Zombies!!!

Three other families from my home area vacationed in the same spot we did earlier this month. One couple came with us to the game store, and they and another couple settled down with us the night before their departure for a little gaming fun.

The group settled on the recent acquisition Zombies!!!

Overall, I liked the game pretty well. I enjoy almost any board game that supports a shifting setting (in this case thanks to tiles, the playing of which is part of each player’s turn). I also admire the mechanics that support the creeping dread of slow-moving zombies while the more agile and stronger player characters can nonetheless only hope to survive by outrunning the endless stream of undead.

I say “endless,” but we quickly ran out of zombie figures and had to fake them with other counters. For a six-player gam, the basic box just doesn’t have enough pieces.

Unfortunately, I found some aspects of the game actively interfered with the fun:

• With six players at least, you had to wait a long time before you could do anything. This in itself isn’t a big deal, but if you were in a disadvantageous position—far from the helipad, perhaps, or simply far from the action—this could turn into a fifteen- or twenty-minute wait while you struggled to get back into position to do anything.
• Because of the long delay and lack of progress when you couldn’t move, it rarely seemed worthwhile to go pick up items (they show up on cards you draw, but you have to move to certain locations to actually “get” them) unless you happened to be right by the target location already.
• Having a skateboard (which increases your speed) is extraordinarily desireable.
• It’s possible to do such mean things to other players that you can absolutely destroy any hope they have of winning. I understand that, as endgame approaches, desperate measures are called for, but certain cards (such as the one that lets you move a player back to the starting point) effectively kill that player, forcing them into the cycle of sitting and waiting for a chance to do anything at all.
• Dying goes from being a very minor inconvenience near the beginning to a difficult challenge in the middle and a cause to completely give up in the end.
• The rules are ambiguous enough on a couple of key points that another edit after a playtest was in order.

Ultimately, I’m enthusiastic about the game, but I do strongly feel it needs some tweaks to make it truly fun. I’ll be poking around the web for rules variants before we tackle it again.
A note about how the game played for the less gamey participants: The owner of the game (let’s call him Tom) isn’t the best rules reader and assumed the game would be quick to play. Instead, it turned into three or four hours of undead creeping. The less geeky couple (Mark and Karen) seemed to have a good time. Mark’s a pretty hardcore WoW player, but he seemed a bit put off by the realization of fantastic themes on a game board.

Karen avoids WoW (and I’ve heard grumbles from her that sound decidedly like she’s starting to resent Mark’s playing), but she likes genre fiction well enough. And she’s so socially adept that she didn’t give off any obvious hint that she was bored. I got a vibe, though, that made me think she’d have been happier with another game or activity.

In other words, Zombies!!! is a reasonably fun game, with the potential for even greater fun. But it’s not one to try to bring new fans to our hobby!

Add comment August 30th, 2007