Dirty little gaming secret: I love undead.
Stumbling hordes of zombies, lightning-quick skeletons — it’s all good. Shawn of the Dead cannot get here fast enough. People say it’s because I like using them as monsters in DnD, but that’s just silly: there is no game or game system that cannot be improved with the inclusion of a shambling corpse.
So this weekend, I picked up Zombies, which I’d been meaning to do for awhile. Later, Justin and I talked Jackie into playing the game.
High points:
* Gameplay is pretty sweet and quite a bit of fun.
* Evocative of the genre.
* I want the expansion packs for the game (especially Mall Walkers, but the military-themed one might be fun for a little more Resident Evil-style ass-kicking).
Low Point: Due to (a) inexperience on the part of the players and (b) general maliciousness on the part of the same players, finishing the game took quite a bit longer than I’d have expected — the final piece on the map went down about an hour in… I think it was about a total of 3 or 3.5 hours before someone finally won. Jackie had quite a bit of fun with it, but didn’t end up finishing the game — Randy played her spot until the end.
I’m going to mitigate that someone by acknowledging that it probably boils down to inexperience playing — (a) I’m pretty sure we used a couple cards wrong and (b) as soon as the ‘escape’ tile came out on the map, we all tried to get to it, whether we had the firepower to make it or not. As I said, Randy eventually won, I think in part because he hadn’t ‘already’ sacked some of the buildings in town for loot, so he decided to go do that, and came back to the helipad with a lot more Life and Bullet chits to play with.
That said, Justin probably could have won by simply accumulating 25 dead zombies… he was really close at one point, but blew it when he tried to make it to the helipad instead of picking off lone dead guys.
Good game, regardless. Makes me want to pick up All Flesh Must Be Eaten.
Plus, a HUGE bonus: ONE HUNDRED zombie mini-figs. [Insert evil laughter.]
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I’ve played this game a handful of times, but it’s been a long time since I’ve dug it out. I don’t really know how much of your experience actually was a result of inexperience, as I’d always found it to be a very slow game. Some of it has to do with the cards… the example I remember most is that you always wanted to be the SECOND guy to get close to the helipad, because whoever was the first always had that instant-teleport-to-start card played on them…
We had a house rule that said you had to discard your hand of cards whenever you died, as a way to stop people from hoarding the uber powerful instants that way. Overall, the theme was fun but after a few games everyone I knew got sick of it.