Time to Panic

IV Studio · 2025

Translation, English to German

A co-op card game where players need to build a row of cards that’s as close as possible to a perfect sequence from lowest to highest card. Each card has keyword that affects the row in some way, like swapping positions or flipping cards facedown. This sometimes produces knock-on effects and is the basic puzzle players need to solve to keep their row more or less intact. Then there’s a deck of panic cards that add unhelpful confusion to the row. All of this is themed as building (or rather repairing) the timeline. In fact, if you lay out all of the timeline cards in a perfect row, the artwork combines to form one large image that sort of shows a progression from past to future. Like with all of IV Studio titles, this one has very distinct artwork, with a sort of 1930s expressionist Metropolis flavour. I enjoyed this one for the challenge of getting all those keywords translated in a way that preserved the sci-fi disaster touch as well as still expressing their effect. This was especially nice for the panic cards, which escalated particular keywords across three levels by applying adjectives to them alliteratively (like idle, intense, and impossible inversion).