DISCLAIMER: I have to confess that I played Doctor Panic for the purpose of writing this review with my boyfriend, mother-in-law and my 3 year old son. I had a games night planned specially to review the game but it fell through and so we had to make do. The relevancy of this confession will become apparent as you read on 🙂
I volunteered to review Doctor Panic as we play a lot of games in our household and hold regular games nights with friends and family. Our favorites are games like Talisman, Settlers of Catan, Cards Against Humanity etc, and with me being new to the Geek Pride team I thought this would be a great chance for me to get stuck into my first full review of something that really enjoy.
Unfortunately my planned games night with friends fell through, so we did a make-shift one with a few family members but still had plenty of excitement to try it out.
My first impressions were really positive as we opened it up. I absolutely love the box art and the contents are all really well made and of a high quality. Everything seems durable too, the board, tiles and ‘instruments’ are thick and would stand a good amount of playing.
As we set up the playing area, they even included hairnets, which of course is absolutely hilarious once everyone is wearing one.
It did start to dawn on me however that we might not have been the most suitable group of people to test this out. Intrigued though, we read through the rules.
The overview states:
You’re a medical team in the most reputable hospital of the region
Your goal is to save the patient who has just been admitted to the emergency room before the time runs out!
To do this, you must succeed at a series of medical tests. If all of the tests are successfully completed before the given time is over, it’s a victory – the patient is saved and everyone wins! Otherwise, how should we put this.. you’ll have to get more training!
Doctor Panic is a co-operative game which is played in real time. All of the players play at the same time. A game lasts an average of 12 minutes.
So we teamed up. My and my Mother-In-Law versus my boyfriend and my 3 year old son. Two teams, playing at the same time. 12 minutes. Still intrigued and hairnets at the ready!
Once we were all set up (after some confusion over the app that the rules mentioned – this apparently hasn’t been released yet) we used their website to play with our first patient.
The application plays a heartbeat sound as you race against one another to complete the tests first. The ‘panic’ part of the game really comes into play here as you only have a limited period of time to perform the tests and complete the procedure. The longer you take, the faster the heartbeat goes and the closer the patient gets towards death.
The ‘tests’ themselves are like mini-tasks. The introduction game has four of these tests (the full game has 8 unique tests in total) which require a mixture of co-ordination, concentration and speed. All of them are easy enough to do, but once you factor in the quickening heartbeat on the soundtrack and the fact that you’r racing against another team, instantly becomes more pressured, difficult and hilarious.
Once past the initial ‘training’ stage which the game recommends you do to get used to the tests, we tried a few more rounds changing the difficulty as we went.
The game also includes ‘cardiac arrest’ events where all players must immediately shout “CARDIAC ARREST!” and players must work together to revive the patients, a procedure involving matching cards and massaging a whoopee cushion.
And it also has a ‘manager call’ event, where all players stop and shout “PHONE!” and have to perform a random task that is prompted by the web application.
The harder the difficulty you choose of the game, the more cardiac arrest and manager call events happen whilst you’re trying to save the patient. These events take up valuable time when you’re also trying to do the tests (which there are more of the harder the difficulty mode)
The game is ‘won’ when one of the teams has completed all of their tests. If neither team completes their tests then it’s a ‘defeat’.
I will admit that my team won (much to my boyfriend’s chagrin as he has to win everything but I did admit that he was slightly handicapped by having a 3 year old on his team) and that we had a lot of fun playing, although we really weren’t in the right frame of mind for the game. It became a bit of a chore as we increased the difficulty and were trying to do the manager’s calls, but I imagine this game would be a lot of fun if you were all ready and fully prepared to get into the spirit of things.
I also think this would work really well at parties and especially ones with older children involved.
Overall though I think it’s a very well made game with a great concept. You just need to make sure you’re ready to play such a high energy game before getting it out – the hairnets definitely help with this though.
