When I get a request from a game designer to review their game here at Cracked LCD, I don’t really do that whole “oh boy, I’m getting a free game in the mail” dance. Instead, I do something more like the “oh god, I don’t want to listen to your brother-in-law’s bar band” grin-and-bear-it routine. So when Justin DeWitt of Fireside Games contacted me asking for a full-bore review of his new release CASTLE PANIC, I said “of course” and braced myself for the worst. Not because of the unproven reputations of Fireside Games and Mr. DeWitt, but because I really don’t like letting someone know, particularly someone new to the industry, that I thought their game sucked. Believe it or not, despite the gleeful trashing I routinely dish out to stinking garbage piles like TOMB or RACE FOR THE GALAXY, it’s kind of heartbreaking to give a game a bad review. You want them all to be good. But they aren’t.
So CASTLE PANIC arrived on my doorstep, and when I laid it out for inspection I thought that I was going to be in for it. The game features some pretty cartoony art, an extremely generic “orcs versus humans” fantasy theme, and very low rules density to the point where I almost felt like I was still looking for the game in there after I read them. I went into CASTLE PANIC with a pretty bad attitude. But then I actually played it.
The game has a pretty novel concept. If you’ve ever touched an iPhone, chances are at some point you’ve played a castle or tower defense game. There are probably thousands of permutations of that formula on that platform alone, and elsewhere games like the popular PLANTS Vs. ZOMBIES or DEFENSE GRID are likely to be the most widely recognized examples of the genre. CASTLE PANIC is very much a board game version of the genre, which is essentially a protracted siege in which “creeps” constantly assault a central location. CASTLE PANIC is a cooperative game, quite the vogue these days, and in this one the players represent the defenders of the titular panicked castle attempting to turn the tide of bad guys a la Helm’s Deep and carry the day.
The bad guys causing so much castellan consternation are various greenskins represented by triangular tiles that appear out of a surrounding forest. Why the humans decided to build a castle in the middle of a monster-filled forest is beyond me, but that’s neither here nor there. The order of the day is to defend the six-walled, six-turreted castle in the center of the board as the orcs, goblins, and trolls advance on it. This is accomplished by a simple cardplay mechanic keyed to three different colored zones and concentric rings depicting different ranges. Therefore, a player can put a point of damage on an orc in the red sector of the archer ring (long distance) simply by playing a red archer card. Of course, there are wild cards and various other special cards that buck the system and provide defense effects such as fortified walls and tar pits, but that’s the sum of it. Play a couple of cards, monsters die. Do that before they kill you.
The creeps aren’t exactly AI controlled in the standard game. Each player turn, tiles are drawn adding new monsters to the board and some tiles have special abilities. There’s also a boulder that rolls straight to the castle, smashing everything in its path. Rather than any complex triaging algorithms that march the enemy tokens to the weakest wall or a certain section, they move simply as a matter of process. Each turn, they all move forward although some tiles let them move between sectors or section. Once they hit the walls, they lose a hit point and the next turn they move in to start hammering away at the towers. When all six towers fall, the players lose. There is also an Overlord variant that lets a player actually control the monsters.
The players win, in general, if they defeat all of the monster tiles in the stack and there is a scoring method available if players want to tackle the game as a cooperative endeavor with a single winner, introducing that delicious co-op/competitive angle that too few games pursue. There’s a trading element wherein players can trade as many cards to other players as they want during their turn, so there’s a strategic impetus to pay attention to who is capable of handling which monsters and when—timing is a big issue. Played as a strictly cooperative game, the trading is fairly dull and more a matter of process. With the competitive variant, the decision becomes to trade a card that helps everybody and keeps the game from ending or holding on to it to grab some points for yourself. The game will handle 1-6 players and I’d be shocked to see any game go beyond an hour.
