Icebox: Timeline

Icebox: Timeline is a tabletop role-playing game about the passengers and crew on the lost starship Sequoia. You’ll experience life aboard the ship with them as they drift in and out of cryosleep across the span of its twelve thousand year existence.

As players, you’ll take turns setting up scenes for your characters by drawing cards and placing them on a timeline—these are the memories recalled in response to a central question you compose as a group about the ship’s history. You’ll play out those scenes together to find out what happened on your long, fated journey. 

You create the scenes in your story in a non-linear fashion, jumping forward and backward in time. You may start with a scene near the end of the story, or begin in the middle and work your way outwards. You might even recount your characters’ history in a completely random order—nobody knows when in the story’s timeline a scene will happen until it happens!

If you’re already familiar with other storytelling or role-playing games, note that Icebox: Timeline does not call for a single Game Master (GM) to run the game. All four players work together to create the story, rotating through different roles and responsibilities as you play.

A single session of Icebox: Timeline requires exactly four players, and runs about three hours. (Play time will vary, of course, depending on how many scenes you play, how long they last, and how much detail you provide in them.) 

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This is a low-design ashcan version—it contains all the rules necessary to play the game, without additional layout or art. Get it now, and get the fancy stuff for free when it happens!

(How long have I been sitting on this game? It's basically unchanged from when it was reviewed on the Gauntlet Podcast in 2016, that's how long. 🤣)

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Another little piece of bonus content! Icebox: Timeline was originally created to help write storylines for a potential narrative podcast—in 2020, we put together a super rough draft of what that might sound like, and you can listen to it here!