You’re relaxing at home, enjoying a rewatch of Akira Kurosawa’s seminal 1954 action film Seven Samurai, when a thought pops into your head: “Someone should adapt this into a co-operative version of Blackjack and also add furries.” Your heart sinks. You’re thinking those dangerous thoughts again, the ones your therapist warned you about. You entreat your brain to come back to reality as intense feelings of disassociation sweep over you once again. A few harrowing minutes pass. Gradually, you return from the abyss. You barely made it this time. You schedule another appointment with your therapist. Two weeks later, you are on Board Game Geek browsing through Antoine Bauza’s list of published games. You really like 7 Wonders, so you want to see what else he’s made. You are just about to ask yourself why this French dude is so obsessed with China and Japan when you see it: Samurai Spirit. It’s co-operative Blackjack. And it has furries. You cancel the appointment. Of all the games in the world that don’t need to exist, I think Samurai Spirit might not need to exist the most. Thematically, it’s pure dreck, an insipid knock off of a classic piece of cinema with the nauseating addition of furry transformations. Mechanically, it’s a crude co-op puzzler largely determined by the shuffle of the deck. The production is decent enough, but decent illustrations of furry samurai men are still illustrations of furry samurai men. If you’re in the mood for a laugh, check out the “Author’s Notes” section at the end…
In a sea of uninteresting co-op games, Castle Panic is particularly uninteresting. Releasing hot on the heels of 2008’s genre watershed Pandemic, it had a brief flash of popularity in the form of expansions, alternate versions, and spin-offs which has since tapered off. Revisiting the game now, it’s hard to believe it was ever en vogue. Castle Panic has none of Pandemic‘s thematic creativity, social puzzle solving, or clever narrative structure. It doesn’t even seem to try. Instead of learning from and iterating on successful tabletop designs, Castle Panic‘s primary artistic influence appears to be early 21st century web browser tower defense games. And, like many games of that ilk and era, Castle Panic feels amateurish, desultory, and unfinished. It has the elegance of a mid-stage prototype, the tactical depth of a “match 3” mobile game, and the social impact of a jigsaw puzzle. The first thing you’ll notice when you open up Castle Panic‘s box is how cheap the components are. Now, I am a far cry away from being a snob in this regard, but this is some of the worst chipboard stock I’ve seen in a published game. The tiles and standees feel like they’re made of pressed construction paper, giving off the impression that the game is a prototype that just so happens to be on store shelves. The cards are even worse, like unpressed construction paper. But these are trivialities compared to the game’s real problems — and the precise psychological ramifications of lackluster productions are impossible to define in pragmatic terms…