Zombies

Your stuck in a city with your “friends”, your shotgun and an ever increasing horde of undead freaks. One of the best “screw your neighbor” type games I’ve played in a long time.

Goal
Kill 25 zombies, or be the first to make it to the rescue helicopter to win.

Gameboard
The gameboard is made up of 30 map tiles that get placed, one per turn, as the game progresses. With the helo pad being the last one played.

Game components
The map tiles have very good artwork but are a little too thin and light. Definitely play with a table cloth. The dice are, well, dice. The action cards have some really outstanding artwork and are pretty durable. The life and bullet tokens are of good quality but the artwork is almost identical from about a foot away. I think they should have found a better way to differentiate between the two. i.e. USE A FRIGGIN COLOR!!! On the plus side, the zombies and player pieces are superb. Highly detailed, rubber (yes I said rubber) and plentiful.

How to play
Each player starts in the town square with three life tokens, three bullet tokens and three event cards.

During a turn, the players must perform the following steps;

1. Draw a map tile and place it on the table along with the appropriate number of zombies.
2. Combat any zombies on your current space.
3. Draw back up to three action cards, if you have less than three in your hand.
4. Make a movement roll (on a six sided die).
5. Move up to the number of spaces indicated by the die roll. You must stop and combat on any space occupied by a zombie.
   You may then continue with your movement.
6. Make a zombie movement roll (on a six sided die). You must move that number of zombies one space each, if able.
7. Discard up to one event card (optional)

Placing map tiles is pretty standard, all the roads must be connected. i.e. You cant block a road with the side of a building.

Combat is pretty straight forward. 1-3: you miss, 4-6: you kill the zombie. You can use bullet tokens to increase your roll by one point for each bullet used or you can opt to reroll your attack by using a life token. If you run out of life tokens and roll a miss, you get sent back to town square, lose all weapons and lose half of your zombies. This is the penalty for doing something monumentally stupid, like getting killed. Plus your turn comes to an abrupt end. On the plus side, you do get three more bullets and three more life tokens.

But what about those event cards?

Good question… you can play em anytime, against anyone. (This is the “screw your neighbor” part) The following rules apply though;

• You can only play one event card per round (the beginning of your turn to the beginning of your next turn)
• You can discard one event card at the end of your turn. This signals the end of your turn and no further actions can be taken once a card has been discarded.

My opinion
Very good game, I especially like how the plot twists mid-game from “kill everything that moves” mode to “get the hell out of dodge” mode when the helo arrives. If you like those “B” rated zombie flicks of yesteryear (like me) you’ll love this game. If you can’t take a bit of backstabbing by fellow players, you’ll hate this game. It still amazes me that this game was released for under 20 bucks.

Complexity: 2             Strategy: 2             Luck: 4             Overall: 4