Game Review: Castle Panic

I bought my wife Castle Panic for her birthday and we played it for the first time last night.  It’s a fun game which will be funner with a larger group.

It’s a cooperative game and the idea is that you are in a castle Under Siege from monsters (Goblins, Orcs, Trolls, and Steven Seagal). Your castle is surrounded by an open field and then a forest. You have a strong wall protecting your inner towers and an army of defenders. The monsters win by destroying your inner towers. You win by killing all the monsters.

Game play is pretty straight forward. You draw cards, trade cards, play cards, and then move the monsters. New monsters are added every round after they ones on the board move. There are three rings around the castle in three color zones. These zones correspond to defender cards; archers, knights and swordsmen. You play these cards to do damage to monsters.

The game gets complicated when you flip over monster tiles. Most of them are just monsters that you add to the board. But some can really change the situation. There is one tile that shifts all the monsters one space over. This can really mess with your defense strategy if the monster was in a Red Knight space and is now in a Green Knight space and you can no longer kill it. There are also boulders which can kill a lot of monsters, but only stop rolling when they hit and damage your castle.

Trading cards ends up being a key element to the strategy, though you can only trade one card per turn. Your walls will go quickly and it’s not very easy to rebuild them. Once the monsters get past the walls, there are only a few cards that will remove them. Sacrificing some of your towers will be necessary (fortunately, they do damage to the monsters).

Over all, a fun game. We won, but with only one castle left. And we got lucky on die rolls for two boulders. Can’t wait to play it will our full group of friends.