Zombicide first thoughts

Grrr Zombies! 

I ordered Zombicide a week or so back from Amazon and it came in the mail yesterday, 15ish days before Amazons estimated delivery date of the 14th of August. It was a bit of a debacle finding a place to source Zombicide from, perhaps because it is from small time publishers Guillotine Games and Cool or not Minis. So I dropped into Dans work on my way home from the ward to pick it up (I get my stuff sent there to avoid the complication of missing couriers) to find they had already taken a sneak peak. No problem, I was a bit choked up about it but got over it fast.

Zombicide is a co-op survival horror game where you take on the role of survivors of a zombie apocalypse to complete various scenarios. The great thing about it being scenario based is that each scenario states how long it will be and the difficulty making it easy to adapt the game for different situations. Anyway lets take a quick look at the pretty impressive components.

First look. Thankfully there is only one tray of cardboard pop-outs,
making the game simple and easier to set up! 

Behind the pop outs is a couple of cardboard boxes with arrows!

In the cardboard boxes were the characters and 'Zombies!' Just to clarify there are a lot of 'Zombies!' I wasn't expecting them to be in trays like that but was pleasantly surprised. This means if I ever want to paint these suckers up then they have nice safe pockets to fit them into. The only downfall is there are 8 double ups of each model except the abomination of which there is one.

You can see the box compared to a more normal sized game,
it is a big box! 

First Game! 

I managed to convince my flat mates including SWMBO who normally isn't into games. They have an introduction scenario to 'teach you the game'. I feel like games with introduction games think everyone playing are brain dead (pun intended) so need a little tutorial. So I was like, stuff the system I am going to play scenario two and skip the introduction scenario! And it was great, I had no problem with the rules.

The rules are pretty simple. All the survivors get to go first, each gets 3 actions which they can spend on, moving, fighting, searching for items, getting into and driving cars and a few more. After this the zombies get one action each, either to move towards the noisiest zone (you make noise during the game which is represented by little tokens) or towards a survivor they can see. The aim is to complete the requirements that the scenario gives you, for example find food, or level up to level 4 (red) by killing a lot of zombies.

So we got the show on the road playing "Y-Zone" a 60 minute medium difficulty scenario. Our goal was to get from the starting point to the exit! Seems easy enough, well it was pretty easy to be honest.

The survivors ready to kick some 'ZOMBIES!'

So we started out searching for some good weapons, which you have to do indoors. We only started with a crowbar, an axe, a pistol and some cast iron pans. Because it was our first game and the deck wasn't shuffled well we had a few of the same items been drawn after the other.

Here is my SMG, Katana wielding homeless guy! 

We maintained a nice area of control in the middle of the board for a while and enjoyed socking it to some zombies. We also had a discussion about the many different names for 'Zombies!' which was humorous at the time but I don't think it would be that great repeating it now.

After a bit of ass kicking zombie action we realised that our goal was to escape not kill lots of zombies. So we devised a plan to run through an abandoned building, and it worked with quite a few zombies on our tail!

End game, you can see the survivors at the exit point
lower right hand corner, we started upper right hand corner.

In summation it was a pretty fun game with a lot of laughs. It is worth noting that it was more fun just killing zombies than actually completing the mission. I am sure that there will be better scenarios with more exciting zombie killing action however! I like having a diversity of games for different situations and groups and this definitely seems like it will be able to be played and enjoyed with lots of different groups. I guess as I mentioned before being scenario based helps as you can tone up or down the difficulty and length of game and co-op can be enjoyed by most. Plus the game play is simple enough but enough strategy in surviving to keep it interesting for a casual to semi-serious board gamer. That is all I have to say for now, just some finishing photos.

Which way? 

This guy is called a Fatty in the game. Not very PC.