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FileFreight

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Selling printable Castle Panic siege logs as downloads: the log your buyer trusts when a troll is argued over.

A printable Castle Panic siege log lives or dies on the one claim nobody can prove from a finished siege, because the whole game runs on one record nobody keeps: the hit points each monster actually had left each time it moved a ring closer to the castle, which colour and ring card hit it, and whether the tower it destroyed was the price of killing it or the start of a clockwise rampage. The siege ended with the castle standing or fallen, and by the time the table argues about whether that troll should have died on the tower, the token is already back in the bag and nobody remembers whether the knight card that hit it was blue or red, or whether the monster was still in the forest ring when the archer card was played.

The argument is always about the tower, not the troll. Everyone at the table agrees the troll is dead; what they disagree about is how many towers it should have taken with it, because a monster that reaches the castle ring destroys a tower and takes 1 damage for doing so, and only then keeps moving clockwise if it survives. A log that only records "troll slain" cannot settle whether the tower was already gone before the killing blow, whether the monster should ever have been hittable in the first place, or whether the next tower in line was ever in danger, and the game is a siege, so the mistake compounds into whether the castle should still be standing at all.

The worked siege is the part buyers actually check before they trust the sheet. Take a troll in the blue archer ring, starting at 3 hit points with the 3 facing the castle. A blue archer card hits it for 1 damage, leaving 2 hit points, and the monster moves into the blue knight ring. A blue knight card hits it for 1 more damage, leaving 1 hit point, and the monster moves into the blue swordsman ring. No blue swordsman card is played, so the monster moves into the castle ring, destroys the tower there, and takes 1 damage for it, leaving 0 hit points. The troll is slain on the tower it destroyed, the tower is gone, and no further tower falls, because a monster at 0 hit points does not keep moving clockwise.

The counterfactuals are what make the log worth printing rather than scribbling. If the knight card had been red instead of blue, it would not have hit at all, because a hit requires both the colour and the ring to match, so the troll would have entered the swordsman ring at 2 hit points, destroyed the tower for 1 damage, and survived at 1 hit point to move clockwise and destroy the next tower too. If the archer card had been played while the troll was still in the forest ring, it would likewise have done nothing, because monsters cannot be hit in the forest ring, so the troll would have arrived in the archer ring at a full 3 hit points and the whole count would shift by a turn. And if the monster had been a goblin instead of a troll, a single matching hit would have slain it outright at 1 hit point, with no tower ever threatened. A buyer who can see all three lines on one sheet stops arguing about which card was played, because the sheet shows what each wrong card would have changed.

That is why the sheet sells as a download rather than as a blank grid. A blank grid records who won; a worked siege log records the decision the table actually argued about, with the monster type, the starting hit points, the colour and ring of each hit, the hit points left after each hit, the ring moved into, the tower destroyed, and whether the monster survived to move again all on the same line. Print it, fill one line per monster, and the next time someone says the castle should not have fallen, the answer is on the paper, not in anyone's memory.

This is an unofficial fan-made log sheet, not affiliated with or endorsed by Fireside Games. Castle Panic is a cooperative game for 1 to 6 players in which defenders protect a castle from monsters advancing ring by ring toward its walls and towers.

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