Castle Panic

To set up Castle Panic, place the circular board featuring concentric rings and colored arcs in the center of the table. Assemble the walls and towers using plastic stands, placing a circle of towers in the center castle ring and walls on the line just outside the swordsman ring. Collect specific starting monster tokens (three goblins, two orcs, and one troll), placing them face-up in the outer Archer ring with their highest health numbers pointing toward the castle. Shuffle the remaining face-down monster tokens into a pile. Finally, shuffle the castle cards and deal a starting hand to each player according to the player-count rules, leaving hands face up for cooperative play.

The primary objective of Castle Panic is fully cooperative. Players must defend Bravehold Castle from a relentless horde of goblins, orcs, and trolls pouring out of the surrounding forests. The team wins if they successfully defeat and eliminate every single monster tile from the game while at least one castle tower remains standing. Conversely, the players lose instantly if all castle towers are destroyed, regardless of how many walls or monsters remain.

A player's turn consists of six sequential steps. First, draw up to your maximum hand limit of castle cards. Second, you may optionally discard one card and draw a replacement. Third, you may trade one card with another player. Fourth, play as many valid attack and special cards from your hand as possible to damage monsters or manipulate the board. Fifth, all monsters on the board advance one space inward toward the castle, damaging walls or towers in their path. Sixth, draw two new monster tokens from the pile, roll the movement die to place them on the board, and resolve any special token effects immediately.

Castle Panic is natively a cooperative game without traditional individual scoring; players either win as a team or lose together. However, the rulebook includes alternative modes, such as the Master Slayer mode, where players cooperate to defeat the monsters but individually score points for every monster they personally slay, with the highest score winning at the end.

The game concludes in one of two ways. If the monsters manage to destroy the final remaining tower in the castle, the players instantly lose the game. If the players manage to survive until the draw pile and all spawned monster tokens are completely exhausted and every remaining monster on the board is defeated, the players achieve a cooperative victory.