Engines of War Castle Panic Expansion Review

Engines of War is the third expansion for Castle Panic. NOTE- YOU WILL NEED Castle Panic to play, this is a true expansion and NOT a stand alone game!

Don’t let the small box fool you, it’s full of goodness!

A keep token
An Engineer Tile
A double-sided task tile
2 Spring trap tokens
2 Pit tokens
2 Barricade tokens
A catapult token
A ballista token
16 Resource cards
11 Monster tokens
3 Reference cards
A rulebook

How to Play

You will not notice too many changes on your setup for Engines of War, depending on what other expansions you are playing with or if you’re just playing with the base game. It will really boil to removing certain tokens and cards from those games. The only minor difference to the basic play. When you draw up, you can take from the Castle deck or the Resource deck. If your know Castle Panic, you will feel right at home here.

Resource cards replace the old brick and mortar cards and include new brick and mortar cards, along with wood and rope. Resource cards count toward your hand limit.

Did I mention you get engineers? Yep just like Bob the builder said

“We can build it!”

So, you might be asking yourself, Why do I want this engineer, and what he can he do for me? Well he can build two types of implements: Field Equipment and Castle Equipment. Some of the field equipment you can build is a barricade, a wall that will hold back the monsters one turn and deal 1 damage to the monster that hits it first. Pits with wood and mortar is another thing, basically an barricades. And we now get traps! A spring trap throws a monster back to the forest ring but deals no damage.

The game starts with the Keep in the center of the board, fear not if it shall fall, as it can be rebuilt for a single Resource card of each flavor. From the Keep, the engineer really will shine and they can add a catapult for rope and two wood, or a ballista for two rope and a wood, A player must sacrifice two cards. if you wish to fire off one of you fancy new Catapults, or Ballista

With all these new weapons at your finger tips, Monsters have gotten a bit of boost as well, and we see some new faces as well. a Breathtaker, who prevents you from trading cards while its on the board, a Shaman, who heals all monsters on the board each turn, and Goblin Saboteurs, of which there are two, who destroy structures and cause you to banish cards. Beware the Saboteurs!

Oh and did I mention that the monster get some siege engines of there own! Siege Towers carry a force of two orcs, they will operate the tower and come out swinging if the tower is destroyed. The Siege Tower moves to the castle ring and sits there until destroyed. You might want to destroy that fast as, you cannot rebuild the wall in that sector.

Final thoughts

The components are top notch as you would expect, the artwork is very colorful and very well done. Engines of War ramps up the game a lot, it adds some more detail and strategy to the game, but it still keeps the great the cooperative fun of Castle Panic. and besides, who does not love a good ballista?

Head over to the official page for more information or to order directly from Fireside Games.

Are for those that prefer you may order from Amazon