We are back with another board game review here at Digitalchumps, as our board game gaming keeps on rolling. This time around, we’re fighting zombies in a complicated, yet charming go-around with Zombicide 2nd Edition. While it’s a game that can be played by two players, the best way to truly play it is with up to six friends. There’s chaos, zombie extermination, looting, and making some hard decisions because not everyone is going to survive.
Let’s dig right into it.
Learning curve
The most difficult part of Zombicide is the learning curve of the game. While the game claims that it will take 30-minutes to grasp what the heck is going on, it really takes about an hour (maybe even a bit more) to get through all the small details. If that’s the worst the game can deliver, then sign me up, right? Well, it’s the worst part about the entire process.
The game starts off with each person choosing a particular zombie killer. There are a variety of heroes to choose from and a variety of ages to choose from, the latter of which becomes important during fights and escapes. Adults in the game are more stand-and-fight characters, while the kids (who have a baby logo on their cards) can fight and/or slip away. If you know of Newt from Aliens, then you fully understand why kids are better survivors.
Once you choose your characters, they come with a bevy of stats/attributes that can gradually increase with the character’s adrenaline. The adrenaline is represented by a sliding bar on the character card holder, which is affected by taking down zombies and collecting loot, two out of the three goals in the game. The more adrenaline you gain, the more intense the game becomes with how many zombies it throws at you. That’s the real charm of this game is how quickly things go from zero to shitstorm.
Along with stats, such as health and attack, there is also a dice stat for each player that tells you how many dice you can roll to perform a successful attack on a zombie. In this respect, it’s a bit DnD, but surprisingly it works well. When your character comes face-to-face with a zombie, you are given a set number of dice to roll (sometimes multiple, sometimes singular) and there is a target number that the character must meet to kill a zombie. You can see the stress in this, right?
To make this game more entertaining, the character also has weapon cards, which can either be used in close combat or can be thrown, if need be. The latter is nice when you want to keep out of the scrum but has its own set of problems. The former is direct and can be quick/easy or go terribly wrong. You can find more weapons as you progress in the game, and you can hold up to two weapons/equipment at the ready. Any equipment or weapons that you want to keep as you move along can go into a backpack (additional cardholders on the character card holder) and can be switched out with an action move as you progress in the game. It’s a simple, yet ingenious way of keeping new weapons or equipment (such as a flashlight) at the ready and available.
Besides killing zombies, the other two big goals in the game are to loot and to make it back to the exit where you began the game. For the looting, each character has two initial moves for every turn that they can use. You traverse streets on the board (which can be expanded depending on people and the size of the table) and make it to either closed/locked doors or open doors. Within those doors, you can go in and find loot. The loot can equal out to many things including new weapons, which gives you enough motivation to keep the loot search going. Some of the loot is in well-lit areas, while some of it is in dark rooms. When you enter a dark room, you are immediately attacked by random zombies in hiding. The randomness comes from a card-pull which could be a low-level runner zombie or a brute that will turn your loot day from good to bad quickly.
Once you loot, you continue your journey and will run into several zombies on your way to the next building. The turns in this game are divided into zombies and players. Players get two action moves, which could be anything (moving, attacking, or breaking down doors). Once players go, even if they don’t run into zombies, then it’s the zombies’ turn. They will progressively move toward players, attack players in their two-move vicinity, and at the same time spawn more zombies at zombie spawn zones on the board (represented by little pieces that have red angry zombie faces on them). All of the moves during the zombie phase are constant, so there isn’t stopping this barrage from round to round. Imagine that you have several turns and imagine how many different zombies you can potentially run into. Yep, shitstorm. Zombies are always present in this game. That is where the intensity of this game lies because the better you do and the more you grow in the game, then the more you’re going to run into zombies. It’s a balancing act that works and it makes the game a bit more entertaining.
There are a lot of finer details to ingest with Zombicide, but that is pretty much how this game is played. The charm in this game is how tension increases like a three-act narrative as your adventure progresses. Balancing looting and disposing of zombies is a challenge. If you focus too much on collecting loot, you’re going to have a lot of zombies waiting for you, which will kill your characters pretty darn quickly. If you think about this hard, it makes sense that a zombie survival game works this way. Every single zombie movie or show that you have seen in your life really does have more zombies than survivors. And the odds can quickly turn against characters in those movies/shows if they make one wrong decision. I guess that is why CMON says that the game should last an hour because either you’re going to quickly succeed or quickly fail. It’s a random chance.
The main goal
Ultimately, the goal of this game is going out to collect as much as you can, make decisions about what is best for the team, and then make it back alive to the point where you started. What makes this game a bit different than a typical board game, and more DnD in its goals is that there is no definitive singular winner. Your goal is to cooperate with other players and survive. I can certainly dig teamwork that makes the nightmarish dream of zombie infestation and survival work.
So, with so much positivity, are there any problems with this game? I think some folks will get turned off by the constant spawning of enemies and not understand the need for balance and communication with teammates. If you’re not used to a DnD format or cooperative games, or you’re just wanting to ‘win’ everything all the time, then this may not be the game for you. For me, I think Zombicide was a helluva fun experience and perfect for a spooky October coming up this week. It brings danger, and intensity, and throws out the time-suck that a bigger, more complicated board game experience can bring.
Time to wrap this up!
Conclusion
If you’re looking for something scary, something more teamwork-oriented, then welcome to the perfect amount of intensity with Zombicide. Sure, you won’t be eliminating all the zombies in the world, and the goals might seem low-stake survival-esque, but it brings the right amount of fun with friends.
