How to play Nine Tiles Panic & Review

Nine Tiles Panic is a speed tile-laying game.

Title: Nine Tiles Panic

Year Published: 2019

Designer: Jens Merkl, Jean-Claude Pellin

Publisher: Oink Games

Players: 2-6

Game Time: ~20 mins

Set-up Time: ~1 min

Ages: 7+

Theme: Alternate Earth

Mechanisms: Real-Time, Tile Laying

How to win: Meet the goal of the theme cards in each round to score points and reach the designated points total first.

Game Description

Out of the sky they appeared on planet earth: an alien race with a preference for hamburgers! To bring the fast food-loving aliens under control, the task force has sent out special agents. Both, the agents and the aliens roam around the city. The aliens are after the hamburger reserves of the city, while the agents are after the aliens. The city drowns in chaos!

Just completing the town is easy enough, but quickly satisfying all the conditions is enough to make your brain go crazy. From kids to adults, Nine Tiles Panic is a speedy and exciting puzzle game for everyone!

How to play Nine Titles Panic

Nine Tiles Panic Theme

Agents hunting Hamburger munching Aliens… Sure.

Setup & Rulebook

Give each player tiles and layout 3 goals. The hardest part is putting the 3 tile scoreboard together right the first time. 🙂

The rulebook is OK with some ambiguity around scoring which is confirmed by reading the BGG rules questions in the forum. Seems people agree that the rulebook isn’t clear here.

Components & Artwork

The tiles are of good quality and the art is adorable.

The goal cards are nice and quite big so would have liked to see the English writing a little bit bigger. But, it’s a Japanese game so I wouldn’t expect English to be put first.

It all fits well into the standard-size Oink Games box.

Ease of Teaching & Accessibility

It’s very simple with the only issue you may have can be sorted with a little leeway in the rules for new players allowing them to adjust their tiles after a round if they made a mistake.

Nine Tiles Panic Summary

This is a good bit of fun. Rounds are quick and you only need to play 2 or 3 before someone wins. Well, maybe more if the rounds are fairly balanced.

I don’t know of any similar games but I think Ghost Blitz maybe? Real-time speed games with very short rounds are not something I get the chance to play very often.

The variety in the 3 goals round to round keeps you guessing and means that even if you did memorise the tiles you still have to play differently and VERY well to score lots of points.

On top of that, you have a bunch of expert-level goals which are much more complicated.

It’s a good, quick fun game in a tiny box with plenty of variability. A very fun game.

Rating I give it 7/10