If you are a tabletop collector, odds are you have at least one app-assisted board game in your collection. Publishers like Lucky Duck Games — the team behind the excellent storytelling and roleplaying mashup “Destinies” — have carved a niche with companion apps that do most of the narrative heavy lifting for players. In those games, you make in-app decisions that prompt changes to the playing board, meaning that you are constantly tweaking your character sheet and world map to match the outcomes in the companion app.
“Panic in Gotham City” takes the app-assisted approach to the next level. This is a true augmented reality experience; as you progress through the game’s seven stages, you will craft a cityscape that lives equally on your table and in the app. The cardboard buildings you assemble become a permanent fixture of the board, but they also become reference items for interactive elements in a virtual Gotham. Several times throughout the game, you will scan a Gotham City News Network jumbotron in the heart of downtown Gotham, only to see the screen come to life on your phone with a live-action update on current events.
And as much fun as it may be to see a bustling city come to life on your tabletop — including an above-ground subway and news helicopters — this cityscape only scratches the surface of the technology. As you dig through case files and pieces of evidence, pieces of cardboard or even your living room will suddenly become a three-dimensional workspace for new and complex puzzles. My favorite use of augmented reality in the game is a series of ink blots that swirl to life when scanned with your phone. The colorful, abstract images printed on the cards reveal essential elements of backstory or key interactions between various suspects and Batman villains.
The results are undeniably immersive — sometimes even a little too much. For the first few chapters of the game, my wife and I cast my phone screen on our television before realizing that my unsteady hand was causing the “aerial” footage of Gotham to trigger a bit of motion sickness for both of us. Thankfully, once we turned off casting and viewed the game through our phone, the problem never returned, but it led to an uncomfortable 30 minutes after we wrapped our first session.
