Our friend Graham loves zombie games (and comics, books, films...), so he brought his latest purchase round for us to try out.
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| Gentle, understated box art. |
All the artwork is by the game designer.
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| Game description. |
You start the game with a camp/hideout, initially an apartment building but as the game progresses you might get a prison, hospital, shopping mall.. or even be left without one! You also start with a few survivors.
Each turn you roll the black die, and possibly the yellow or green die as well, depending upon the stage of the game. At the start, the black die tells you how many survivors join your group. You might also get to roll the yellow die for some extra survivors. The green die comes into play later in the game...
In the centre of the table is the pool of survivors, the draw deck and the discard pile.
The basic rules are fairly simple. Roll the black die, plus the yellow die if someone had given it to you at the end of their turn. Your camp might grant you positive or negative modifiers to the number of survivors who join your group. Having no camp/hideout has big penalties. You then pass the yellow survival die to any other player. Top up your deck of cards to 6. Take an action, in our game the only actions we ever made were to play a card. The game was never slow enough that anyone felt they could afford to spend their action discarding cards or passing instead of playing a card!
Here's an example of my hand. In the background, you can see the draw deck, discard pile, survivor pool (right), and the zombie pool (left). As survivors get killed, the counters get flipped over and added to the zombie pool until all the survivors have gone. You can see I have a Character that I could play - he'll count as an additional survivor, on top of the little counters I have. Characters have extra rules printed on the card, for instance this one can be sacrificed to avoid something nasty happening to your camp. Next are 3 Action cards that can be played on your camp or more usually, on an opponent's camp - there are lots of zombie attack cards that kill their survivors! Finally, there is a Reaction card that can be played against an Action card to add to or cancel out some of the effects. Reaction cards can build up in chains: "I play Zombie Frenzy to kill 3 of your survivors!" "I use my Shotgun reaction to cancel 2 deaths, and because I have the Police character in play at my base I get to double that to cancel 4 deaths!" "I play this card to cancel your reaction so you still lose 3 survivors!" "Then I'll use my First Aid Kit to cancel 2 deaths!".
I lost my base quite early in the game when Graham played the Fire card on me.
I had my revenge, playing the Zombie Frenzy, plus added a Reaction card to eliminate 5 of his survivors!
Laura was unlucky enough to be given the Carrier character by Graham. Hidden in the draw deck is the Hidden Bite card, which goes to the player who has drawn it - unless the Carrier is in play! Characters have various uses. The Doctor interacts with a Reaction card to allow you to discard 2 casualties, but will sacrifice herself to save the Carrier! The Police officer gives a bonus when you have a gun. Some locations have extra bonuses too, for instance the Hospital allows you to search through the discard pile to find a First Aid Kit.
The green Infection die now comes into play, and gets passed to each player in turn until everyone is infected. The yellow survival die is removed from the game, and the yellow rules card is turned over to the green side, with a slightly different set of rules. Now, when you roll the black die (plus the green die if it was given to you by someone), you lose that number of survivors. In infection mode, the aim is to roll as low as possible every turn!
I was the first to run out of survivors (so got to become a zombie player, trying to kill extra survivors each turn), then Laura, leaving Graham the winner. It was a fun game, but probably works better with more players, so that there is more to-and-fro between different camps. There are also extra cards that are used in 4+ player games (1 of which had been accidentally left in the game and which I drew early in the game, taking up part of my hand with something that had no real use for the 3 player game).
