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And yes, it struck me while watching Carpenter's The Thing for the sixth time, without reservation his absolute pièce de résistance: Why isn't there a game that simulates the intense paranoia of this classic? Sure, I know Battlestar Galactica comes close paranoia-wise, but it's still far away from the claustrophobic feel of Carpenter's icy survival trip.
Five weeks of no sleep, midnight brainstorming sessions in my backyard with my insomniac neighbor, and at least four gallons of politically correct Ikea-water – you have no idea what that Swedish stuff does with your head – later and I had a rough draft for a game. The working title had haunted me right from the start, and I wrote it in large cinematographic capitals with a marker on the cover page of my notepad: PANIC STATION.
Add another five weeks of almost no sleep and there it was – the first rough prototype of the game.
And boy, did it look ugly. It was very minimal and used some primitive clip art that even the clumsiest child would run away from. It looked like a first grade project gone awry, but I figured that if people enjoy this version, then I'm on to something.
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What I wanted to simulate with the game was the idea of a team of people being trapped in a situation where they had to share the same location, but weren't exactly sure that they could trust each other, while needing to find out soon who was okay and who was actually malicious – all in order to survive the harsh circumstances they needed to confront. A sort of balancing act of having a healthy dose of mistrust without getting overtaken by paranoia as players who do will not be able to complete the goal of the game, since the tools for defense are the same as those needed to complete the mission of the game.
At heart Panic Station is relatively easy to play: 4-6 players control two characters each: a trooper send by the government to a desolate army base and a mind-controlled android that's helping this trooper track down a deadly parasite that has overtaken the location and wiped out the entire crew to create a hive to breed offspring. Sounds creepy? Good!
Players use a limited set of Action Points to guide both characters through the "station", which is built on the table while exploring. Along the way they perform search actions in rooms to gather equipment and eliminate roaming parasites that appear out of the dark. There is some tactical decision-making right from the start as the placement of the rooms is crucial and the positioning of your characters opposed to the encounters will make the difference between life and death.
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From clip to hip
While the android has the ability to eliminate the creatures, the trooper must try to locate the hive and destroy it. This is done by playing three Gas Can cards (to fill his Flamethrower) that are part of the search deck containing equipment cards. But, now comes the trick, the little wicked twist that makes the game:
During the first turns of the game while exploring the unmapped rooms of the station, one of the players will secretly receive a "Host" card that represents him being infected by the alien life form.
Enter: 40 minutes of intense paranoia.
From now on he will do anything possible to prevent the team from locating and destroying the hive. This is done by "infecting" other players, turning them one by one to his side. As you can imagine, right from the word go the game is riddled with paranoia as nobody trusts anybody but must at the same time work together to complete the main mission.
When I started to design the game, it was crucial to find a mechanism that forced interaction between the players, but the interaction could not involve open information. I wanted to follow the hidden information-path to create a feeling of uncertainty that the game desperately needed and that made me think of a blind trade system that players perform during their explorations. During such a transaction, players pass a face-down item card to a team member in the same location. At the start of the game, however, each player has received a set of "Infection" cards; since these cards share the same card back as a regular card, the host and the other infected players can play this card at any time instead of a regular item.
Because of this blind trade mechanism, it is crucial for both sides to carefully consider their next steps. The infecting members of the team need to play low profile first, gaining trust by doing some innocent trades, then striking at exactly the right moment. The humans need to closely watch the behavior of all the team members and use the tools of the station to gain information, such as a heat scan system that allows them to scan the entire base and determine the number of infectors present. A well-timed scan could be enough for a member to know whether those soldiers two rooms away are okay or are in fact planning a brutal ploy.
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Room by room, players explore the station
When you write down a theoretical mechanism, there is this part of you that dreams about the potential for this idea to work, but it's not until your first playtest that you get the raw proof as to whether it actually does. To my own amazement, this worked; five minutes into the first test with some gaming friends there was already nervous laughter, fierce accusations and the pure unfiltered paranoia you find in a girls-only Catholic school after a valuable piece of jewelry is stolen during the night.
In short, the core system did what it needed to do: Created intense paranoia that grabbed player by the throat and never let go.
Panic Station is all about identifying the alien players through behavior, and doing efficiently timed heat checks of the building that offer team members crucial information of how many human and alien players are currently active. The main dilemma comes from the sparse Gas Can cards; players need them to both fend off infection attacks and destroy the hive, so too much paranoia can seriously lower the chances of the human side winning the game.
What I learned design-wise with this project is that interaction between players, even if it is non-verbal, is crucial for the future of boardgaming. If board games stand a chance against the ever-increasing technological advancements in the field of entertainment, it will be because board games offer a social structure in which players can interact with other players. An environment in which what happens on the table is only part of the appeal; the meta-game is just as important.
Panic Station, debuting at Spiel 2011 from White Goblin Games with Stronghold Games taking it under license for a North American release, is my attempt to incorporate this human factor into the reigns of cardboard and dice.
David Ausloos
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From reactor room to storage room to a team search location to the parasite hive – it's a long walk...
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Game preview, by W. Eric Martin
David has succinctly described Panic Station above: One human character must collect three gas cans to power a flamethrower in the hive room to destroy the parasites and win the game. The parasite host, on the other hand, must prevent this from happening in order for him and any other infected parties to win.
One nice aspect of the design of this cooperative game is that no one starts as the parasite host, yet the host will definitely come into play within a certain number of rounds. How this works is that the host card is shuffled among the top 8-12 search cards, depending on the number of players, and everyone gets to enjoy a brief feeling of camaraderie before the situation heads south.
What's more, once the host is determined, the infection spreads from that character and not an outside force, as in Battlestar Galactica, through the blind trades David described above. What David didn't mention, though, is that players are forced to trade whenever either of their characters enters a room occupied by another player's character. The forced trade makes sense as anyone in a claustrophobic environment isn't going to just give a chin wave and keep walking, but would instead ask what the other character has seen and learned while checking out the station. And that's when an infection would strike – not that I'm speaking from experience or anything. Honest, I'm not infected!
The Infection cards are color coded, and a player can give someone else an Infection card only if it's his color. Thus, if you discover a heat scanner while searching the rooms and use it on another player – looking at that player's cards – you'll not only learn whether that person is the parasite host, but how many Infection cards he holds, which tells you how many other players have been infected. If the player holds an infection card of another color, then you know that person is infected as well as the person who gave him the card. But will you get everyone else to believe you when you drop that info on the group?!
Each round, once the parasites move and attack anyone in the same room, each player has 1-4 action points (APs) depending on the health of his characters, and he can spend those points to:
1. Explore, adding a new room to the station, with most rooms having something distinct about them: a parasite trigger, storage of extra goods, a run icon to show you get extra movement through this room, security doors that can be passed through only with a keycard, and so on. You must place the room adjacent to you, if possible, and doors must line up with doors. The parasite hive will be one of the final five locations in the deck of twenty, so you better stay in good health until you find it.
2. Move, with each room costing 1 AP to enter.
3. Fire the android's gun, either at parasites or other players. Weak parasites appear first and require only one shot to kill, while the double-tough parasites appear later.
4. Search a location, which gets you a search card from the deck, representing additional gas cans, better weapons, ammo, parasite attacks, armor, grenades, first aid and more. The storage rooms hold more material, and the team search rooms give something to everyone in the room, which may or may not be good. After a location has been searched once, it's flipped over to reveal a red icon instead of black, indicating that the next time this room is searched, the noise attracts a parasite, which is randomly placed in one of the adjacent rooms.
5. Activate a computer terminal, which lets you add a location anywhere in the station, open all locked security doors until the end of the round, or perform a heat scan. For this latter action, each player places one "check" card (showing infected or clean) in the truth pile and discards the other. Someone shuffles these cards, then reveals them, showing everyone how many infected players are currently in the station.
6. Heal in the sick bay, which boosts your health points and give you more actions and less death.
7. Use one of the items you've acquired, with some items requiring an AP cost or being a one-shot effect. A player must have at least five cards in hand at all times, so if playing a card would drop you below five, you can't play it, which means you need to search more, which means you're probably attracting parasites, which means you're doomed.
Okay, maybe you're not doomed.
No, I'm sorry. You are.
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