Let the Panic ensue! Playing Castle Panic! PART 2: With the Wizard's tower expansion

I was actually so happy with how this game turned out that I did decide to go onto the game number 2, but this time trying it with the expansion which comes with a wizard tower which you replace one of the other towers with, this tower so long as it stands will give you another deck of cards specific to this tower that can greatly help you in your quest to slay all the monsters. However, you take out some of the original monsters and add them to all the new monsters that are in this expansion. There are 6 new bosses that are much harder to kill than in the original ones (You still have all 4 of the original bosses within the bag of doom! which you get in the expansion, not sure why you wouldn't have gotten it in the original but it's just a black bag with the face that you see on the back of the pieces.)

You get a wizard's tower in this expansion as well as some new monsters to contend to!
In this scenario you draw monsters from the bag and place them randomly around the board. Any boss
monsters or non-monster tokens get thrown back into the bag. Then you draw 3 of the 6 monsters from a
separate pile and add them without looking at them. 

It is a whole new ball game with the expansion added. I had a lot of fun playing but as you can see below halfway through the game I was in dire trouble! Everything was coming at me so fast and with the Basilisk on the board I couldn't discard! It really sucked! The Hydra wasn't any more fun either ( For each point of damage to the Hydra, 2 Imps appear in the forest in the same arc. Basically you want to try and kill it off immediately and only deal with the Imps which were one hit point each so they weren't so bad to kill. 

But the game went even worse for me after this when I lost my wizard's tower. I was drawing the wrong kind of cards as well. Eventually all these got into my castle but it was the phoenix that got the last tower and I inevitably lost the game. 

I won't go into details of all the new monsters so that will be a surprise to you when you get there! But here are the ones that really killed me in the end. Just so you can see why I had such a hard time killing them. I wasn't able to get to them fast enough.

Gargoyle - immune to knights, swordmen, all boulders (Something that you can draw, roll the dice to see which arc it will roll down, kills everything that it can in it's path but will destroy your wall or tower), Tar (Tar one creature for one round, they do not move forward this round), and Drive Him Back!(You are able to drive one monster back to the forest ring)

Phoenix - Same  immunity as Gargoyle. Catches all Monsters in the same space on fire when destroyed.

All in all I still had a load of fun playing even if I didn't win this game. It was just interesting to see the difference between the 2 games while playing solo. I know that each game can and will be different depending on what you draw and what other bosses you play..

I say today was pretty successful! 

Let the Panic ensue! Playing Castle Panic! PART 1: Original game (no expansion)

Okay so today I went to my local game shop because there was supposed to be a zombie game being played. I decided to wait it out and play a couple rounds of a game I own called Castle Panic. (One without the wizard's tower expansion and the other with the expansion.) Both games were pretty fun and was able to get through both before some people showed up to play a whole different game then the one that I had been waiting on...

Anyhow this is what the boxes for this game look like.

1-6 players.
About an hour to play
Co-operative yet competitive game.
You can either keep the monster tokens you
slay and whoever has the most points is the
Master Slayer or don't.

This expansion is packed with a lot of punch! It's pretty hard to
get through playing it with other people! I found it pretty hard
to play on my own. 

This is a pretty fun game with friends but can be very challenging! I have known for quite a few years that you can play this game solo and so I figured why not try now? I didn't want to walk home in the rain and also wanted to see if people were going to show up. By the way there were a lot of other games going on like Magic: The gathering (Commander & Modern games), Warhammer, and Star Wars X-Wing. When people showed up I got to play Smash Up which is another of my favourite games to play but it isn't a solo game.

So anyhow I will post a few pics of my 2 games I played solo and explain a bit of what happened!

The board is comprised of arcs (the different colours and rings; forest, Archer, Knight and Swordsmen before the inner circle of your castle.

The above picture is of the basic set up of the original game. . As you can see there are monsters moving in from all sides of the board towards your castle in the middle. The goal of this game is to kill all the monsters and have at least one tower in the middle standing. You are faced with 3 goblins, 2 orcs and a 1 troll at the beginning of the game. I generally just roll the dice and whatever it lands on I will place the first monster and pick them at random to go around the board. It seems to help a lot.

This was my opening hand, depending on the amount of players, will determine how many cards each player starts with and how many trades each turn you can have. On a single player though you get to start off with a 6 card hand and are able to discard and replace 2 cards.
There are 4 different kinds of soldiers (As I am going to call them) you can possibly get as well as a wide array of other cards that can help you to try and win the game. There are Swordsmen, Knights, Archers, and Heroes. Each can only hit in their ring, but the Hero can hit in any ring except for the forest. Any three of these will kill a monster outright, best to use them on bigger foes unless you are in a really tight spot and need something too close gone. The Barbarian is a wild card that can hit anywhere even inside the castle.

This pic is about halfway through the game. As you can see I still had a lot of towers left but then I got hit with the draw 4 monsters, draw 3 monsters and one of the 4 bosses: The Goblin King, which you then draw 3 additional monsters. I ended up drawing a plague on archers, as well as The Troll Mage which moves all monsters one space closer to the inner circle. I ended up in a pretty bad position with most of the monsters too close to the walls for comfort.

This was my hand after all that went down. I really should have played the missing card (second from the right)
Lesson learned!

Well at this point I was thinking that I was probably still not doing too bad with all my walls.. but everything was too close for comfort so in the ensuing rounds I ended up losing a lot of walls.

I slayed as many as I could until alll I could do was sit and watch as these 2 as they went around the castle (clockwise) went around the castle. Luckily when they hit walls or towers they go down a hit point, one died hitting the next tower while the other died at the next one.

But I was victorious in the end! both monsters killed themselves on the other 2 towers. It was such a close game that was for sure!

Though I decided to go on! Read part 2 to see what happened when I decided to play with the expansion!