LogFAQs > #932709494

98. Zombicide (2012)

Category: Cooperative
Genres: Dudes on a map, campaign, dice combat
Rules complexity (0 to 7): 4
Game length: 45-120 minutes (depending on campaign)
Experience: 1 play of Zombicide: Black Plague (2015), 1 session of Zombicide: Season 2 (2016) with 4-6 players
Previous ranks: 65/100 (2016), 64/80 (2018)

Summary - Each player is represented by a miniature on the board. Everyone works together to kill zombies (by rolling dice at certain distances), represented by other miniatures on the board. You can search for equipment and unlock doors, and depending on scenario, you might have to escape the map, survive/kill some number of zombies, or find some sort of item.

Experience - I'm not sure I should really even be ranking Zombicide, because by nature, a game like this is meant to be played as a campaign. You can't really get a full experience from one sitting, especially not the near-tutorial levels. I played once at a meetup, which was fine, and once with a friend group that's not the best to play games with, and it was kinda rough, especially the Season 2 scenario - downtime was high, too.

Design - Zombicide's ruleset can be fiddly in terms of upkeep with zombies, but the gameplay itself is pretty simple. You get some number of movements, plus actions. You try to make yourself more powerful. You try to avoid confrontation, or you try to slaughter the hell out of zombies. Almost every decision is straightforward. Your miniature looks great, and the zombies look evil, and the cards you forage for to look for items or weapons (see Dead of Winter) are kind of a mediocre mechanism. But when you're all in it together, it feels less pointless and more like you're working toward something. And that something is killing zombies. I can't comment too much on the game since there are so many scenarios I haven't played, but this game is super Ameritrashy and not exactly attempting to be elegant - you just gotta enjoy killing them zombies.

Future - So out of carelessness, partially, Zombicide is a good deal higher on this list than it has been, leapfrogging some games, despite my not having played it (or those games it leapfrogged!) recently. Why? Probably because with distance from everything, the games I've played become "oh, I'd like maybe a refresher on that," while Zombicide becomes this wistful, "if only I could get a campaign of this going." I'd have near-zero interest in playing another tutorial round of Zombicide; that isn't particularly fun. But getting to dungeon-crawl for real over multiple sessions and seeing new levels? Ahh, if only my friends owned that. Alas, instead they play Gloomhaven with another friend of theirs, and I'm campaignless.
---

yet all sailors of all sorts are more or less capricious and unreliable - they live in the varying outer weather, and they inhale its fickleness