Fireside Games FSG01013 My First Castle Panic, Multicoloured

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I urge you to get this game for your children, nieces, nephews, grandchildren, or any child that you spend time with. In that way it turns out that My First Castle Panic is teaching our daughter a lot more than taking turns and cooperation - it’s helping her work on her shapes and colors as well.

If the goblins get to the castle, they knock it down (first an outer wall, then the whole castle) and you lose. These wonderfully illustrated cards by Cam Kendell feature champions of the castle (albeit a bit younger than the fighters in regular Castle Panic).You’re excited to play tabletop games with your kids, but most are way too complicated for little ones.

Luck is still present in the game, and sometimes you might just not draw the cards you need or draw a difficult monster that throws off your strategy but it usually feels manageable. We like to put the bottom of the box behind the castle because it is the dungeon where defeated monsters go. The hardest thing for them to grasp was the special abilities of the monsters (and strategy), but the iconographic is pretty clear, and after a few games I didn’t have to help them with that anymore.I can’t help but remark on the fact that the goblins in My First Castle Panic are definitely teaching our daughter some useful skills. It’s simple and quick to learn and the whole game plays out in around 10-15 minutes which is great for younger children.

Once an adult shows them how it works, it’d be pretty easy for most older kids to play the game themselves without too much supervision. One was a variant of Pretty, Pretty Princess, and that has been quite popular, but mostly just for taking the jewelry and making daddy wear it around the house. In the game, monsters follow a single path toward a single, large, eye-catching castle, which is protected by one wall.

We played three times in a row when we first played it and they have asked to play it numerous times since then. On a player’s turn, they first must draw a card and then can either play a card from their own hand or ask another player to help by playing one of their cards. If you stop all 16 of them (sending them back to the game box, which is cleverly designed as a dungeon to house the defeated goblins), you win. My Castle First Panic may only have a shelf life of a couple of years before they move on to more complex or fulfilling games but as a starting point it is great and reflecting upon my opening to this review, it is such a huge step up from the first board games I played.