by ldsdbomber
Introduction
OK, I make this review based on just one play of the game with the missus, we have both enjoyed (a lot) Pandemic, I also particularly like Ghost Stories, which she did not like as much. In that case, and in this game she felt a little 'too hopeless', whereas I relish the difficulty challenge and knowing that more often than not I will 'lose', the fun is trying to find different ways to defeat the advancing front of doom! In both Pandemic, and more so in Ghost Stories, the escalation of defeat feels faster and more urgent, here in ZSDoD the pace felt slower but nonetheless unrelenting, in fact, it matched the theme of the game perfectly, the mechanics of how the zombie hordes feed, multiply and move works really nicely, and while random 'outbreaks' can occur (like in pandemic and ghost stories), unlike those games they are only small 'seeds' of zombie infection, so they don't suddenly cause ruination in a direct sense, but if you've spent time barricading yourself in, or organising your military might, or pushing the hordes around the map away from your key populations, this can provide a nasty (and fun!) surprise when a zombie 'seed' appears behind your defences!
Based on how the game evolved for us, I had quite good luck with Africa and always felt in control of the horde, coming close several times to eliminating them completely, the missus had some bad luck in Europe and quickly reached a position that looked pretty hopeless, although as I tried to point out to her, it was actually possible to selectively sacrifice regions to strategically direct the zombies away from certain areas, thus giving you the time to reinforce and hold on to a pocket of population in another area of the map.
Which brings me to another point. If we ever play again we will definitely take 2 regions each (the world is divided into 5 regions, see below), either as separate forces or as 'teams of 2 regions', perhaps even use the 5th region as a dummy region (perhaps allowing their research to be used globally or something). There's lots of scope for adjusting the play parameters I think, we did not try the suggested variants in the rulebook yet. I think it felt a bit difficult to see how the game could go on long enough in a region to allow you to really see the benefit of researching many technologies, I think I ended up with 3 or 4 technologies by the time we had got to mutation marker 10 (when you get to 15 its game over! the one with most population wins), and my missus was all gone. We need to play more, but because of the limited resources and actions and constant need to keep the zombies in check (and more research activates the mutation marker faster), I wonder how you would ever really get to the 'tier 3' research options which are quite powerful. I was surprised thematically to not see an option for zombie starvation (unless I missed it) but on the other hand zombies surrounded by 'empty' regions can't move into them so that is a way you can stem the surge of zombies across the map
Before I try to go over the game components and mechanics/gameplay, I would have to say that to me, it feels a bit less polished and streamlined than Pandemic, but more easy to grasp and understand than Ghost Stories, with a difficulty level between the two in terms of feeling like you can defeat the game. It is more like Ghost Stories in that there are a lot more options and actions available to you and it will take time to get to grips with what works best (raised borders work well!), and additionally, you are very clearly in charge of your own region, and while some co op type play can be seen, its not really a coop game in the same way, you can just as easily not have anything to do with your neighbours, in fact, a fun aspect of the game is being able to 'steer' zombies across your borders into neighbouring players regions.
So, 'in a nutshell',if you like Pandemic / Ghost Stories, I think you will definitely like this game, ESPECIALLY if you have the feeling in P/GS that you are often 'agreeing' on the best course of action, this game has the basic 'you vs the game mechanic' but here it's very much every man for himself, and totally up to you to decide how to resist the zombie horde, with options for helping or hindering your neighbours.if you don't like those games, either for feeling like you are banging your head against a brick wall of random 'bad shit', or that those games are 'too light' for your needs, you may not like this but I would say that the mechanics of how zombies feed, multiply and move does add a very logical, thematic and tactical/stragetic element not as obviously present in those games. You will perhaps still feel like you can't do as much as you want to do, but you can better predict and plan what the future holds to be able to make strategic choices (though to be honest, its more tactical because its difficult to go that much into the future with your planning).
And of course, the other plus point of this game is the updated theme relative to Pandemic in particular, there is just something a bit cooler about zombie legions than nameless diseases.
I have given this game a 7.5 for now, but will rerate as I play it more, I think I would like to play it with 4 or 5 individual players, so will break this out with my family when they visit. Ah yes, I should have mentioned (have not even started the review yet!), that the rules are very straight forward, and always work 'how you think', I was surprised to see videos online explaining zombie movement, feeding and combat, it really is pretty obvious, the only 'tricky' thing to learn is that there are a lot of available actions to do, but it's easy to follow the game play guide on your player board to keep in check. If your family can understand RISK they will have no trouble with this! (and I am not comparing this to RISK, though it does have a global map with regions!)
OK, on with the review.... what do you mean, that was just the introduction!
Components
The box is a decent sized, somewhat different to most of the bigger boxed games I have, a bit deeper and squatter, perhaps explained by the panoramic aspect of the board. The cover art is not spectacular, but good enough to convey the theme, without really being eye catching. The box insert has lots of little spaces, so there is plenty of room to keep all the bits in the game, of which there are quite a lot. First of all, a panoramic map of the world as mentioned, with 5 large regions (North & South America, Asia, Africa and Europe) subdivided into a dozen sub regions, the map is colourful and very nice to look at, somewhat RISk like you could say, but there is a curious mix of names for the sub regions, sometimes city names (some well known, some not), some regional or continental type names, and some with names that appear to be "future" labels for areas, such as "The Rust Belt" on the eastern seaboard of the USA. While I quite like the potential for "new names" fitting the theme of a post apocalyptic world, it seems a bit confused with some of the other regions not matching, I would be interested to hear the designers thoughts on how they chose this apparent mismatch, but let me also say it does not really detract anything from the game
Each player gets a nice and decent sized colour coded board which lists various research options, government popularity and influence, a random outbreak table and a play order reminder. I will describe this in more detail shortly. I actually think because most of this information is the same for all players, it would have been better to have a separate single board or card with research technology reminders perhaps including spaces for each players coloured tokens to track their development, and have smaller player boards with just their own information on it, or make the map 'wider' by adding the research area sections to the top and bottom edge. Maybe a bit picky, but they could have saved a fair bit of room on the table that way (e.g one idea would be to have a deck of cards for each player, one per technology and let the players place a card when they research it, since it seems hard to imagine you will ever get more than 4 or 5 technologies, having a whole board reminder of each one seems a bit wasteful.
Each player gets a mutation token which is an analogue to represent the advance of time and the disease in the game a bit like the Pandemic Outbreak marker, 6 'freedom pawns' to perform actions, linked very nicely to the players 'popularity' which is basically how many of your regions you are keeping alive!, then there is a deck of random event cards, some outbreak cards, resource cards for fuel, food, metal/wood, chemical, and tokens for zombies, research, resources, quarantines, oh, and some plastic figures of tanks and barricade/wall structures. You also get 12 coloured dice for each player, these are used to track population levels in each of your sub regions, and a black d12 used to roll random outbreaks or research success.
Again, I am going to sound picky here, but something about the components did not quite 'add up', i.e. it was easy to see this game was produced by a smaller independent label and not by one of the big companies, it felt a bit like they'd taken different components belonging to different games and put them all together, and maybe it could be said it seemed there was some obvious cost saving decisions there. Now, I also want to say that the components were still GOOD, they all do their job admirably, at no point did we sit there thinking anything got in the way of the gameplay. It's just that if I could, I would change a fair few of the components, either so they feel more 'cohesive' in terms of how they look and are constructed, or a bit more stylish. I will give some examples, but please, let me stress, this is probably just because I've been lucky enough to be spoiled by games with very lush components, there is absolutely nothing wrong with the stuff in this box!!!
Oh, note to designers, please in v2 of the rules, stop talking about 'zombie token' actions, it is a disconnect from the game/theme. Instead, please describe 'ZOMBIE movement, feeding and combat', we already know the tokens represent the zombies, it is jarring to read it in each rules section as though 'zombie tokens' were themselves some kind of entity.!
OK, some examples
the tank units are a bit odd looking, and it would have been nicer to have an 'upgraded' tank model to represent 'barricaded' (see below) military units, e.g. a basic tank model, an upgraded tank model representing better firepower (offense), and a separate counter to represent 'barricades', something that could sit under your tank model for example
the raised border /wall figures are too detailed and don't match the other components, this is one of the reasons it felt like the designers perhaps were balancing what they could and couldn't afford. I would have kept everything in the same 'style' and made these much simpler blocks or wall models (you could easily have models of cannons for firepower, and block type models for barricades and border walls for example).'
The dice for population markers are nice, but with only 12 regions to each player, it could have been nice to see some kind of building units, e.g. with simple models for 1, 2 and 3, each region could have a more 'visual' representation of its population, though it has to be said, the dice work well in seeing where the population is, and this is important when working out where the zombies go, so its hard to argue against the dice really the freedom pawns are cheap plastic versions of the pandemic pawns. Thematically I like what they represent, but they could have been a bit nicer
The resource cards are nice, perhaps I was expecting small wooden blocks though!
Anyway, as I said, this is a very picky point, perhaps you will disagree with me, but I just felt that either constraints of time and/or money left them just a little bit shy of getting all the components 'just right', having said all that, it still looks very nice, functionally it all works very well and this is only suffering with comparison to the bits from a big name company big box release that we have all been a bit spoiled by!
I would also have been tempted to use zombie models and then just stand them on tokens for their number, but I might do that anyway with some spares from Last Night on Earth! Since the tokens do stack, I would have made them a bit bigger and bit more noticeable as zombies!
Rules
OK, the rules are remarkably simple. Players start with their 12 regions populated, using the dice to display the population units in each sub region, marked on the map. Some regions have a symbol indicating they produce a particular resource, so you can already see how some countries or regions are more valuable than others in that regard, but also which ones are immediately at risk because of the low population.Each player randomly seeds 2 of his regions by rolling the d12 and referring to the 'outbreak' section on his player board, which says which country to add the zombie token. This table is also used when the various outbreak events (see later) occur.
So the play goes along these lines
1. Resource collectionIn resource collection, players collect cards from all their regions with a resource symbol on them (and later research allows you to add tokens to regions to allow them to produce resources if they didn't originally). Initially that gives you 6 resources of various kinds, but since researching technologies costs you 4 cards in general, and using some technologies also costs resources, it is quite tricky to stockpile resources unless you specifically research the ability to add 'resource production' to your other regions. Since you really need to use most of your resources each time, and you can also spend actions to draw resources (see below), and since most technologies need at least 3 of the 4 types, this results in not as much resource specific tension as there could have been, this may become apparent as we play the game more, but it would have been nice to see different resources be more or less important for different strategies. I have to say we did not always feel this, although there were occasions when if we'd had a different balance of resources we might have snuck in an extra action or so. so maybe this will come with more experience with the game.
2. Freedom PawnsOK, now we come to freedom pawns. Ultra neat idea! Basically this represents your 'government influence' and is represented by a track on your player board, in the start of the game you have 12 regions, and this gives you 6 freedom pawns, each one basically an 'action', but you can also use each action to move military, draw a resource card, contribute to research a technology, activate a technology, or increase the chance of research success. As you lose regions to zombie dinner (!) you take the dice off the board and onto your popularity track, thus reflecting how much population you have left, how much influence you have to do actions, and for each 2 regions you lose, you lose 1 freedom pawn, thus limiting your ability to deal with the current situation. It does remind you of the infection rate mechanism in Pandemic, although whereas in that game the track makes more bad shit happen (and thus your actions can cover less of it), here you get less actions to do stuff, and actually since the zombies advance relentlessly you get a bit of a double whammy with that one! Luckily there are technologies you can do to repopulate regions, and some of the random events help with that too. Basically this works really nicely, and fits very well in with the theme of your 'control' of the situation spiralling away as the population continues to dwindle. You also get some random cards that reduce your FPs because of rebellions in certain regions etc, so it does fit in very well to the game mythos.
3. Random EventsNext we have the random event deck, and again, its easy to draw a parallel with Pandemic, especially when you start shuffling in Outbreak cards as the mutation track advances (see below). What is nice about this deck is that it is truly random in that some of them are good and some of them bad, so its not like 'oh, which 3 cities do we add disease to now'. A card could just as easily help you crack a research goal more easily, or repopulate a nation, or airlift some military or upgrade your defences etc, but there are also bad cards that stop research, reduce your FPs (actions), and cause outbreaks, though initially the deck contains no outbreak cards (see 'upkeep'). So far, this has been super easy and straight forward, we gain resources, we count our freedom points, and we have various global events helping or hindering our progress, these cards are very nicely written, thematically very relevant and definitely add to 'tell the story' of how the defence against the spread of the zombie virus is going.
4. Zombie ActionsThen we have the zombie actions. Again, super neat mechanism. Basically the zombies are represented by tokens on the board. White side up as 'active', each zombie eats 1 population, so go through all your regions, change the dice to reflect the drop in population, if that number goes to 0, take it off the board and onto your popularity track to represent a drop in your influence for next time via the freedom pawns. Any zombies who feed you flip over to the red inactive side, and add tokens off the board to match each one, i.e. if 5 zombies are in a country with a population of 3, 3 zombies feed (take the die off the board and onto the player board), those 3 flip over to inactive, and 3 more inactive side tokens are added to the region, so now we have 6 'inactive' zombies, and 2 leftover white side up 'active' tokens. It is these leftover active tokens that now move to seek food. Again, super cool mechanic that just fits so well. Once you have done all zombie feeding, move your active zombies to neighbouring regions.
Take the first 3 tokens and move them to the adjacent region with highest population (more food!), obviously if only 2 active zombies are in a region, then both of them would go to the adjacent region most full of brains! In the case of ties, they prefer to go to regions with military (must say I did not understand this, or did I read the rule wrong!, thought they should avoid military, perhaps they like the noise!), failing that, break ties with dice rolls. After you have moved 3, if any more active zombies, take the next 2 and move them into the next highest populated neighbour region, and if you still have active zombies, go through them 1 at a time, going through all neighbours in population order one at a time, moving the zombies until all have moved (sometimes you loop through the neighbours a few times, e.g. if 10 active zombie tokens, and 3 neighbouring regions, say A, B and C in order of population, 3 zombies move to A, 2 to B, 1 to C, then 1 to A, 1 to B, 1 to C and the last one to A.)
It's a really nice way to deal with the theme of zombies eating, then doubling (infection), then moving (towards food source). it also means you can have a lot of input into your strategy by seeing where the horde will move next. You can predict how your population will suffer and where to focus your efforts. It's nice, really nice. Since you can also use border walls and quarantine research and various other actions to block off certain routes AND zombies don't move back into 'empty' regions (no population), you can very much shape how you funnel the infected towards areas you can deal with, and as I said, its really cool that you can effectively push zombies out of your map area and into the other players areas! (likewise you can use that perhaps to bargain for help, say, ask another player to block off a border between his and your region if you do the same somewhere else, or threaten to send your horde over his border by blocking off their other options).
Now, with a 2 player game, the unused regions (3 of them) are effectively quarantined, so I think this will really shine with 4 or 5 players and you start to see more border traffic as we can call it!
Finally, we have combat to take care of, very simple really, any zombies now in regions with military enter combat, 1 zombie = 1 point, any military (tank model) = 1 point, unless it's 'barricaded' when it is worth 2 points (and we did not read all the technology modifiers so maybe some of the higher level ones give extra bonuses). You basically lift off military and zombies to match, i.e. 2 zombies, 2 tanks, everyone dead, take them all off, 3 zombies, 2 tanks, take off the 2 tanks and 2 zombies, leave 1 zombie left over. 1 tank with upgraded defense can take out 2 zombies etc.
Really simple, predictable (and therefore something you can plan tactically) even if it seems difficult to ever have enough time or resources to effectively build much military. Also, one slight nitpick, when zombies move and then go to combat phase, you use military 'defense' strength, later on when we move the guns, you use 'offense' strength, but its not as easy to see that (you stand the tank up on its side to show an upgraded defense), so thats something to bear in mind
5. Player ActionsNow, finally we have our actions to play, depending on how many pawns and resources we have in our hand at this point based on population, and any random event card modifiers. You can use an FP (action) to draw a resource card of any type, you will do this when you want to research something or add military and are missing a specific card that forms the cost of that action. Of course, you can also draft military, research technology, activate technology or move military
Lets start with military since we touched on that in the zombie attack phase. You can spend 4 specific resource cards and 1 FP to draft a military unit (tank) and place it anywhere you have population but that does not have zombies in it at that point. You can then choose to upgrade its defense strength with 1 FP, you turn the tank on its side (meh!) to show this, or you can spend a FP to move any military unit up to 2 adjacent regions (if it hits the horde after 1, it must stop there and no more movement after), you can do this multiple times, eg, 3 FP to move 3 tanks. This time when you resolve combat use the offensive strength (more often than not, just 1, since the upgrades to offense take some time to research!). because of the speed of the game, and lack of resources and the quick spread of disease, we found we almost always used this just to send in a tank or two just to nip at the zombie forces in one region to allow that regions population one more round to survive while you planned something else. I.e. you will not be building up huge armies and sweeping across your nation splattering zombies everywhere! There are cool research options to upgrade your military and allow airlift to far away regions as well by the way
Ok the other mainstay of the game here is the research technologies. Cool! Though as I said, i would have preferred some kind of cool tokens or cards to place on the table to show that I had research 'nuclear strike' rather than the rather small token on a large player board with quite a lot of text. Maybe have the technologies as large icons instead, and just have a reference sheet to look at?Well, you can research in different areas, military being one, science being another, medical being yet another, each branch has 3 tiers of technology, tier 1 for quite modest 'powers', once you have successfully researched 3 of those you can research a tier 2 'power', for better options, and once you have 2 of those you can research a tier 3 power, e.g. Nuclear Strike! on military. YOu would thus need to do quite a bit of research to get to those giddy levels, but I think it would be possible if you keep alive long enough! It will take me a while to get used to all the technologies available, for example I missed the 'research focus' one which looks boring but actually gives you a +2 chance to succeed on all research in the future which would have avoided our bad dice rolls stopping research in key moments! I certainly made use of the technology to blockade borders between countries, which also allowed me to funnel a large zombie horde out of North Africa and into Western Europe haha! And defensive manouevres also allows you to upgrade your tanks defense automatically without having to spend a pawn.
Anyway, to research something you pay the resource cost, plus 1 FP and roll a d12, you need 7 to 'get it'. If you do, you place a green token on that technology, and you can then use it by paying, usually 1 FP, or some are just permanent modifiers in play. You can spend 1 FP to +2 to your test roll, and once you have got a tech in one area, that gives you another +1 to succeed in another tech in the same branch (eg military), finally, if you fail a research, you leave a +3 token there so that on the next turn you still have to pay the resources and FP to try again but you are more likely to succeed. Thats just nice, it works thematically, and it means you dont have to worry that you could miss out on an upgrade by bad rolls over and over.
And thats basically the actions done with, as you can see, a lot more options because of the large number of techs you can research, but still very simple to track and you won't ever have enough stuff to do lots at once, so you really need to think tactically with that, also with military placements and movement, and use of the zombie feeding and movement rules to plan where the horde is heading.
6. UpkeepThe final upkeep phase basically flips over all inactive zombie tokens to their active side ready for the next wave, the mutation marker moves along (see below), take away any quarantine markers used as part of research ability (allows you to block off one region from zombie entry), move the start player token, clear away any unused FP off your board and start again.
So, the mutation marker. Yes, its basically the Outbreak marker in Pandemic. Again, with an added thematic twist. Basically this goes up each round, each player has their own token on it, usually it goes up 1 space at a time, BUT once you start dabbling in 'high tech', eg Tier 2 and Tier 3, then your marker goes up 2 or 3 spaces instead. Since Level 15 means the virus goes airborne, that triggers the end of the game since you are powerless to stop the virus spreading. It really fits thematically that as you start messing with research you are more likely to cause mutations, and theres another subtle effect too.
The mutation track has red, yellow and black spaces. Black spaces do nothing, and yellow spaces are 'mutation alerts', only activated once (so if your marker hits the 1st yellow space, a mutation occurs, but if another player hits that space later you dont get another mutation for that space). Mutations basically mean you shuffle 'outbreak' cards into the random draw deck, these serve to generate the placement of a new zombie in a randomly rolled region, perhaps in a place behind your carefully designed defence!
With the red spaces, EACH TIME a player hits that an outbreak occurs, now most of the time, your tokens will move together, but as soon as one player uses a tier 2 tech, his token will go 2 spaces up instead of 1, and all of a sudden then, you have the possibililty of activating an outbreak space more than once, so that has some interesting possibilities as well I think!
End Game & Conclusion
The end game is triggered when the mutation marker hits 15 in which case I think you are supposed to have lost to the virus but since you all have separate forces, you can add up your population dice remaining to see who has the most survivors to determine a winner. Otherwise, if one player ends his action phase with no zombie tokens (and I almost had it!), then they are victorious!, and I think if one player loses his last population, then you play out the current round, and again use total survivors to determine a winner. I suspect that the most common way for the game to end will be one of the players succumbing and thus who has the most left alive at the end will win (and I am writing this away from the game, so it could be that the Mutation Track 15 just means everyone loses absolutely).
Well, my missus was not so enthused, but think she had some bad luck in the beginning, and does not really enjoy feeling she has no chance from the early doors, whereas I think I feel like that adds replay weight since it can really feel good to beat difficult games, and also, I think she did not play optimally as neither of us really knew the best way to proceed on our first play! I just know, that in a group of 4 or 5 this will be an absolute blast to play, light and easy enough for 'non gamers', but with plenty of stuff going on to feel exciting, interesting and varied, difficult in terms of not having enough time or resources to ever quite get on top of the infection, but the fact that you play your own forces really gives you a sense of satisfaction of planning your own way to manage the crisis, use different techs in different ways, and use the clever mechanic of zombie feeding and movement to shepherd the undead onto your neighbours land, this is a game you will enjoy win or lose, it will be about the developing story of the horde and your efforts to defeat it. I also think the quoted time on the box may be overstating it, I think it feels like quite a snappy game, very simple to learn and intuitive.
I absolutely recommend this game, really great effort, and definitely 'new' enough to own along with Pandemic and Ghost Stories, and to be honest, will appeal to a lot of people who liked those games but weren't quite convinced how much they were really playing as opposed to agreeing optimal strategies. I think this game will work as a solo game (e.g. just play 1 region on your own, or join 2 together and use 2 boards) to defeat the horde or just beat a best score for population when the mutation reaches 15, it works great with 2, either 1 region each or next time we will play 2 regions each, and I think this is crying out for a full 4 or 5 player game. Great effort, thanks so much for quickly getting this to Sweden so quickly, really looking forward to getting the most out of this game, and already thinking of several ideas for variants, modifications and 'pimps' to the game as well.
cheers
Lee & Petra
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