Board Game Review: Panic Station

The other day I took a trip up to Lost Atlantis Games, located at C3 - 32386 Fletcher Avenue in Mission (The website is fairly new, and not every game that he has in stock is represented yet).  This is an awesome place to go for great Board Games.  The owner, Darrell, is an awesome guy and possesses an almost contagious sense of enthusiasm and passion for board games, which, in my opinion, is the best reason for going into the business of selling board games.  He has a vast knowledge of many different board games, and does a pretty good job of keeping a finger on the pulse of the board game industry.  He even stocks a handful of very rare titles that are almost impossible to acquire in North American markets.  In addition to his regular stock, Darrell also has an extra shelf full of different games from his personal collection which he is willing to open up and show off and demonstrate the mechanics in order to help give players a good idea of how the games play.  His eventual goal is to grow the business to a point where he can relocate to a larger store that could provide a larger stock of games and have extra tables so people can try out games before and after they make their purchase.  At the moment the store is rather small, occupying the space of a single office, and can at most fit up to six customers at a time.  I really hope his business succeeds, as the Abbotsford/Mission area needs a good board game store like Lost Atlantis.

On this particular trip, Darrell showed me a handful of games that all looked quite intriguing, and would all likely be well received by those that I regularly play with.  All the games I mention here were all games that Darrell had just gotten in recently, and are not on the website yet at the time of my writing this.

There was Quarriors: An interesting hybrid between a deck building game, and a dice game, with a monster battling game  à la Pokemon or Yu-Gi-Oh.  Another Game was Space Alert:, a real-time cooperative board game where the players assume the roles of the crew of an Spaceship exploring the final frontier, and having to react to events as they occur as they occur as narrated by soundtracks that feature shipwide alerts and blaring red-alert klaxons.  There was also Lord of the Rings: Nazgul, an intriguing twist on the typical games that feature the epic struggle between good and evil from Tolkien's masterpiece novels.  Instead of the playing Frodo, Gandalf, Aragorn, or any of the other heroes from the story, the players get the play the black robed ringwraith servants of Sauron, working to bring about the defeat the free peoples of Middle Earth and cover the land in a second darkness before the ringbearer reaches Mount Doom.  Dungeon Petz also looked pretty awesome, as it had the hilarious theme of raising and breeding monsters to sell to evil overlords of various tastes for them to put in their dungeons.

The game I eventually settled on was Panic Station.  The reason that this game stood out to me was that it was a sci-fi thriller game, which was designed to evoke a feel similar to the movies from the Alien franchise, including the most recent addition, Prometheus, which the majority of our group had seen and thoroughly enjoyed.  There are some differences of course, but these make for a more interesting game.

The players are playing a group of human troopers and their loyal android companions as they explore an abandoned military base, each player is gets 1 human and 1 android to control.  Humans wield flamethrowers, androids wield guns.  Of course, the base is not entirely abandoned as the players will quickly find out.  It has fallen host to an infestation of alien parasites!  The only way stop the aliens from overrunning the base is by reaching the alien hive, hidden in the bowels of the station and destroying it.  With Fire!  A player needs to have three tanks of fuel in their inventory to provide adequate juice to power their flamethrowers and destroy the hive, and each player already begins play with a tank of fuel and a random item.  

Now with a team of 4-6 players, the most immediate thought is to trade all of the fuel to one player right away so that they can go and destroy the hive.  Easy right?  No.  As  you explore the station (rooms are cards that are randomly drawn, and then placed on the map as the players explore the station) in search of both the hive and new gear, one of the players will inevitably become host to the alien parasite, and will begin working against the humans, trying to infect their former teammates and keep them from obtaining their goal.  The way that the infected go about infecting other humans is by trading infection cards in a secret trade that must occur when a player enters a room with 1 or more characters belonging to another player (each player starts with three infection cards, which they cannot trade until they become infected) the only way that the humans can defend themselves from infection is by trading their fuel to the infected at the same time that an infection card is being traded to them.  The infected gets to keep the fuel, but the infection is nullified.  So the only way to survive infection is by trading your means to win the game, and if the infected end up with all the fuel, and the humans have no way of getting more, the game is practically over.  

The humans can try to destroy the infected using their androids' guns, however, the infected still have access to their inventory, as they did when they were on the human side, and so, are able to hold their own.

My group ended up playing through twice over, and each time that we played, the infected ended up winning by whittling the humans down to one or two people without enough fuel to be able to win.  

While it is understandable that we took about three times longer than the 30-40 minutes posted on the box, as we were all just learning how to play for the first time, the second time around still took us well over an hour.  I think that's more of a reflection of our group's playstyle, rather than an inaccuracy on the game's part., as my group seems to enjoy the amount of intrigue going on around the table.  The infected players did a good job of operating under cover and throwing misdirection around being thrown around, so the other players were often unsure of which players were and were not infected until it was too late for them to save themselves.

When I bought the game, I also bought a survival mini-expansion which added a handful of new equipment cards to add a little extra content to the game.  Included among these cards was the antidote, which was a very interesting card, as it could be used to cure a player from their infection.  The only problem was that the antidote does not protect the trader from being infected themselves, so such a trade is likely to merely switch which players are infected.  The only real use for the antidote is as a self-sacrifice gambit where the targeted infected happens to have a stockpile of gas from either before they became infected or from previous infection attempts, and having been cured of the infection, are then able to torch the hive and win the game.  

In terms of difficulty, the game seems to be weighted in the favor of the infected players, so it is quite difficult for the uninfected humans to actually win.  The game comes with some optional rules to adjust the difficulty, such as decreasing the infection cards each player has, allowing the host infected to use their host card as an infection card, or changing the amount of gas cans needed to burn the hive.  Some other ideas that we proposed were to have killed players return their inventory to the equipment draw deck (the deck has a tendency to run out by the late game), or to allow the antidote to provide defense against infection to the person trading it.

As a whole, I'd say that this game succeeds at bringing across the feel of a science fiction thriller movie in the form of a board game.  If you liked movies from the Alien series, or even Invasion of the Body Snatchers, I would definitely recommend this game.