I have never been a fan of Zombie movies, shows, games, etc. until I played this game (oh and the Zombie Fluxx, but that is a no-brainer game that just made it's way into my collection). I saw a demo of this game being played at my local comic book shop and thought it was a bit complicated. However, when I saw the popularity of the game and saw that my store finally got a season 1 box in stock, I told myself, I am going to try this and probably like it... also considering I got it on sale helped the budget a bit.
Before I get into the actual game play and review, I just want to mention the amount of expansions and so on you can get in this series: The original box comes with a load of stuff; zombies, survivors, equipment cards, zombie cards, noise markers, door tiles, objective tiles, police and pimp cars, game tiles and more. It also includes a rule book that has 10 different scenarios for you and your friends to try and complete and they are not easy scenarios that is for sure. But of course, if you are a real gamer, this box just won't cut it for you; you will need the Toxic City Mall expansion that has toxic zombies and new game times and zombie cards and new survivors to have even more people playing and even cooler, Zombivors (zombie survivors - yes you can keep playing with your character as a zombie with new abilities and such). Then of course you need more zombies because there just isn't enough already so you get the walking dead 1 and 2 expansions and then the angry zombies and then the toxic crowd expansion and why not the dog zombies and dog companions and finally the Second Season of Zombicide; Prison Outbreak... oh but of course you will need more game tiles so you will want the 3 expansion tile packs that add on to any base set (Season 1 or 2). You better make room in your game cabinet because this is going to take up a lot of room, or simply put all of this in just the base set box and you should have enough room.
My fun was playing with my younger boys (yes it says 13+ but they like moving figurines around and destroying zombies too) and taking whichever tiles I wanted and created my own scenario which we almost defeated. This is the main reason this game is so great, because it has amazing replay value (unlike Zombies where you need to buy every expansion and the only thing you do is walk around until you find the helipad and more zombies spawn and you have find health and ammo... almost like the Escape game but less fun) you can constantly change the scenario and with the random zombie cards that spawn new zombies every turn, you never know what is going to happen.
This game is really cooperative though, but even if you play alone, you need to use all 6 suvivors (or 10 I guess with the toxic city mall expansion... i should read those rules before assuming anything here) to get through the scenario(s).
Here is how it works: to setup the game, you either choose an already designed scenario from one of the many rule books, go online and download some free ones found here (missions) or create your own. Then you simply lay out the tiles and so on as described and start the game.
Each player chooses a survivor (1 survivor per player unless you are less players, then you divide the survivors equally - but read the scenario because some start with only 4 survivors) and receives one random equipment card (1 of 6 possible cards - 3 frying pans, a pistol, a fire axe and a crowbar).
Then a first player is chosen and given the first player marker and activates their survivor; each survivor has 3 possible actions (which you can choose from a list of actions - I am not going into this detail) and after that is done, the next player activates their survivor(s) and so on until all survivors have finished their actions.
Then, it's the zombie's turn... they attack any survivors in the same zone as them, they move and they spawn at certain locations.
And this continues until the objective(s) of the scenario is(are) completed.
The illustrations and details of the game pieces is amazing... the only downer I saw was with one of the survivor minis that is like a darker grey, almost the same as the Zombie minis... they could have used a better color in my opinion. The rules are quite easy to understand once you play a couple of times and having more players just makes the game so much more interesting (you really have to work together because at the start of the game, 2 survivors can open doors and only 2 have guns - stay close to these guys).
The entire game is fun and I simply can't say more than this so 5 out of 5 dice (or zombies) for this game and go buy it as a late Christmas gift if you can still find copies out there.
Provided by Multizone
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