Panicking never felt so fun

🌀 Time to Panic is a cooperative card game from IV Studio. Your goal is simple: Just reorganize the jumbled events of the timeline into the correct order, before time folds in on itself, and life and the universe ceases to exist. Simple, right? 😁 Basically you are interacting with number cards in a line, trying to bring them into ascending order - but it's a lot more fun and involved than that may sound! 

Games begin with a simple setup, with 4 cards already out. Each turn you play a card face up, activating its special ability, plus another ability of an adjacent face up card. 🧐Then you draw back up to 4 number cards, and draw a Panic card. Yep, the game is called Time to Panic for a reason. Panic cards will keep shuffling things around and ruining your plans, making things challenging.

The card abilities make the game. 👉The most important one is ‘Collapse’ that lets you get rid of a consecutive set of cards, discarding them from the game completely. This is quintessential, otherwise you'd have to juggle 30+ cards in a line, which is impossible. Other abilities let you Peek at facedown cards, or Flip them, then there is Switching, Trading and Deleting. These are mostly self explanatory. 

The tricky part? You can only play cards to the far ends of the card line, or into Gaps if there are any. Collapsing and Deleting cards leave Gaps, though these might disappear thanks to the pesky Panic cards. Getting cards into consecutive sets can be a real struggle, as there is only limited communication allowed. There is no real losing condition, you just score at the end according to how good you did -  but sometimes you don’t do good at all. 😄

💭 Although I am starting to warm up to the graphics of the game, I still find it a bit strange. The foil effect on the numbers and the components are cool though. 

If you are like me and you aren't vibing with the art, don't let that dissuade you. The gameplay speaks for itself! It's a challenging and dynamic puzzle, where things are constantly changing and clever plays are necessary. Even though Panic cards are a random hindrance each turn, there is enough player agency to deal with it.