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Castle Panic: Engines of War

We’re big fans of Castle Panic. We already had the expansions Wizard’s Tower and Dark Titan, so when we heard about Engines of War, we knew we had to have it as well. It took awhile for us to find it (as it was out of stock on Amazon for quite a while), so we were even more excited when we were finally able to buy it.

Engines of War adds some new monsters and tokens, a Keep for the center of your castle, and then, well, engines of war to both sides. The monsters get things like a Battering Ram and an Encampment while the players get things like a Catapult and Traps. One of the new monsters is the Breathtaker which keeps players from trading cards! We really didn’t like that one.

It also adds a Resource Deck and an Engineer. Depending on whether or not you have the other expansions, there’s a list of cards and monsters you remove from the game. Because of the new Resource Deck, you remove all the Brick and Mortar from the original deck (4 of each). These are now found in the Resource Deck and can be used to build other things besides Walls. For example, Mortar is needed to build a Pit Trap. The Resource Deck also has Wood and Rope (important for building that Catapult and Ballista). The Engineer is the one who builds your engines of war, so players place the appropriate Resource Cards on him. Once all the needed Resources have been played, you get to add that engine of war token to the board.

There is now a set list of the 6 monsters you begin the game with (including an Ogre and the Gargoyle, yikes!), and you set aside 6 Orcs to man the engines (2 per engine of war for the monsters).

We played with all of the expansions (we chose the level 3 Agranok), so there was a lot going on. We didn’t use the Engineer as much as we probably should have, and we only used the Catapult once or twice because we were so focused on controlling the monsters on the board. At one point we had 8 Imps, 1 Troll, the Doppelganger, and 3 other Special Monsters on the board along with Agranok. It was looking pretty bad. It didn’t help when our Keep was taken out by a Giant Boulder either. Despite these set backs, we did manage to win the game with the Wizard’s Tower still standing!

The additions to the monster side of the game were much more noticeable because they’re elements you have to contend with. You can’t really ignore the Battering Ram headed for your castle.

I think we’re definitely going to have to play more with this expansion to really figure out how to get the most use out of the new elements the players control (like the Engineer), and it definitely made the game take a bit longer for us, but it was a lot of fun.

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