"The forest is filled with all sorts of Monsters. They watched and waited as you built your Castle and trained your soldiers, but now they’ve gathered their army and are marching out of the woods." No, not all at once. They form into polite little pairs and run at your castle 2 at a time, so that a tiny stone hut of a castle with absolutely no allies will be able to wipe out an entire orc army.
But those are problems with the plot of Defend Your Castle genre of game, not with Castle Panic. In fact, Castle Panic catches the most invigorating feeling from DYC games. That is, complete and Utter Panic as wave after wave of evil baddies fling themselves at(and somehow manage to destroy) your defenses.
There are 3 modes of play:
Standard, all the players defend the castle, and, assuming the castle survives, the player with the most points(kills) wins.
Co-op, the players win or lose as a team.
Overlord, one player controls the monsters.
In Standard it seems like the company tried to put in some player spite(or player interaction, a rose by any other name...)(Example: No, I'm not gonna trade you my knight, you'll kill that troll and win!) but, at least with my family, the defenders are so focused providing the optimum protection for the castle that whoever wins is a matter of who's lucky. I guess my family isn't competitive enough.
It's well done in terms of difficulty. Despite my previous comments, a group's first game is well balanced, with either the players heaping curses on that last orc or symbolically crawling from the single remaining tower of their base, ecstatic to be alive. So the first game leaves you with a little more breathing room than Pandemic, which will grind your delusions of how awesome you are into dust the 1st go around. As you get better it's necessary to add twists to the main game to make it harder. In detail: The game starts off throwing punches, surrounding your castle at the start, and keeps sending a steady stream of monsters, and mixing up the basic systems with Giant Boulders, moving certain monsters closer, and Boss Monsters.
Player interaction while co-operating is still good, as players must trade cards and plan together to hold off the hordes.
As with all co-op games, you run the risk of having one player become self-proclaimed Head Politician and telling everyone what to do. The fact that 80% of a person's hands changes each turn helps curb that, though, and usually keeps advice to within the pleasantly helpful level.
Meh. The art could have been better, but you don't look for good art from a small publisher's first game.
Fireside Games has released some more Alternate Rules here! I haven't played with 'em yet, but they look great!
This is what I call a moddable game, because, while it's a good, self-contained game, it's gameplay mechanics makes it easy for user made content to fit in.
Summary
Players: 1-6 (or 7 if using Overlord)
Ages: 10+
Game Length: Appr. 1 hour
Pros:
-Co-op
-Has many variants to the game made by Fireside, which boosts the replayability-Simple enough to grasp easily, but still be complex enough to be engaging to "serious" gamers
-Anyone can pick it up and play for an hour, without thinking the game is personally insulting their intelligence
Cons:
-Art could be better/more varied
Neutral:
-Doesn't have difficulty levels, just ways you can tweak the game away from Standard
I'd give this a solid 8.5 out of 10.
Photo lifted from Fireside Games section, here.
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