Lesbians Review: ZOMBIES!!!

Hi everybody, we are two super gay lesbians from the land down under, and today we are reviewing an excitingly themed game called ZOMBIES!!!
(Hold on to your brains everybody.)

My lovely Girlfriend having her face mauled by Zombies!!!

Zombies!!! Fact File

Players: 2 - 6

 Play Time: 60 minutes (theoretically)
Genre: Figurine/ Board-Building

Zombies are pretty in right now. Books, movies, games, Zombie strippers, it’s hard to get away from the undead (unless you have a 2+ modifier on your movement dice roll). Zombies!!! is a game which feeds your expectations of this genre just as its zombie figurines feed on your brains.
I purchased this game for my lovely girlfriend on her birthday based purely on the pun on the front of the box – “This one’s a No-Brainer!”

***

APPEARANCE

The Zombies!!! artwork has the gritty, bloody, funhouse feel you would expect from game jumping on the Zombieland style bandwagon of gleeful gore. I may have been a bit too excited about the figurines (“BABE, IT’S IN 3D!”). I’ve never really played a figurine style game before (unless you count smashing batman into the joker when I was five), and it’s fun to play in “real space” so to speak; a game that really has space and location at its core. The only problem is, the 2D buildings seem pretty flat in comparison. I’m not going to lie, the zombies are cool, they even come as female/male ones!

(When they aren't hungry for brains our zombies support marriage equality)

GAMEPLAY 

The Girlfriend usually writes the gameplay section, but she is studying hard for her very scary law exams, so I’ll give it a go. Flame me if it’s too confusing.

There’s two ways to win Zombies!!!, neither are easy, both end up being pretty lolzy. Either you kill 25 zombies and hoard them in your dead zombie collection, or you are the first player to reach the helipad and escape this zombie infested nightmare.

Zombies!!! follows a pretty simple game mechanic. You are a dude with a shotgun on a board of square tiles. Turns are:

1. Draw a map tile from the deck and attach it to the board, giving you more fun spaces to explore.
2. Draw until you have three cards in hand. Cards are the best bit of this game in my humble opinion, they let you do crazy shit to all the people.
3. Make a movement roll (roll a D6)
4. Move (really, I thought we would just roll and do nothing). This is the bit where you FIGHT THE ZOMBIES HARDCORE STYLE by rolling a D6.
5. Roll a D6, and move that number of Zombies one space each.
6. You can play your awesome cardz at any time.

You can collect life tokens, which let you re-roll die, and bullet tokens which let you modify die, but these only work when you’re fighting the Zombies.
That’s it really.

OVERALL

Zombies!!! is one bitchy game. In movies, heroes faced with a zombie apocalypse will inevitably band together and defeat the looming threat. But board game makers are a much sicker bunch than Hollywood writers, and like another zombie board game, Mall of Horror, players must exploit and brutally devastate each other in order to win the game. Unlike Mall of Horror, Zombies!!! is more about drawing those really nasty cards than calculated manipulation and betrayal.

Because of this, Zombies!!! is a very hard game to win (and finish).

Reaching the helipad first without dying is an extremely difficult thing, especially when you have four other players sending hoards of zombies towards you. In fact, probably the only way to win is sneaky sneaky in the background kill ALL the Zombies, or when all your opponents are so busy killing each other, they haven’t got anything left to throw at you when you use a movement card to race towards the helipad.

Because of the above, Zombies!!! can be a really fun game to play, especially with a group of people who, although friends and sometimes in long term committed lesbian relationships are not afraid to tear each other apart completely. It’s especially fun towards the beginning of the game, when all the players are fairly close together, and it’s a race to use cards, luck, and zombies to get what you want, and where you want. There is a nice system of dice modifiers which means that while luck is a key element, it never gets stupid, and taking risks can sometimes pay off in the most awesome of ways.

Unfortunately, the very strong spatial element to the game means it degrades a bit as it goes on. Often the zombies will run out about three quarters of the game, and a zombie game without a serious zombie threat is seriously flawed. Similarly, as the game goes on, the usefulness of different cards change making some very powerful, and some very useless. Also, because of the largely space, the players are often just too far away to be competing directly, which is just less fun.

Fortunately, the cards, most of which allow you to target someone else, keep the competitive multiplayer element of the game up.

Just a note, Zombies!!! also has about one billion expansion packs, most of which are supposed to be better than the original game, so keep an eye out for those.

FINAL REVIEW

Me: Zombies is a fun and funny game which is a nice combination of luck and just pure inter-player nastiness. For those of you who like your games hardcore, it’s fairly lacking on the strategy front, but if you’re just after a lolzy casual game, it’s well worth a play. The main downside, as I mentioned before, is that it does decelerate towards the end when the space gets too big to cover quickly, but if you’re willing to see it through to the end there’s usually some tense final moments.
Rating: 6.5

Girlfriend: This is definitely more of a casual party game, and I'd recommend playing it with upwards of four if you can manage. We have played it with 2 and 3-player, and much of the spatial issues in this game affecting the tension and competitiveness would be address in, say, a game of six players. So far the game hasn't really lived up to my expectations of a good zombie game, I might check out some expansions someday (though I am not keen on spending the money on it, frankly). Alternatively, I will check in after I've played a 6-player game and re-assess then.
Girlfriend’s Rating: 5.5

6/10