Castle Panic's Master Slayer, or Throwing the Baby Out with the Bath Water

I had always sort of disregarded the Master Slayer aspect of Castle Panic, thinking of it as something of a novelty in an otherwise straightforward cooperative game. I now see that it’s actually the entire point of the game. Defending the castle becomes secondary because everyone suddenly has no interest in helping each other, only in collecting orc and troll skulls. I’ve mentioned before that I find the game fun, but exceedingly easy. This seems to solve that issue since you are once again pitted against other people, rather than some sort of easily defeated game mechanic.

Playing with the Master Slayer (which is actually the way that the game should be played, the more cooperative game is an alternative to it) gives points to the players for killing monsters. Tougher monsters are worth more points. Makes sense. But the game is really structured so that players trade cards and help one another out by planning together. The cards are even played face up on the table, the game presents the illusion that we are all actually working together to save this castle. Which now seems sort of ridiculous since everyone is in constant competition, hell bent on killing the Troll Mage. The thing that makes it odd is that the game is very short sighted. If you offer me a card for a Blue Archer I know exactly what you are going to do with it. You are going to shoot the goblin in the blue zone. I don’t want to help you kill that goblin. I suppose if you offered me a Green Knight that I needed it would be, at best, a zero sum exchange as we both get something that we need. And what’s really the point of that? In a game like Settlers of Catan or Bohnanza trading is a big part of the game, but you don’t necessarily know the extent that you are helping your opponent and can always tell yourself that you are getting the better end of the trade. In Castle Panic the entire board and all of the player’s cards are on display.

The real catch comes with what is now the possible game endings; either one of the players wins or nobody does. That’s interesting. The game ceases to be cooperative. Sure, you could look at it as somewhat of a victory if you successfully defend the castle but one of your partners is the Master Slayer, but who feels that way? Who wants to sort of win, when someone else wins a little bit better? The last time that we played I fell behind pretty early on in the game. The cards I had just weren’t matching up to anything good, and the other players were racking up the kills. At that point it was really in my best interest to let the castle be destroyed so that we would all lose. It wasn’t coming from a point of bitterness, but why would I help someone beat me? Three of us played this afternoon and within a couple of turns the castle was in shambles, orcs and trolls having caused numerous breaches in our walls. No one was looking to trade anyone a brick so that they could be a new wall for it, we were too busy reloading our crossbows. It certainly becomes much more difficult to actually win.

Well, the Master Slayer has addressed what I found to be the biggest fault with Castle Panic. That is, that the game is too easy. I guess I was wrong in writing the game off so quickly and probably should have played the game the way that the designers had really intended it to be played.

Cooperative Games Have Got Me Down

These days Shadows Over Camelot routinely leaves the kingdom in shambles, the world is festering with disease and pestilence whenever the CDC leaves us in charge with Pandemic, even the lost treasures of antiquity rarely make it off of the Forbidden Island. Forbidden Island is a kid’s game! It’s for children! I used to think that cooperative games were great for bonding with my fellow gamers, but now they just leave me feeling hollow inside.

I don’t mind losing a game to friends. In fact, it happens all the time. I usually play games with a smart and savvy group and wins are distributed fairly evenly amongst us all. It’s losing to a game mechanic that I hate. And I don’t mean losing a game because of some sort of rule technicality, I mean when the game is actually the winner. Cooperative games have really got me down these days. We just seem to rarely win, and the silent gloating of the victorious game pieces looking up at me is almost more than I can bear. Whether it’s the stack of black cubes surrounding Mumbai and Tehran, or the hordes of siege engines massed in front of the castle makes no difference to me.

Recently four of us were playing Shadows Over Camelot and we were doing really well. We had won the Grail Quest and several others and basically just needed to keep the siege engines at bay until the game ended. Two of our braves knights had returned to Camelot to do battle with the belfries and catapults of our foes, and they got mangled. Not just defeated, but really embarrassed. On three consecutive rolls the enemy rolled an eight (on a d8) and both knights were killed in successive turns. Undermanned, the remaining two were quickly overwhelmed and the kingdom was plunged into darkness. It was heartbreaking. The next time we played we were dead men walking. We didn’t stand a chance. Our fragile mindset, so recently elevated as we were on the cusp of victory, doomed us from the beginning. We overreacted to threats, jumped around the board like novice squires and bickered with one another. We had lost the psychological game to a non-entity, literally something that had no brain or psyche had gotten inside our head.

What I need to do is play more Castle Panic. That game is absurdly easy, maybe that’s why people seem to like it so much. Because they always win. But therein is the problem. If a game doesn’t present much of a challenge for the group than it’s not a very good game, it makes me feel a little bit like a bully. But if it’s too challenging and we just lose all of the time we feel like doormats. True, it does make victory all that much sweeter, but I’m beginning to forget what it tastes like at all.

Castle Panic review

Building your castle right in the middle of the forest was probably not the smartest idea, so you shouldn’t be all that surprised that monsters are coming out of the woods to tear it down. Such is the dilemma of Castle Panic, from Fireside Games. Castle Panic is a cooperative game in which the players must defend their castle from hordes of goblins, orcs and trolls. The monstrous horde reigns victorious if they are able to destroy the castle, the players are triumphant if they defeat the entire gang of monsters laying in wait. Castle Panic is for one to six players and takes about 45 minutes. I think that it's a fun game and a great introduction to cooperative board games due to it's simplicity, but ultimately it lacks the depth and strategy that would allow it to be a great game. 

The castle consists of six towers in the middle of the board surrounded by six walls that help to defend it. Working from the inside out the castle is surrounded by several colored rings; swordsmen, knights, archers and the forest. Monsters in the forest are in wait and can’t be attacked until they emerge, monsters in the other rings can be attacked by the appropriate soldier. Example: a troll that has moved into the Knight ring in the green section can be attacked by a Green Knight card. Monsters are randomly placed in the forest when they come into the game and on each turn they move one step closer to the castle, ultimately destroying the walls and moving onto the towers. There are 49 monster tokens in the beginning of the game and the players have to defeat them all in order to achieve victory. The game sort of works as a puzzle as the players attempt to piece together the best offense by anticipating where monsters will wind up on a given player’s turn.

Each turn the players have a chance to trade cards with one another, and if the game has a key strategy it is trading cards between castle defenders. The strategy is simple to grasp and, unfortunately, does not get much more complex which does not bode well for repeated plays of Castle Panic. Most of the moves are self evident. If there is a goblin in the Red Archer zone and one of the other players has a Red Archer, you should trade for it. You can only trade once per turn so it is important to prioritize and make sure that the trade you make is the best one available. Aside from that you should just kill anything that you can reach.

The oddest thing about Castle Panic is the Master Slayer. When a player defeats a monster they claim it’s monster token and at the end of the game players total these up and the one with the most points is given the title of Master Slayer. So, everyone wins but one player wins more than the others? That seems real weird to me and does not mesh all that well with the team dynamic. I suspect that the designers probably added this to increase the competition in what is generally a pretty easy game. But I’m not so sure about it.

The game components are simple and do the job. There is not much to the game. Castle Panic consists of some towers, some walls, monster tokens and a deck of cards. The art is just okay. I would like to have seen some variation amongst the creatures that are attacking. The orcs all look the same as one another, they must have some real military discipline going in on those woods to get the traditionally chaotic creatures to all agree to the same uniform. I do like the Boss monsters that lead the others. The best components are the actual walls and towers. They are on little stands and lend some depth to the board. They fall into the unnecessary but enhances the game category. The board is sort of bland and the one I have is a little crinkled around the edges. I would like to have seen maybe some enemy encampments, siege engines, or really anything else put on the board just as a meaningless detail. As it is it is just a big field with circles on it.

I think that the biggest issue I have with Castle Panic is that it seems to be pretty easy. Actually, it seems to be real easy. I’ve played the game about a half dozen times now and only once did I actually feel panicked, which I sort of assumed to be the signature emotion of the game. A cooperative game needs to be hard. It is one of the reasons why Pandemic is such a success, most of the time you are probably not going to win. It’s creates tension and drama and a nice feeling of accomplishment when you finally succeed. Same thing with Shadows Over Camelot. There are suggestions in the instructions about making the game harder, the most difficult of which is the version in which the castle starts with no walls, just the towers to defend. It was close, but we were able to defeat that one as well and I’m just not sure where we take the game from here. I’m not sure how much our game group will continue to go back to this game since we will keep winning. I don’t need the ego boost that comes with continued winning, I’d prefer the challenge that makes a great game.