Nine Tile Panic

26th November 2019

Tuesday gaming night at 'The Sovereigns' is here.

The first game of the evening was 'Nine Tile Panic'.

Nine Tile Panic is a game that comes in a little box that delivers a lot of stress!
This is a game all about building a city but not just building a city. It's a game about building a city in a strict time limit!
Thinking about it, maybe we should get real city planners to play this game? You won't find any unoccupied roadworks in Nine Tile panic let me tell you.

What's in a game?
'Nine Tile Panic' has few components:

• ​Tiles: 45 double sided tiles, 5 identical sets of 9 cards for each player. The tiles depict different types of roads such as crossroads, T-junctions etc. The tiles also depict dogs, men-in-black, aliens, ufos, burgers, buildings etc.
• Objective cards: 26 cards that have objectives that need to be met each round.
• Order markers: There are 5 of these that are used to rank the finishing order at the end of every round.
• Scoreboard: Tracks scores!

The components are reasonably colourful with simple illustrations.

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Timer, score board & order markers.

Incorrect city setup, road in bottom right corner is not connected.

A city which has all the roads correctly connected!

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How's it play?
Before playing, give each player a set of tiles.
Nine Tile Panic is played over a series of rounds. Each round is scored before play proceeds to the following round.
A round goes like this:

• Set out order markers, according to the number of players.
• 3 objective cards are drawn. These objectives tend to be quite diverse and unusual. Each objective has variable levels of success. The better each objective is completed, the more points are earned. An objective might be 'have as many men in black pointing their guns at aliens as possible.
• Players now have to place their 9 tiles down in a 3x3 grid in such a way as to maximise scoring from the objective cards (Both sides can be used.). Players must however, follow this rule: Any roads on the tiles must enter and exit the 3x3 grid and must be connected to each other as required, there can be no 'dead ends'.
• Players can choose when to 'stop' building their city. The first player to 'stop', takes the highest value order marker and turns over the hourglass timer.
• All remaining players have 90 seconds to complete their cities. When a player stops building their city, they take the next highest value order marker. This continues until all players have taken an order marker, or the timer runs out.
• Once the 90 seconds are over, any player who has not claimed an order marker is eliminated. Furthermore, any city that does not meet the criteria for connected roads is eliminated from that rounds scoring.

Scoring:

• Scoring is based on the number of players participating. For a 5 player game, scores vary from 1 to 5, for a 4 player game it's 1 to 4 and so on.
• Each of the 3 objectives is scored separately. The player who has achieved the most of an objective will score the maximum points for it (5 points for a 5 player game.), the second best player to achieve the objective will get the second highest score. This continues until the lowest achieving player receives 1 point. Obviously, players who were eliminated in this round will score 0 (In all objectives.). Ties are settled using the order marker (Highest value wins ties.).
• This is done for all 3 objectives. Thus; in a 5 player game, a player who gets highest in all 3 objectives would score 15 points.
• Once all 3 objectives have been scored, a new round with 3 new objectives will begin.

Endgame
Play continues until the score limit has been reached. For a 5 player game this is 25 points.
Final scores are tallied, highest score wins. 

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Overall
Nine Tile Panic is a small, quick to learn and quick to play game. A game can be 20 more than 20 minutes.

The game is supposed to be fun, but it should be called 'Nine Tile Stress!'. Why? Because there will always be that one player who's going to finish their city too quickly just to watch the other players suffer! That's why. Always!
You'll be swearing under your breath as any strategy you've concocted will fly out of the window and you'll just be trying to make any city you can!

And seriously, that's what makes Nine Tile Panic a good game and fun too.
If you have friends who like real time games, you should play this with them.
And if you have friends who hate real time games you should definitely play this with them!