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.