REVIEW

Zombicide Board Game Review

by Luke Walsh, February 25th, 2017

Started from a Kickstarter in 2012, if you love multiplayer zombie games with RPG elements that can be extremely tough, then Zombicide might just be the game for you. It can be a little daunting to get into for new players to the board game genre but your patience to learn will be well worth it.

You play as six different ‘heros’ which allows from 1 – 6 players. It is always nice when you can play a boardgame on your own, as sometimes you might not have 6 buddies to hand or it could be 2am on a Wednesday night and don’t want to call them up for a quick board game-sesh. The fundamentals of the Zombicide are; get into a map area, accomplish a missions which has a set of different goals and in true zombie fashion, survive.

The game is played in a series of turns, where you will control each survivor on the map until all survivors have taken their actions. Actions on the board consist of moving, searching for items and fighting the silent horde of undead. To win, you just need to complete you mission and get out with at least one player alive, sounds easy…but that could be further from the truth. If everyone on the mission does get eaten by the undead masses, then the game wins.

Before we get into the finite details of how the game works mechanically, I have to stress how well built this game is. Each component of the entire game has been so well crafted, the zombie and player miniatures are detailed and easily identifiable. Although, the zombie tokens are all grey it is easy to distinguish a normal zombie from a ‘fattie’. Players are easier as they are colour coded but still just as detailed. The area tiles being configurable and flippable adds many different layouts to the game. All additional pieces such as noise tokens and item/weapon cards have great artwork.

There is a rulebook included in the contents and outlines how each phase works, what players can do and different missions and board configurations. It is a fairly big rulebook but taking the time to read through it before you play will help speed up the process after your first game. The rules can be quite confusing at times and with so many mechanics, there could have been more effort into going through different scenarios. There is a special tutorial mission you can take which only uses 2 tiles, a great way to start the game without having to set up 10 tiles and feel overwhelmed.

How to play Zombiecide

Learning how to play Zombicide consists of two main phases broken down into smaller parts. Players do their actions first, then zombies. This repeats until you either complete the mission or find your gruesome demise at the hand of a zombie.

The amount of “survivors” on the board for a game, depends on how many players there are. If you are a one-man band you get four, 2 players get all six – three each, 3 players get two each and 4 – 6 players only get one. The balance of the survivors to players makes 4 or 5 player games pretty difficult. If two and three players can get an extra meat shield each, the 4-5 players lose one or two which won’t be an issue in the blue levels but later in the game, those two players can make up some extra firepower. Ideally, as the game is balanced around the highest player level and not how many players, each survivor should be shared among all players, yeah if you’re a group of 5, it means one person only gets an extra player but you’ll thank me for it.

Once you have your survivors and the first player is (carefully) chosen, has the “first player token” they can use three actions per survivor, so for example, 2 players will get nine actions across the three. The actions are broken down into five main areas; moving, searching, opening a door, taking an objective and combat. Certain actions require items and some survivors have skills which can additional actions that you can take. Opening a door requires a fire axe, crowbar or chainsaw and players such as Ned can perform 1 extra search action per turn. It also costs 1 action to look and rearrange your inventory including discarding, simultaneously though you can trade with any player in your zone.

Learning how actions works is important and can take a little while, you will forget to use your additional free search or forget that your survivor can move two zones per action instead of one. It might mean your turns are not as efficient, making it harder but the more you play and understand how each character works at each level will greatly improve the playing experience. Don’t be afraid to get something wrong, or do something that is not in the rulebook. When I played for the first time with friends, we thought the first game was too easy. There were hardly any zombies being spawned, we were not gaining levels quickly but were flying around the map collecting objectives. Little did I release, collecting objects scores you a massive 5 EXP which would of made the game a lot harder. You are playing the gamemaster and player, just learn from it and move onto your next turn.

Once all the players have moved or acted on their survivors, it is the zombie’s turn who will follow the noise or line of sight. If a zombie is in the same zone as a survivor during their turn, they automatically take a bite, making it crucial that if you share your zone with a zombie on your turn, kill it. If zombies can not see a survivor then they will move towards the noisiest point, sight always taking priority over noise. Once, they have made their moves, players will draw a zombie spawn card and add some more to the board.

Noise in Zombicide is one of the things that takes the most getting used to but also a great mechanic for the game. Basically, everything you do will make noise unless you have a silent weapon. Opening a door makes noise, firing a fun makes noise and survivors are basically one noise token. For each action that makes noise, you drop a noise token in that spot, the more noise tokens the more zombies will go towards that point. This means that staying together in a group will means 6 noise tokens are always around you, pulling the undead closer in that direction. At the same time you can use it to your advantage, making loads of racket and allowing one member of the team to sneak past unnoticed.

How Zombicide's Combat Works

Zombicide is great for gamers as it has a lot of elements you’ll be used to in video games. You can equip and trade weapons with players and gain levels for each zombie that you kill, giving you the option to choose different skills to better your survivor. As your survivors get stronger, the zombies also respond by spawning more and harder enemies, which take more damage to kill or can hunt you down quicker. Zombicide is probably one of the best zombie board games trying replicate what you would find in a video game.

I’ve left combat till now because it is the biggest part of the game. It is the best part but can also be the most annoying due to everything being based on dice rolls, relying on your luck to advance or see defeat. Each player will start out with one weapon, mainly a frying pan but also a crowbar (so you can leave your starting room), a gun if you have the right character and a few other bits. To win combat, the key is to explore your surroundings and search inside building or cars to gain weaponry which can come in the form of guns, SMGs, swords, chainsaws and special weapons such as dual wielded shotguns.

With each weapon comes different criteria on how you can and will use it on the board. Pistols are great for taking out enemies in the same zone or 1 away but only have one dice and only do one damage, making harder enemies have the advantage later in the game. Shotguns are a little better as they can do 2 damage and gain two dice for the same accuracy requirement. Melee weapons include the frying pan which is pretty useless, the katana which has decent balance of requirements and by far the best weapon is the chainsaw. It does not have the range but uses five dice and only needs one, 5 or higher roll. The requirement is high but you get five chances making your odds 5:1. Finally some weapons can be built such as the sniper rifle which has a range as long as your line of sight, highly useful to reduce numbers of zombies before they get too close.

Additional items include, molotov cocktails, extra ammo, water, food and some other items. These are either requirements for missions such as collecting water or can help support your damage dealing, the molotov being the most useful against a lot of zombies or the Abomination…

Another part of combat and the overall aspect of your characters is levelling and skills. As you kill zombies you’ll gain 1 EXP or more if you complete certain objectives like picking up the tokens. This will move your characters level into different coloured zones, with each your character gains a new skills but also ramps up the difficulty of the game, making more zombies spawn. As EXP is not shared across the group, you have to be very careful which survivor does the killing, collecting etc, once any character enters a new level colour the game makes it more difficult for all players. If you have one really high level character but the rest are in the blue, you’ll provide some tasty snacks to a lot of hungry braindead groups.

Levelling makes the game much more fun, you have a sense of progression while you gain new skills and can use them for different strategies. Each survivor has different skills, all which can help in a number of ways for different scenarios, making them more unique and useful instead of just cosmetic. Some of survivors do have similar skills which does ruin the balance of the party a little and some skills are better than others, but overall the Zombicide team have tried to make them fair, interesting and fit the scope of the game.

Zombicide is a great game but not without its grievances, there are some issues with scaling and rules which can make the game annoying at times or just confusing. Zombies take their turn after all players have gone which means, with odd players you can end up in a situation where you have less chance to do more damage as your only one character to use per turn, reducing the turns you can take before the zombies can. It also is fairly consistent with the number of players, the game gets harder by the highest level character not by the amount of people playing. Having a multiplier of sorts would help a little with this issue but it can be either an easy win for loads of survivors or a horrible defeat. Usually, the more survivors you have the more chance you’ll win.

A rule which can make combat hard is the ranged combat rule, if another survivor occupies the same zone as the zombies and you roll to hit a zombie, it will always hit your friend first. This is particularly annoying because it can make using ranged weapons pointless unless you want to wipe out your team mates. I feel that a better mechanic could of be thought of to make this a little fairer, as it punishes players 100% if the time for shooting in a zone not just with zombies (surely can’t all have that bad aim?). There are exceptions to the rule like the sniper rifle allowing you can call your shots, but you might never find the parts needed in time to use it.

When zombies have equal distance to their target, they split and go both directions as a smaller group. This rule can be a little confusing at first as you’ll need to learn the zones before you’ll gauge correctly when to split. It is by no means, game breaking but not very well explained. Another rule which can kill you, is that running out of zombie actors when spawning gives every zombie on the board another action. This can really finish you off with no hope. If you were a Kickstarter backer, you probably got extra miniatures meaning you’ll less likely come face to face with this rule. Anyone who bought the commercial version, either needs to buy two boxes or just suffer, it would make sense for Guillotine Games to offer additional miniatures as sets in their store as the currently don’t.

Finally, players who die are excluded from the game, this might be okay if your playing with the sharing all the survivors rules I mentioned but if not, expect to wait a little before you can join a new game. Bad luck can make a game quickly end but there is nothing more boring than sitting on the sidelines waiting for your friends to die or win, so another game can start.

Overall, Zombicide is a fantastic game with some expertly crafted pieces and missions you can enjoy. It’s by no means perfectly balanced and rules are poorly explained sometimes but hey, you can always make it your own. If you follow the rules by the book, you’ll still have a great time, combined with some frustrating times but mainly always enjoy your stint into an infected unfair world. It sets out to do a particular theme and genre really well and hits the nail exactly, if you enjoy zombies, tactics and rpg elements this really is worth a play. As far as board games go it retails for around £50-70 which might seem a lot for some, for a decent board game though this is well justified.