Crisis: Cooperative Play For The DC Comics Deck Building Game

I have a confession to make. I have never been much of a fan of deck building games. I like Marvel Legendary, but it is not something I play often because of the hastle of putting it all back in the box divided in its own separate factions. As far as the DC Deck Building Game is concerned, while very popular among our clients, I never liked it. Found it boring and too dependent on chance and someone not buying the cards you need from the line-up.

When the Crisis expansion arrived in the store, I dreaded having to give a demo of it. However, I knew many players would be interested in it so I had no option other than to hold my breath, learn the new rules and roll with the punches. After playing a few three and four player games, I must admit that I am hooked on this game. I still dislike the basic DC Deck Building Game, but if you are playing with the Crisis expansion, I'll travel to the opposite end of the island for a chance to play.

There are several changes that make Crisis so much fun. First, is the cooperative aspect. Victory points no longer have any meaning. Everyone wins or loses together. Unlike Marvel Legendary, there is no winner/better superhero. Everyone wins when all the impossible super villains are defeated. Everyone loses when the main deck is depleted.

Second, the addition of crisis cards, impossible super villains and the related mechanics. Both the crisis cards and the impossible super villains can have ongoing effects that last until the crisis is resolved or the villain is defeated. For example, we had a crisis card (Rise of the Rot) that required players to take a Weakness card at the beginning of every turn unless they could disclose a Weakness card in their hand. To resolve this crisis, players had to simultaneously discard a Weakness card from their hand or wait until the Weakness stack ran out. In our three player game, we could never coordinate it so that everyone had a Weakness card in their hand at the same time. Thus, we resolved that crisis when the Weakness deck ran out. This made for very porous decks for all of us.

The order for resolving things is not entirely new but is quite challenging. You cannot attack an impossible super villain unless the crisis is already resolved, but you cannot resolve a crisis unless there are no villains in the line-up. Also, when you kill a villain, it does not go to your discard pile anymore. The villain is destroyed. You will need some type of card effect that allows you to access the destroyed pile if you want to incorporate a villain into your deck. Defeated impossible super villains leave the game. They'll never form part of anyone's deck.

There are a few more differences but I will mention one more before I go scrounge a group to play Crisis. It is the timer mechanic created by changes in how you refill the line-up. In the regular game, if you bought three cards, at the end of your turn you would replace the three empty spots in the line-up with three new cards from the top of the main deck. In Crisis, it no longer works like that.

Now, at the end of each player's turn, you add the top card of the main deck to the line-up regardless of whether the player bought any cards or how many cards he bought. A player didn't buy any cards during his turn? You add the top card of the main deck to the line-up. A player bought three cards from the line-up? You still only add the top card of the main deck to the line-up.

The result of the above can be daunting. At one point in the beginning of the game when we didn't have much power to buy cards, the line-up grew to something like 12 cards. Imagine trying to resolve your first crisis with a 12-card line up filled with villains! However, once we all acquired substantial power, the line-up consisted of anywhere between one to three cards as players could usually buy most of the cards in the line-up and the line-up got replenished only one card at a time.

We still have not won a single game of Crisis. In fact, we have not even come close to winning. The best we have done is killed a little less than half the impossible super villains. After our last game, we had a round table discussion of strategies to attempt in our next games. I'll let you know if any of them worked.

Until then, if you are in the Guaynabo area and would like to try or buy the Crisis expansion, visit us at The Gaming Pit.

Zombicide: It's All Fun & Games Until Someone Eats Your Brain...

Zombicide is a cooperative game for 1 to six players where you get to play a survivor trying to complete a variety of missions in an area spanning a few city blocks and which will shortly become zombie-hell unless all players work together.  It comes in a big box chock full of minis, which makes the game even more fun.  You get minis for the players as well as minis for the four different types of zombies that can spawn.  I've been playing this game quite a lot lately and thought I'd write a little something for those still undecided about getting this gem.

Wanda's special ability is that she can move
two zones per move action.

The Good

There are many things that are good about this game.  For starters, every survivor has a special ability that sets it apart from the rest.  One can be slippery, allowing him to move through zombie-infested zones without having to spend extra actions, while another can move double the usual number of zones in each move action.

The rules are simple.  Every time I play this game, I am surprised at the simplicity of the zombie movement rules, and how effective they are at pressuring the survivors and making the game challenging.  Basically, they move towards a survivor if they can see him or towards the zone where the most noise was generated (this is easily tracked with noise tokens).  If zombies have two paths of equal length to get to their destination, they split.  If the number is uneven or it is only a single zombie, you add another zombie so that you can split them in equal numbers.

Survivor rules are just as simple.  You start with three actions that you can use to move, search, attack, make noise, trade items, open a door, activate an item, enter/exit a vehicle, etc.

The survivors level up with experience.  There's a zombie kill tracker on every survivor card.  Everyone starts with zero kills, at the blue level.  On your seventh kill, you enter the yellow level and get an extra action.  At the orange level you get to choose an additional ability from two that are indicated in your survivor's card.

As the survivors level up, the game gets more challenging.  At the end of every round, you spawn zombies in the areas designated in each scenario.  For each area, you draw a zombie card.  All zombie cards have four colors: blue, yellow, orange and red.  They correspond to the survivors' experience level.  Initially, you will look at the blue color to find out what type of zombie and how many will be spawning.  The moment one of the survivors hits the yellow level, you will now look at the yellow color instead of the blue one, and so on as survivors keep reaching the orange and red levels.  Of course, at orange level the spawns are more and tougher zombies than at yellow or blue level.  In fact, at times you will find yourself asking a teammate to run away instead of killing a zombie and clearing a path just so that he won't reach the orange level and increase the difficulty of the game.

Survivors above.
Walker, fatty, abomination and two runners below.

Not all zombies are created equal.  Most of the zombies you will be dealing with will be slow stupid walkers that have only one action per round and die from one hit.  Every so often, fatties will spawn.  Fatties are always accompanied by two walkers.  Also, fatties cannot be killed unless hit with a weapon that does two or more points of damage.  I believe there are only three such weapons: the sawed-off shotgun, the chainsaw and the fire axe.  You also have runners, which get two actions per round.  They can either move twice, move and attack, attack and move, or attack twice.  Finally, there's the abomination.  It can only be killed by a weapon that does three points of damage, and there is only one such weapon: the molotoff cocktail.  Good luck finding the empty glass bottle and the gasoline to make one.  There can only be one abomination on the board at any time, but I've had games where an abomination spawns just a few rounds after you killed the first one.

Multitude of scenarios.  The rulebook comes with ten scenarios.  Each scenario has different victory conditions, starting conditions and some have special rules.  There are a lot of scenarios that can be downloaded from Guillotine Games' website.  Guillotine Games also makes freely available a program that includes all their map tiles so that you can create more scenarios and upload them to their website.

The Bad

At $89.99, the game is definitely on the expensive side.  You *do* get 71 minis, nine double-sided map tiles, and a bunch of markers and tokens, so it is not necessarily an unreasonable price...  but it is still a lot of money.  You can probably get it for around $70, maybe even less, if you decide to backstab your friendly local gaming shop and order online.

I missed the kickstarter and then I missed the Zombicide Season II kickstarter!!  I am so pissed at this that I could eat someone's brain...

The Gamer

I have played this game with several different groups of people and it has been a huge hit evey time.  Personally, I haven't gotten tired of playing it yet.  After the first three games, I thought that it was impossible to lose as long as you played hard and smart.  However, we got our asses spanked so badly on Thursday evening that I actually had nightmares that night about being surrounded by zombies!

If you are playing with a full group, set aside a good two hours.  The game plays pretty fast but once the zombies start zoning in on your position, you'll spend more time than you think dicussing strategy, attacks and moves with your fellow survivors.