[Pre-release review written before the last three scenarios of The Forgotten Age were published.]

Okay, this is a weird one. Unlike Ace in the Hole which, for the same XP cost, is instantly and reliably useful, Borrowed Time can only really be useful if you build your entire deck around it.

While superficially similar to Ace, Borrowed Time gives you deferred actions rather than extra ones. Why would this be useful? Mainly because of the combos you can achieve with cards that confer bonuses until the end of the round, the phase, or the investigator's turn. That means building a deck with one-round-boost assets, or at least a large number of events and skills.

Ideally, the one-round boosts should come from reusable assets, because then you could reliably spend alternate turns saving up actions and then taking pumped-up super-turns. At the time of writing, the assets with one-round boosts (based on the search strings 'x:"end of the"' and 'x:"end of your"' on ArkhamDB) are:

• Keen Eye, which only works for a character who can buy 3XP Rogue and Guardian cards (and is a pretty underwhelming combo anyway);
• Encyclopedia, which only works for a character who can buy 2XP Seeker and 3XP Rogue cards; and
• The Red-Gloved Man, which doesn't actually stay in play for more than a round, so it's more like an event for our purposes.

So, basically, Lola Hayes with Encyclopedia is your only option at the moment, but it's a pretty compelling option. More on that in a moment.

Turning to single-use cards, first of all you should obviously try to run two copies of Pay Day with Borrowed Time. For 0XP cards, Intrepid, Sleight of Hand, and especially Fight or Flight should usually be included in a Borrowed Time deck where feasible. Mind over Matter won't play well with any of the characters so far who can actually buy Borrowed Time, but who knows what the future holds?

Under the current card-mix, the best-case non-Lola scenario seems to be recurring The Red-Gloved Man - take a Rogue who can buy Survivor cards like Jenny Barnes or Finn Edwards, and use A Chance Encounter to replay The Red-Gloved Man, and then use Resourceful to replay A Chance Encounter. That's powerful if it works, but it hardly ever will - you'd basically be building your deck in the hope that you draw Borrowed Time and The Red-Gloved Man early enough to put them to work, which is unlikely even if you doubled up on The Red-Gloved Man for a total of 16XP. It seems pretty clear that Jenny and Finn have better builds available at that level.

Having said all that, I think a Borrowed Time/Encyclopedia combo has some real potential for Lola or for a hypothetical future Rogue/Seeker character. The Seeker class has Research Librarian and No Stone Unturned to improve the chances that the Investigator can actually get Encyclopedia and Borrowed Time into play. Maybe supplement with Quick Thinking, upgraded .41 Derringer, or the normally-inefficient Leo De Luca in order to get even more boosted actions. In Lola's case, she also has access to all those lovely Survivor cards, so a Lola/Borrowed Time deck could be a serious powerhouse.

For anybody else, though, this seems like a pretty dubious thing to throw 6XP at.

While people have written about the deferred action value, I haven't seen any conversation around specifically using this card to maximize your "extra action" events and skills.

I personally find that this card is most useful in allowing for Quick Thinking or .41 Derringer to be used when you know you will succeed, regardless of whether the extra action would be useful THAT TURN. So shoot .41 Derringer at a Swarm of Rats and then bank the extra action for a turn when it will be better used, like right after the Act advances or when you have the "right" cards in hand. Or ping Quick Thinking on Lockpicks during the first round and bank an action for fighting/evading after monsters have spawned. If you are using Double or Nothing, even better, as you can use it on a nearly guaranteed success on a 1 target and put two actions on Borrowed Time, also clearing DoN out of your hand. Heck, you could drop Ace in the Hole as soon as you get it and load it onto this card, if you're worried about discard effects. As others have mentioned, you can carry up to three actions forward indefinitely until a better turn.

I've often found that I have those rounds where I could get 6 actions but don't have Pay Day in my hand yet. No problem! Grab those actions now and defer them. Or start building an easy extra action here and there as the game progresses so that you'll have six for the boss showdown with your Chicago Typewriter.

Long story short, you don't need to spend your 3-per turn actions to build this card, instead you can use your "extra action" economy cards to guarantee the extra actions on the front end, and have them when you need them on the back end.