'Castle Panic' brings tension to the table

Few games can approximate wring-your-hands worry

By Rick Teverbaugh, Herald Bulletin Sports Editor

Tension is an element not easy to create in a board game. To do it without speeding up a game is even more difficult.

But "Castle Panic" is a new game that provides a wring-your-hands kind of worry, fret and yes, panic that few games even approximate.

This is a cooperative game with a slight competitive element. All of the players work toward a common goal and in the end, the player who contributed the most toward that goal is rewarded with the title “Master Slayer.”

“I'd been designing more standard, competitive games for a while, and I always enjoyed the moments where the players would work together, even if they were brief,” said "Castle Panic" designer Justin De Witt.” I wanted to see if I could expand on that with a game that would put all the players on the same team. The most logical way to do that was to give the players a common enemy, in this case, the game itself. Once I had that idea nailed down, I worked on a list of situations that naturally lend themselves to being cooperative. Right away, the idea of defending a castle against waves of attackers became the obvious choice.”

So that’s the idea in this game. The players have built a castle with six towers and six walls. The area is surrounded by a forest inhabited by orcs, goblins and trolls, which come out of the forest and rush toward the castle. If they get to the walls they will tear them down and once inside the walls they will start on the towers. If all of the towers come down, he game is over and the monsters win.

As the game winds down and the walls and towers have already started to come down, that is when the tension begins to build and "Castle Panic" really shines.

“I love it when a game is a really tense nail-biter,” De Witt said. "The players have lost almost all their towers and walls, and they are surrounded by the last few monsters. They are desperate to draw that one card or make that one trade that will save them, and when they do, the cheering that goes on is just fantastic.”

If there’s one criticism of the game it is that there are only three cards out of 49 in the Castle Deck that can deal with monsters who get inside the walls. There’s one more that can get a needed card from the discard pile but none that can get one from the draw deck. That can often make luck a necessary ingredient to winning the game. But it’s also a lesson not to let the monsters get inside the walls at almost any cost.

The board is sturdy and will hold up well to the repeated plays that are almost guaranteed with this game. All of the components are done well. There are 49 monster tokens, six walls with plastic stands and six towers also with stands. There are two tokens to fortify a wall and one tar token that will keep a monster from moving toward the castle for a single turn.

Each player gets between four and six cards in his or her hand depending on the number of players. There are six regions, two in each of three colors. Many of the cards used against the monsters only work in one color. The monsters have their paths to the castle chosen randomly by dice.

There are three versions. Two are cooperative. One involves each player keeping the monster tokens they eliminate from the board and the crowning of a “Master Slayer” at game’s end. The second doesn’t keep track of this.

There is an overlord version where one person will control the monsters charging the castle.

So far the game is off to a rousing start.

“The response has been nothing short of amazing,” De Witt said. “People are really responding well to the cooperative play. We’re getting great responses from every age group: families, couples, kids, friends, college students. People like the idea of having a game they can play together in which nobody has to be singled out as the loser and everyone can help win. We’re even hearing from people who say they don’t like board games that this is their new favorite family activity. On top of all that, the game is selling great! Retailers are having a hard time keeping the game in stock.”

If the game continues its popularity, more is planned for this game.

“We’ve already got an expansion in the works, and without giving too much away, I can tell you there will be new, more dangerous monsters to threaten the castle and new, powerful cards to help you defend it,” said De Witt. “One of the things that you’ll notice about 'Castle Panic' is that there aren’t a lot of magical elements to it. That was a very deliberate choice we made because we want to introduce the magical powers in the expansion.”

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