Recall and reflexes come together in Polar Panic an easy to play game that’s perfect for all ages, however does need a fair bit of space.
If you’re looking for a meal in the frosty arctics of the utmost Northern Hemisphere then you’ll need to ice fish, however, in the case of Polar Panic, you’d better be paying attention because it’s a case of first-come-first-served as players race to claim pairs of fish from a rapidly decreasing pool of fishing spots.
Every other week my family head to our local board game cafe, the eldest goes off and joins a D&D table while the rest of us settle in for a new board game. As such, we play through a lot of quick party games and kids games. Polar Panic is an excellent fit for what we needed, being an incredibly fast game of memory-matches with looming danger from the get-go.
Set up is simple. You take all of the circular disk cards, shuffle them up and then lay them out face down. Each of those cards will have characters (Fish, Fishes, Fisherman or Polar Bear) on them, and the aim is to spot the paired fish and slap your hands on them when you see them. The trick is that the cards can, and often do, have multiple fish on them, and players only turn over one card per turn.
The wrinkle is that the fishermen cause a table reset, with any exposed cards being flipped over, and the polar bear ends the whole game and leaves you with just points to tally up. It’s not all rushing to grab cards though as grabbing incorrectly at a fish card will cost you one of your banked fish, so you need to be constantly recalling the cards that are already in play so that you don’t mess up.
Polar Panic is incredibly easy to play and could even technically be a great warm-up title to be played with larger groups — you could also, likely, combine two copies of it to make for a longer game.
Polar Panic is available now from Amazon, and other storefronts
