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Tag Archives: Castle Panic

Playing the Game Wrong

More and more often we’ve been discovering that we’ve been playing some of our games wrong.

Well, maybe not wrong, but it seems like some rules somehow slip by us. Sometimes we purposely ignore certain rules. With co-op games, we always play with our cards face up on the table. It just makes it easier to strategize. Other times it’s just that we messed up.

Some of our mistakes we discovered because of a BoardGameGeek thread. Others were discovered after rereading the rules again.

With 7 Wonders, we didn’t realize you couldn’t play multiple copies of the same card. No one ever questioned it, so we never looked at the rules for clarification.

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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.

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Chubby Unicorn’s Favorite Games 2017 Edition

When we first started working on this blog, we filled out player profiles which included our favorite games. I listed mine as Castle Panic, Shadows Over Camelot, and 7 Wonders.

In the nearly two years since then, we’ve played a lot of new games or revisited older games with a new expansion or end goal. A lot of other things have changed as well, so I don’t think I’d pick the same games today as I did back then.

Castle Panic is a great co-op game, and it’s often one I like to pick as a new game for someone.

Shadows Over Camelot we don’t play as much. It’s a co-op game, but with how many quests there are to complete, you end up splitting up and working alone, so a lot of the time you don’t feel like you’re working together.

7 Wonders is a great game, but we haven’t been able to play it lately. It’s hard to be excited about a game that doesn’t see a lot of play. Right now it’s just Professor and me, so we’re more likely to play 7 Wonders Duel.

So I think today I would say my favorites are:
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Castle Panic plus Wizard’s Tower and Dark Titan

As a group we’ve played Castle Panic several times, and we’ve enjoyed the Wizard’s Tower Expansion, so when we saw the Dark Titan expansion, it was an easy buy.

We had to do a refresher on the game because we’ve played Dead Panic more recently and, while similar, there are some very different aspects to game play. As usual, there were times in the game when things looked really bad. We had several Mega Boss monsters out, things were on fire, there were plagues. It was craziness! We prioritized keeping the Wizard’s Tower intact because the wizard cards were helping us to keep monsters with special kill zones in those zones (i.e. the Gargoyle). President Gamer relied on the regular Castle cards over the Wizard’s Deck, while the rest of us took a mix of cards. We managed to light Agranok on fire, but unfortunately a single fire can’t kill him since his last two HP have to be taken at the same time. Thankfully when we lit him on fire, we were also able to move him back, giving us more time to destroy him.

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Castle Panic and Wizard Tower Expansion with guests

Guest Players: Broadway, Mermaid, and Smurfette

For my birthday, I had a few friends over, and we ended up playing Castle Panic (one of my favorites!).  The Professor and I were the only ones who had experience with this game, and we suggested we play with our cards face up on the table.  This let us talk out a lot of the strategies and answer questions the new players had about their cards.  We had some unlucky Monster draws at the beginning of the game (Giant Boulders, Flaming Boulders, Plagues, and Draw Additional Monsters), but found the Wizard Deck to be extremely helpful in dealing with the repercussions.  Smurfette also had a few awesome turns that helped keep the monsters at bay.  Things were beginning to look bleak, though.  We had three walls left (all had been rebuilt at some point and one reinforced), and just two Towers (one being the Wizard Tower), but we managed to pull off a win.  Mermaid thought it was fitting that I dealt the final blow, it being my birthday and all.

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Dead Panic

We really enjoy playing Castle Panic, so when Dead Panic came out, we had to have it.

Game play is similar to Castle Panic in that zombies appear and move in the 6 arcs and players use cards to kill the zombies before they get to the inner ring (the cabin). However, there are a lot of differences. This time players are on the board as tokens (rather than just being defenders of the castle) and can only attack zombies within their token’s range. The Cabin Cards are similar to the deck in Castle Panic except when this deck runs out, that’s it. You’ve searched the entire cabin, and there’s nothing left to find. Another new element is the Bait token. This gets passed around during the game because whoever has the Bait token is the player the zombies will come after. In Castle Panic players place new monsters at the end of their turns, but in Dead Panic everyone takes two actions, an Event card is drawn, and then new zombies are placed and moved. Winning is different as well: in this game the goal is to assemble the radio, call the van, and get everyone into the van. Once all players who are still alive (someone might get turned into a zombie along the way) enter the van, the game is won, even if the cabin is completely destroyed.

For this play through, the cast is as follows:
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