Zombicide Review: A Tabletop Kickstarter Gone Very Right

Quick Summary

Hello and welcome to my Zombicide review. Zombicide is a cooperative multiplayer game for 1-6 players. As a player, you are a survivor in the wake of a zombie apocalypse. You and other players band together to face off against the zombie hordes whilst trying to complete certain objectives before you are overwhelmed.

What’s in the box?

• 9 Modular Game Tiles (Printed on both sides)
• 71 Miniatures (6 Survivors, 40 Walkers, 16 Runners, 8 Fatties and one Abomination)
• 6 Dice
• 6 Survivor Identity Cards
• 6 Experience Trackers
• 110 Mini Cards (42 Zombie Cards, 62 Equipment Cards, 6 Wounded Cards)
• 76 Tokens (Noise, Doors, Cars etc)

How does it work?

The ruleset is really easy to pick up and even though the rulebook comes with a tutorial to learn the basics of the game it is not really needed if you have a player who has played the game before. Depending on the amount of players, you control one or more survivors whilst the rules dictate how the undead shuffle around the board.

Each survivor starts with three actions and everything you can do ingame costs one action; opening a door, moving a square, attacking a zombie, searching a room and so on. A turn starts with one player and then goes around the table clockwise until it reaches the last player. Then it is time for the zombies to have their turn. They attack, move and then new zombies spawn in at specific points on the board. And then it is back to the survivors.

Objectives per map can vary from collecting certain goods to retrieving keys and opening doors in a specific order to getting from point A to point B. The rulebook contains 10 scenarios that can be played in any order as they are most definitely not arranged from easy to hard. 

Personal Opinion

Personally I have been enjoying the hell out of Zombicide – even with me losing about as often as I win a scenario. All of the survivors included in the game are archetypes or based off of existing characters in fiction (out of the basic six I recognize Rick from the Walking Dead, Michael Douglas’ character from the movie Falling Down and Abby Sciuto from NCIS). The nine double sided board tiles allow for a large variety of game setups beyond the ten scenarios in the rulebook. 

Initially, I ran the tutorial level by myself so I could see the game mechanics in action. Seeing it is a very short map (using only two tiles), I then ran my friends through it with me just observing, explaining and giving out advice. Afterwards we ran another scenario as a group and had a blast….before dying horribly.

This also brings me to another point; house rules. In my game I already weeded out a few zombie spawn cards that give each zombie of a certain type another activation which I personally found to be a very overpowered event. Although, it might get reintroduced eventually once we get more familiar with the game. We also started using dice to mark larger hordes of zombies. Even though there are 65 zombies included in the game we managed to get all of them on the board simultaneously at some point.

The six characters included are by no means the only characters and Guillotine Games released some additional promo survivors as well. Blank Survivor cards are available on their website and it’s quite easy to create your own unique survivors. The scale of the models (32mm) matches that of most miniatures available.

Guillotine Games also offers blank equipment cards, a level editor and an app for either iPad or Android to keep track of the Survivors in the game. All the rule books are also available for download in case you want to take a peek at how it all works before making up your mind before you decide to buy the game or not.

All free – of course.

Conclusion

Guillotine Games has done a terrific job with this boardgame that originally originated from a Kickstarter. With its ongoing support of the game on their website along with the readily available material related to the game I can wholeheartedly recommend this game to anyone looking for a fun game where you get to wipe the board with zombies.

I hope you enjoyed this read! Might be a tad long, but thanks for sticking with me to the end.

Cheers.