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[pingpongsam]

Has anyone played Panic Station and, if so, what was your impression?

I ran across this game the day it released but only had time to read the rules and examine the pieces before I had to go.

It appeared to have high potential like Pandemic meets Paranoia. I don't have much time to play games and when I do find the time I'm pretty much only going to play engaging and relatively easy to learn games (like Dominion). As such, I'm interested to know if this game is in line with those criteria.

[pingpongsam]

Taking this as a big fat NO on all aspects of my post.

[pingpongsam]

Bought this game a couple months ago and it has been sitting on my table torturing me with the fact that it requires 5-6 people to play it rightly. Well, I finally got a chance to play it this past week on vacation and I have to say it is a rather fun game with a high level of paranoia. Those of us who like our Mafia games will dig it. We started with 6 people but 2 eventually bowed out before we got fully through the rules and understood how to play it. The game plays with 4 people but definitely deserves 6 people in order to increase diversity and, in our case, actually get through the search cards and make things actually happen in the game. In the 1 game we got to finish the humans won without ever getting infected because we never got to the host card which infects whoever draws it. It did not stop us from suspecting infected people for the 1st while but  at some point we had identified a path to victory that required no further search deck draws and certainty was high no one was infected.

Everyone who played said they looked forward to playing again in the future. It took about 2 hours to go through all the rules and explain the deal to 6 completely new people. I would expect a 30 minute learning curve for an experienced player to introduce the game to newbies.

[ftl]

Hmm, I'll keep it in mind. Sounds like the sort of game I'd like.

[Qvist]

I played this the first time yesterday in a 4-player game.

And we had such a blast. It had a Mafia feel, but without Player Elimination and more paranoia. The forced card exchange is such a great mechanic. In Mafia the game begins very slowly with RVS and such, but even with the first card exchange you get nearly a cardiac arrest. We made some rule errors with the Parasites in the first game, which basically made it easier for us, but it didn't matter. The host could infect us all. The body scan is a great item. All immediately wanted to play a second game and this time with bonus cards and (hopefully) correct ruling. The host was the same one and couldn't infect any of us. We figured that out and tried to avoid him. Just before we won, I healed him for a group win. 
The biggest point of criticism was that the item cards don't have text on them (I assume this is like that so it can be distributed language independant). So basically every time someone drew a card he had to look the function up in the Card List Sheet. And that was especially problematic if you read the back where the stronger items are listed what everybody could see. This slowed the first games down way too much, but with more experience, this isn't much of a problem, I assume. And I think it might even better with 6 players.

I also think this could work as a Forum Game. But I like to play and not to moderate.