#34/52. A Game with Triangle-Shaped Components - Zombicide

When I saw the criteria for #34 - A game with triangle shaped components - my first reaction was, "You've got to be kidding!" Then all of a sudden the noise tokens from one of my favorite games, Zombicide, floated into my mind's eye and I jumped up to check and make sure I was right. I was! Huzzah!

Now let me start off by saying, I'm not a huge fan of all things Zombie. I don't watch every zombie movie, I'm not a fan of iZombie, and I certainly don't like every zombie-themed board game out there. In fact there are two that I like. Zombicide and Zombie Dice. That's it! I think the whole zombie theme is WAY overdone. However I happen to be really enamored with both of these two zombie-themed games.

In Zombicide you play survivors of the zombie apocalypse and you're on a mission with the rest of the players. This is a cooperative game. Cooperative games involve multiple players working together towards the same goal. The rule book contains several scenarios ranging from easy to medium to hard. Each has a different way to set up the board and different goals and objectives to achieve. In some the whole group needs to get out of the city alive. In others, only one person has to get out alive in order for the game to be considered a win. In the one that Mark and I played tonight, we were on a mission to kill the zombies before they could escape from the hospital complex and neutralize their spawning zones.

Mark and I each took on three characters each (there are six available in the base game) and set up the board. We had a false start where we made a glaring error (we ended a turn in a room full of live zombies) and died right away. So we decided to re-think our strategy and start again.  This time we were able to defeat the zombie hoards.

If four zombies escaped then we would have lost the game. We had to let three zombies escape in order to keep our characters from dying, but we did end up losing half our party before the end of the game anyway. That was ok though because we didn't have a survival number requirement. As long as even one of our characters survived to neutralize the zombie spawning zones and kill the zombies, we could consider it a win.

This was an intense game! Zombicide usually is if played correctly. There is lots of strategic and tactical thinking. Your characters move and act. Then the zombies move and act according to a preset way outlined in the rules. Then more zombies spawn at the spawning zones. If you don't plan your moves correctly, when the zombies move, your characters will die. To fight the zombies you have to role dice to see if your weapons work or not. If you say, "I'm firing my pistol at those zombies" but you only role a three, you just missed AND you made noise which means the zombies will be headed your way when it's their turn to move.

The intensity and need to communicate, coordinate, and work together is why I really enjoy this game so much. The theme adds to the fun and tension, but if you changed out zombies for space aliens, I think this would still be a fun game. Not only is this game on my 52 Game Challenge this year, but I also put it on my 10 x 10 challenge so that I could finally explore more of the scenarios in the rule book. I also hope to obtain at least one more of the expansions so that I can play with it. This game really does have a lot of variety and the potential for even more when the expansions are added in. The price of it is really high though but that's because of the great quality components. This is a very well thought out and produced game.