Zombies!!!
About
Compete with your friends to fight off a hoard of Zombies while trying to find the helicopter pad so that you can escape.
This is not a cooperative game because each of you are attempting to gather the most points and escape but it's not a directly competitive game where you directly attack other players. That being said on your turn you do move Zombies to interfere with your opponents.
The game has a pull a tile and place mechanic to create a new and unique map each time you play and includes 100 plastic Zombies.
Created in 2001 this was well before the rise of cooperative games like Shadows of Camelot in 2005 or Pandemic in 2008.
Thoughts
Tim:
Split Review
Game as written 2/5
Thematically a game where you have a band of players that are trying to survived the zombie apocalypse but you are doing so competitively is just odd. I understand this mechanic was not in general use when the game was designed, but it just feels out of date now. Add a rule where when you die you restart at the staring square, and it has more of a video game feel than a modern board game. To top it all off, the gameplay balance is rather bad with resources being far too few and between and the randomness of the dice gives it more of a luck than strategy feel.
With Home Brew Rules 4/5
When the top six files on Board Game Geek are all rule variations, something interesting is happening. This game seems to be a gem for those that like to tinker with house rules, and I can heartily agree. The basic idea of the game is great, it's just all of the details that need some work. It also helps that there are still (2021) almost no games to replace this with. The closest match would probably be Zombicide but with a base price over $150 it's a bit much to start with and from the reviews I've read it come across as more of a video game conversion that what I'm looking for.
Laura:
3/5
I'm not much for games that have gore, even on the card art. I would stack my cards to show the least disgusting art on top. The graphic axe to the head card stayed on the bottom. It was an okay game, using the BGG rule variation. I felt like it could be better with a few elements changed, like the dice element and the seemingly underpowered weapons.
Tim did a bit of a redesign and made drawing cards a lot more fun (and added great humor because he's hilarious) as well as changing the scoring for the dice, so it was no longer underpowered. We ended up winning the game, and I admit it was more fun when I had a chance to kill zombies as well as not have to be apprehensive of what I'm going to see on the cards. I'd give the original version a 1/5, the revamped rules 2/5 and Tim's redesign.
Trivia
- They currently have 22+ Add-on's and Spin offs so somebody really likes this game.
8-22-2021