1441: Panic!

Having tried Escape yesterday, Andie and I gave Castle Panic a go earlier. Despite the title, it’s a somewhat more sedate affair than Escape, though you’re still dealing with difficult odds and a distinct chance of being horribly defeated at any point.

Castle Panic is a cooperative game in which you and up to five other players are tasked with defending your castle from an incoming onslaught of goblins, orcs and trolls. Your castle is made up of six towers, each of which has a wall protecting it. Lose all the towers (but not necessarily the walls) and everyone loses; get through all the monster tokens and kill everything and everyone wins, but whoever scores the most points wins slightly more than everyone else.

Gameplay is pretty straightforward. The board is split into three coloured sections, each of which is subdivided into two numbered areas and five different rings. The outermost ring is the “forest” surrounding the castle area; the next three rings represent the effective ranges of your archers, knights and swordsmen respectively; the innermost ring is inside your castle walls and is where you’re trying to prevent the beasties getting to.

In order to deal with the incoming hordes, you need to play cards from your hand. Many of these take the form of a coloured archer, knight or swordsman, which means you can deal one point of damage to a monster in the appropriately coloured section of their respective ring on the board. Different types of monster take different amounts of damage — goblins only take one, for example, while trolls and some “boss” monsters have three and orcs have two.

There’s a selection of special cards in the mix, too — a “lucky shot” card allows a monster to be outright killed rather than damaged when used in conjunction with an appropriate card; “hero” cards can attack any ring in one coloured area of the board; barbarians can attack enemies who have managed to breach the castle walls.

Each turn, more and more enemies show up to make life difficult, and the enemies already on the board move in by one ring. If they hit a wall, they destroy it and take a damage, and likewise for the towers. Certain monster tokens cause more monsters to show up, or move further than they would normally, or rotate around the board. Giant Boulder tokens roll across the board, killing everything in their path but also destroying the first wall or tower they meet, making them something of a mixed blessing.

Andie and I won the game we played earlier, which surprised me somewhat — I’m used to cooperative games smacking me about somewhat more than this one did, but it may have been a lucky combination of card and monster token draws.

I’m interested to try the game with more people, since then you have smaller hands of cards but are able to trade more cards with people at the start of your turn.

It’s an interesting take on cooperative because there’s a competitive element, too — while you’re all working together for a common goal, there is a scoring mechanic to encourage you to try and be the “best”, too. This somewhat discourages the “alpha player” problem that some cooperative games suffer from, in which one player takes charge and orders everyone else around. In Castle Panic, there’s not so much scope for that to happen and turns are pretty quick, so everyone can feel like they’re contributing.

It’s a good game, in short. I’m looking forward to trying it some more.

Talking about all these board games has given me a blogging idea for January — I’m thinking I might go through my collection and compile some detailed posts on selected (or perhaps even all!) of the games I own, sharing some thoughts, images and details on them for those curious. I have a pretty decent collection now, and it would be nice to do it justice with some more detailed posts. So look forward to that!