• Game: Panic Station
• Publisher: Stronghold Games
• Designer: David Ausloos
• Genre: Paranoid co-op
• Players: 4-6 (but you really, really want 6)
• Playtime: 60-120 minutes



• What's Hot: Fascinating metagame; cool sci-fi concept; compellingly divisive



• What's Not: Awkward, broken, confusing, inconsistent, and subject to revision rules; extremely fragile and dependent on players to work; can be extremely gamey and narratively nonsensical

by: Michael Barnes

Belgian designer David Ausloos’ Panic Station is one of the most critically perplexing titles I’ve played in recent years. It’s a game that frequently breaks down, crashes, and completely flops. But it also has brilliant ideas, an amazing psychological metagame, and a narrative that is just about as close as a board game has come to a John Carpenter film. I’ve seen this game split play groups right down the middle between ardent supporters and vehement detractors. I’ve engaged in numerous post-game conversations about what the hell is wrong with the game and everybody seems to have a fix for some wonky or gamey mechanic. Even Mr. Ausloos and the publisher have their own fixes, with the online rulebook now in its 2.2 revision.

The 1.0 original rules, by most accounts, were a mess. I’ve never played with them, and when Stronghold Games’ Stephen Buonocore agreed to send me a review copy he admonished me to use the new set available online. I did, and they were still obtuse, awkward, and non-intuitive. It’s one of those games that somehow always manages to put you in a situation that sends you back to the rulebook for some head-scratching and page-flipping. The rules-writing isn’t necessarily bad; it’s just strangely dense for a game that really doesn’t have that many processes or disparate mechanics. It almost feels over-written but given the open-ended nature of the game and its often alarming fragility, it probably needs to be. Yet the game also feels underdeveloped- another critical paradox.

The setup is sturdy, sci-fi action movie material that sounds awfully close to a certain James Cameron picture. The Extermination Corps, a team of troopers with their telepathically paired-up androids, is sent to a remote mining colony on the planet Recon-6 to investigate why it has gone silent. It turns out that an alien parasite has infested the facility, and as the team arrives one of the players- chosen secretly- becomes a host for the bug. The goal is to find three cans of gas for a flamethrower and hose down the hive. This task has to be accomplished before either the Host player can secretly infect all of the other players or everybody dies either from the bugs or at the hands of other players.

The core mechanic by which the host player secretly spreads the parasite is brilliant. When a player enters a room with another player’s units, there is a forced trade of equipment cards. Players exchange face-down cards, and at this point the Host (or another infected player) can pass an infection card to a human player. The player thus infected doesn’t want anyone to know that they’ve got the bug because they’ve effectively switched sides and victory conditions at this point. But if a player trades one of the game-winning gas cans- usually out of suspicion of another player- it blocks the infection attempt. And at that point, the finger-pointing, accusations, shouting, and betrayal begins as the target of the infection- or in fact, the would-be infector- start campaigning to either indict another player or clear their name.

When the game gets into this crazy, paranoid state is when it becomes something really unique- it can be even more desperate and delirious than Battlestar Galactica. You might have a player going around shooting people just to put some wounds on them “just in case” they’re infected. Another player might aggressively pursue trading to do a little ‘investigative’ work to root out who the parasite players currently are. Another might simply avoid contact altogether, rushing around to collect gas cans- or to avoid having their infection discovered. Then there are rules-directed periodic heat scans where everyone must turn in a status card to a common stack so that the number of parasite and human players is almost always known. That’s when group discussions regarding who traded what and when to who break out. It’s a raucous, schizoid verbal donnybrook where the game on the table almost doesn’t really matter.

But the problem is that there is enough of a game to matter, and too much of it is gamey. The fiction- both the story the game presents and that created by the players- breaks down much too easily in an avalanche of contrivances, confusing rules, and fragility. The construction of the game is such that it doesn’t always support its storyline with logical, narrative cohesion. It doesn’t help that neither process nor strategy are consistently clear and rules are too often vague.