Game Review

Concept:

Relive your favorite Zombie movie moments... Survive the zombie onslaught, or die trying.

Gameplay:

Players begin by creating a character -- noting their special bonuses, and agree upon a basic scenario to play.  The rules give some basic suggestions as to how to do this, including some basic weapons lists and character abilities.

In general, players can move 6 inches per turn, can be wounded twice before dying, and have 2 attacks.

The game is played in phases of turns.  Players have the first turn, then zombies.  Each player completes his/her actions for the phase before any other player attempts the next phase of the turn.

On each player turn, they go through the following phases in order:

1. Move

2. Shoot
   

3. Attack (hand to hand)
   

After all players have completed the Attack phase, the Zombies roll to bring in new zombies, and then proceed through the same phases as the players. 

One six sided die is rolled for additional zombies -- this is the number of new zombies entering the scenario, plus you add one zombie for each living player.  Another six sided die is rolled to determine which side of the board (or crate) from which the zombies will enter the battle.

Zombies move in groups, for each group two six sided dice are rolled.  The higher number of the two dice is the number of inches that the zombie group may move this turn.  (If doubles were rolled, the zombies add the two dice together for their movement!)

Combat is pretty simple -- each player has a To-hit number that they must roll to successfully hit the enemy.  If hit, the attacker rolls again to see if the hit has wounded the enemy.  If wounded, the defender rolls a save die to prevent the wound. Zombies only save on a roll of a 6, and only need one wound to be eliminated.

Shooting in combat follows the same rules, except the player must have his enemy within range of his weapon to shoot.

When a player is killed, they become a zombie player -- and are able to attack their former comrades.

The game ends when all players are killed, or the scenario's victory conditions are met.

Winning Conditions:

• The player who is still alive at the end of the game, wins.
  

Our Opinion:

For those of us who like Zombie movies, this game honestly tries to emulate the major elements of the genre.  The catch is that the rules need some fine tuning, and the players need a trifle more hope than being able to run faster than the zombies.

Admittedly, our reviewers don't play many miniatures games.  In this game, you don't get a single scenario plot that you repeat each time you play, however, you do get a system for  an ongoing campaign fighting zombies.   The rules are fairly brief, to their credit.  They are organized adequately, however there are several holes that caused us a good deal of confusion.  On the plus side, there is a lot of character generation creativity, and depending upon you group, generating the characters could be more fun than the game itself.  The character generation is expandable, and straightforward to understand.

Of the holes in the rules, we found this fairly early -- the rules never specify if anyone is to start the game as a zombie player.  On multiple occasions, the rules note that players killed by zombies become a zombie player, but at no time is the initial condition even mentioned.  We opted to have all zombies move toward the nearest living player character until there was an official zombie player -- that was the most we could glean form the rules.

A second major complaint was more mechanic oriented -- we found the game very tedious in combat. You roll to hit... then if you hit you roll again to see if you wounded them...  This did not make sense during game play and added a lot of excessive die rolls.   We strongly felt that if you hit, you should skip the roll to wound and go straight to the save roll -- it's the same thing, only with fewer dice rolling around.

Thirdly, the rules were very unclear about zombies entering the board.   If a group of 6 zombies come into play on the north side of the board -- do they all start in the same place? If you have miniatures, this isn't possible, but if you use the paper zombies (provided in the game) this is very possible.  Likewise, if the zombies appear on a crate, there is no mention of how to choose the crate that they appear around/on -- and you still don't know if they are all on the same location or not.

Strategically, we disliked the game phases.  Once you were caught by more than one zombie, you could never escape. More and more zombies would gather around you as you fought them one by one -- you can't move once a zombie touches you, so you must attack without moving.  And, since the zombies move after the players move and attack, then the zombies almost always catch up to you and continue to pin you down.  It's a nice mechanic to emulate a movie, but it's very frustrating to players, because you really can't expect to win.  Ideally, the move and attack phases for the players should be in any order.  That way the player could kill the zombie that caught him/her and then move away in an attempt to escape.

Overall, the game shows a good deal of imagination and expandability.  It needs quite a few refinements (including spell checking words like "attack" and "psychic.")  But, the price is good for a starter miniature game.  This is Bad Yorkie Press' first game -- I hope they learn from it and continue to produce other games with the same level of imagination. 

We recommend this game to any fan of miniatures that hasn't already bought this competitor game. 

Where to buy:

Check online at www.badyorkiepress.com -- it costs about US $5.

Warning: the site is very new & may not be running consistently