Don’t Panic continues to be an approachable, family-friendly game of quick-thinking and list making.
Iteration, not innovation, is the way that you keep a B-tier board game on shelves. Don’t Panic is a perfect example of that, looking back I can find versions dating back to 1987, including one from 1996 labelled as ‘vintage’ (I turned to dust reading that). It’s continued to sell, and remarket, successfully over the years through careful tweaks and modernisations.
The current iteration of Don’t Panic comes in a six-sided box, with a simple, race-style board for score keeping. However, it also automates some of the difficulty selection that was previously left to players. The box also includes a modernised version of the timer, which has a comedically oversized ‘big red button’ on the top.
Don’t Panic is, and always has been, an incredibly simple game about drawing a card and then naming a certain number of items that fit the category on the card. In this case, the numbers and topic are (unless you’re using the kid rules, which allow you to simply guess at the easiest category on the card) defined by the colour of the tile you’re on, with Green being easiest and Red being hardest. The rest of it is left up to the player and the timer.
Naturally, if there are only a handful of options within the category (Spaghetti Westerns, Italian Car Brands) then the hardest difficulty might only require a few names to be mentioned… The counterpoint to this is that the timer is always ticking away at exactly the same rate, so if you struggle to compete in an easier category then you’re going to end up getting the same points as somebody who struggles on the harder ones. It makes the rules and rulings clear and succinct, with the only human element in there being that the person who reads the card to the current player is also the one who decides when they’ve completed the task.
The nicest feature, although Don’t Panic is clearly something that’s been refined to a fine point, is that the three different difficulty questions are all on the same card, rather than drawn from different decks. It means that you can play the difficulty down for kids that are playing. It also feels like something that wouldn’t have happened a few years back, when there would have been 1/3rd of the questions split over the same number of cards.
Don’t Panic is available now, you can also pick it up from Amazon.
