Castle Panic

I bought Castle Panic this weekend, primarily to play with my kids, who are quite enamored with Plants vs. Zombies. And it works quite well as a fun co-op with kids. I imagine it would work very well as a good gateway/party game for adults who don't know better about board games.

The simplicity of this game just screams variants. I'll probably wind up applying some rules form my old Doppleganger design, to create a nice traitor variant, even though a lot of this seems stolen from Battlestar Galactica at this point.

Things such as:

-- Players are dealt loyalty cards at the start of the game.
-- All cards are held as closed.
-- Discard pile is face down.
-- Player select 2 monsters, and return 1 to the stock, while playing the other one face down to the board. While moving normally, the monsters are turned up with the first hit; all effects occur then.

I may have to limit trading a bit to counter the effect of the players having control over the monsters.

Also, there would have to be some kind of accusation element added into it. I'll have to think about that for the time being.