Eric

Zombicide, by Guillotine Games, joins the popular trend of cooperative board games that are designed to allow friends to play towards a common goal instead of being at odds with one another. In this case, you’re banding together in a post-apocalyptic world for mutual survival, holding the hordes of undead at bay just long enough to salvage some supplies or a cache of weapons. Cooperative games like Zombicide are not necessarily a new concept, but I’m finding that cooperative games with geek-friendly themes like zombies, space aliens, and hobbits are incredibly accessible for wives, husbands, and the significant others of hardcore gamer geeks. I’ve found that the invitation to play a game with your spouse and not against them makes a big difference in the overall fun factor for everybody involved.

After several playthroughs and a number of conversations with a few veteran players of Zombicide, I’ve come to a number of conclusions about the game and how best to keep your brain out of the clutches of ravenous undead.

Zombicide is a board game that has a high replay value due to its modular nature. The board is laid out according to the mission you’ve chosen to play from within the rulebook using tiles with artwork of various interconnected city streets and abandoned buildings. Each scenario has its own specific set of victory conditions that need to be met, each mission ranging from some simple escapes to more involved supply runs. For example, our first mission was to break down the doors of each building and collect five ‘objective markers’ and then make it off the board’s edge that contained the exit marker. The second mission had us searching the buildings for supplies (bottled water, bags of rice, and canned goods) and loading them up into a car on the far end of the map. We then had to drive that car off the board via exit marker with as many survivors as the car could hold.

The Odds Are Against You

Having a win ratio around 33% is about the right odds that you will find in a good co-op game. According to our host, they typically play with four players and things are incredibly deadly with a win ratio of roughly one-third. Whereas we played with eight players, which put enough firepower on the board to deal with the swarms of zombies through sheer volume of fire in both of the games we played. The basic game normally does not support this many players, but due to the Kickstarter stretch-goal rewards our host got a stack of three extra player characters and a bunch of extra zombie models which made it possible to play with eight players.

The more players you have, the easier the missions will become.
Playing together as a team is the only way to survive the zombie apocalypse.
Avoid get so wrapped up in killing zombies that you forget the actual victory conditions.
Never split up the party (universal truth).

Survival Tip #1 – Level Up Simultaneously

The overall strategy that was identified early in the game is that there is an experience track for each of the characters. You earn experience for killing zombies and picking up objective markers. There are four experience tracks (blue, yellow, orange, and red). As noted in the photo of a zombie spawning card, the number of zombies that are spawned are based on the highest level character within the party. If you don’t plan your level-ups right, you could end up with one player racking up a lot of experience points from kills and objective tokens while the rest of the party struggles with the beefed up waves of baddies. Watch your experience track and talk it out with the rest of the group; if you play things right you can all level up within the same turn and keep the threat level down longer.

Survival Tip #2 – Open Doors Early and Often

Opening the doors to the buildings early in the game will help manage the threat level whilst searching buildings and collecting objective tokens. Each time a door is opened into a new building the cards are drawn to determine the undead population for each room within that building. If you can manage to keep the party experience at the lower levels while you explore, the buildings will spawn fewer zombies. There are characters that have high speed values that can help take advantage of this trick early in the game.

Survival Tip #3 – Get a Gun if You’re Going Last

Get a gun if you are the last player in the turn order, because after every player has gone it’s the zombies turn. It will be too risky to run into a room full of zombies with a machete or a chainsaw. You see, zombies will always attack a player that is in the same tile as the player – so running wildly into a room of zombies with a fire-axe screaming at the top of your lungs is risky – if you don’t kill all of the zombies in your room you’re going to die. Once you take two hits, you’re dead.

Increased Fun Factor – Character Randomization

It’s easy to gravitate towards some of the characters that are clearly built for putting bullets into the undead at thirty paces or putting a machete between their eyes. To really appreciate the danger and keep the game fresh, my suggestion is to randomize the character you get. This is a great way to try new things without having to think too hard about it.

In Conclusion

In the process of writing this review I asked some of the regular players for additional tips, tricks, and strategy. Sean, the owner of the game, says that making noise is always a good option when you run out of zombies to shoot. He declares that his character points his shotgun up to the air and fires off a few more blasts and places noise counters next to his model and says with a look of mischief on his face, “See? It’s a thing.” It’s important to point out that noise attracts the undead. At this remark the rest of the players sternly correct him including his wife, who says, “no, it’s really not a thing.”

Wired: The production value of the game is high, the game mechanics are simple, and with the number of missions and different characters you get with the box set there is plenty of replay value. Definitely a beer and pretzels game that encourages players to work together.

Tired: Some of the dice that come with the game are slightly confusing, with a zombie head icon for a 1 and a molotov cocktail icon for a 6. The only other drawback is that the game does not scale beyond 4-5 players very well without needing some additional house rules to make sure things remain challenging enough.

Verdict: The game has officially gone onto the buy-list for my personal game collection.

So the game is beautiful, but how does it actually play?

The game is actually surprisingly simple, and, with two players, lasts about an hour. Now, when I say simple, I don’t mean that there isn’t a wealth of opportunity for strategy and plotting. The game actively encourages underhanded and back-stabby playing. Simple means that I was able to sit down with two others who hadn’t played, on my first game, and from setup to completion, we had all become quite good at it. I look forward to playing again and seeing how well we all improve.

I’m getting far ahead of myself, though.

You play the Lords of Waterdeep, mysterious figures who control the organizations within the city from behind the scenes. You begin the game with a number of agents (based on the number of players) and begin placing them throughout the city at the different buildings. If an agent is at that location, you cannot place another agent there, except in the case of the Waterdeep Harbor and the Cliffwatch Inn, which have multiple spots.

You attempt to gather heroes (represented by colored cubes) into your personal tavern to send them on quests for you, which you gather from the board’s Cliffwatch Inn. Quest range from bolstering the city guard to stamping out cults. You gather these heroes from specific locations on the board.

This is where the strategy kicks in: You are able to see other players’ taverns, as well as the heroes they’ve gathered so far. As such, you can send your agents to locations you know the other player needs to gather adventurers from.

There are Intrigue cards you are able to collect as well, which you can use against the other players, or in your own efforts. These can add to your heroes, remove other player’s heroes, force other players to perform mandatory quests, and lots of other nasty little surprises.

In addition, you can build buildings of your own at Builder’s Hall. These give you new buildings with interesting new mechanics, and which give the owner a little something when another player places an agent there. There are some quests which give you Victory Points for building buildings, and one of the Lords of Waterdeep grants you VP for this as well.

And that’s what it comes down to: Victory Points. As the game progresses, you’ll gain Victory Points for completing quests, building buildings, and a few other things. However, no one really knows who’s going to win until the very, very end, as the Lords of Waterdeep are revealed. Each player took a Lord at the beginning of the game, and kept them hidden from the other players. When they’re revealed, they have a brief rule on the bottom of their card, granting VP at the end of the game for completing specific types of quests. While you may have been completing quests throughout the game, more than any other player, if you weren’t doing the quests your particular Lord of Waterdeep granted VP for, the person with fewer completed quests than you may very well surge ahead and win it.

This game is incredibly simple to play right off the bat, but has a ton of options in-game, allowing players to play to their liking. In my first game, one player spent most of their time sending Agents to the Harbor, playing Intrigue cards, while another built a massive army of Fighters and completed Warfare after Warfare quest. Most of my tavern was full of Rogues as I completed lots of Skullduggery quests.

It’s a fantastic game, and I can’t wait to play with a full complement of five players.

During the game, players have to constantly check for dominance in several areas. A true pain in the fiddly butt!

Too much fiddly accounting. No clear objectives. Just constant victory track scoring. Boring. A game themed on evolution: how about survival of the fittest? Unskilled players hose the game, which happens often since it is overly complicated. After two turns I didn’t want to play anymore.

It is a mix of mechanincs boiling down to pure chaos… for several hours!
Being virtually eliminated after ten minutes, yet having to endure four more hours of boredom is not what boardgames should do.
It is way too long and needlessly complex for the unsatisfying gameplay it delivers. The theme feels poorly portrayed as well.

I’m a big fan of the game genre called “4X” – “explore, expand, exploit, and exterminate.”. I’ve been playing these ever since the Ur-progenitor of the genre in the 1980s, Empire, and I actually still maintain an open-source C version of that game. Civilization is my favorite computer game ever, and by what I hear of it Master of Orion – the game “4X” was coined to describe – would have hooked me even harder if I’d known of it when it came out.

I particularly like SF-themed 4X games. I have previously posted a favorable review of Twilight Imperium (hereafter “TI”), a big sprawling epic of a contending-galactic-empires 4X game. But now I write to report on a game that effectively makes TI obsolete – a new design called Eclipse which I think is going to permanently raise the quality bar in 4X games.

When you unpack the components for Eclipse, you’re going to immediately get the impression that it’s Twilight Imperium lite. Hexagonal star-system tiles for variable board layout – check. Plastic ship models in different sizes – check. Playing mats, describing human and alien species one per – check. This impression is not exactly wrong, but the differences turn out to be more important than the similarities.

One difference is that the game doesn’t start with all the board tiles down. Instead, player homeworlds are arranged in a broken ring with unexplored space between and around them. Unlike TI, which has exploration only as a bolted-on afterthought with the Distant Suns option, exploration is central to this game and one of the ways to win is to explore more aggressively and successfully than your neighbors.

Another difference is that instead of a huge pile of available ships you have only a relatively small handful. Interestingly, this actually encourages combat, because losing your fleet-in-being isn’t a catastrophe that will take you half the rest of the game to recover from.

But the most important difference is not local to one aspect of the game, it’s a global fact about the style of the entire game. Eclipse is as tightly constructed and carefully interconnected as a Swiss watch. By contrast, TI is a huge sprawling pile of game mechanics that make terrific thematic sense but don’t integrate all that well and in some cases are only half-realized (hello, politics sub-game, I’m looking at you!).

Here’s an example of what I mean by tight construction. Your player mat has a track with disc-shaped pieces on it. You have to expend one of these temporarily (getting it back at the end of the round) to take a game action such as moving ships performing research, etc. You have to expend one of these permanently to control a solar system. This matters because the track beneath the pieces has numbers on it representing the upkeep cost for your empire; as you take actions and seize systems, it rises. If at the end of a round you can’t cover that upkeep from your money reserve, you have to give up solar systems (taking back disks to cover numbers) until you can.

That one mechanic (somewhat reminiscent of the resource market in Power Grid) creates a delicate multi-way tradeoff between seizing territory, taking actions, and building a money reserve that you can use to finance a late-game surge. Because it does so with very little state, you can reason about your option tree more quickly and effectively than in a game with heavier mechanics. This nets out as faster turns and shorter overall playing time; where a 6-player game of TI can easily take 8 or 9 hours, I’ve seen a 5-player game with mostly newbies take about 5 hours and a following 6-player game take about 4:30. After another play or two I expect my group will get down to the designer’s estimate of a half hour per player.

Most of the the people in both games had previous experience playing TI with each other, and after the first game the consensus was already becoming clear; this game pretty much obsoletes TI. You give up some thematic chrome; the real draw in TI’s sprawling elaborateness is the way it ticket-punches every trope from battlestars to the Galactic Council in a loving tribute to all those classic space operas you read as a kid.

What you get in return is a much better game – tighter, faster-playing, less vulnerable to runaway-leader effects, packing just as much tactical and strategic depth and multiple paths to victory but with much lower total complexity overhead. Eclipse is elegant in the way a mathematical theorem can be elegant – minimal premises worked to a powerful and satisfying conclusion.

I expect this game will be studied by game designers as it will be an innovative example for years to come.

The first impression most players will have seeing the game played will be the map, and I think most everyone will agree the map looks gorgeous. The realistic feel, the mix of bright and dark colors, the new blue for the oceans, it all looks great. Breaking it into 3 separate panels is perfectly fine by me.

The addition of Burma is very exciting to me and has long been needed, as well as the new representation of China. Scandinavia being split into two, Eastern Europe being re-drawn, and the new Northwest Europe territory will all improve the depth of gameplay in the European theater.

National Objectives

The concept of National Objectives seemed familiar, and it took me a while but now I realize why. It’s essentially a page pulled directly out of RISK, where you get bonus armies for controlling all the territories in a continent. The biggest difference is that in RISK you had to control the continent at the start of your turn, while in AA50 the bonus is received at the end of your turn meaning you can acheive the requirements on your turn and then get the bonus before another player interferes. And of course, AA50 has thoughtfully tailored it to the WWII situation and every nation has multiple unique objectives but the basic idea is similar.

I find the National Objectives system a brilliant, elegant way to introduce numerous elements into the game that have been lacking in previous editions. Control of the sea in certain areas is now meaningful without the addition of convoy zones. Nations are encouraged to both attack and attempt to achieve their historical objectives while also defend and hold regions critical to them. Even Lend-Lease, which has been on a lot of people’s wish-lists for a long time, is nicely covered by this system. Best of all, the National Ojbectives system, combined with the new representation of China, makes an early Japanese attack into Russia even more difficult and less rewarding, finally killing this ridiculously stupid strategy that has been a trademark of the Revised Edition.

Of course the largest criticism of National Objectives is that the incentive for achieving them will be so large that strategies and gameplay will revolve around them and the variety of gameplay will decrease. Whether or not there is any truth to this remains to be seen.

Italy

The addition of Italy is a great feature and despite my fears was very well carried out. My greatest fear was that Italy’s industrial base would be vastly exaggerated but it turns out Italy only starts the game with 10 IPC which is an ideal value to represent Italy’s historical economic weakness in comparison to the other nations. The national objectives system will give Italy the chance to possibly get a lot more than this but they will have to earn it by accomplishing Italy’s historic goals of securing the Mediterranean and obtaining territory in Africa. Very well done. Italy’s starting forces will probably be exaggerated but this is acceptable for balance reasons. I also could care less about Italy’s shortage of unique sculpts.

My main and really only complaint about Italy so far is the choice of color. Brown is an acceptable color for Italy but I am disappointed to see how close it is to the Soviet brown. Having seen how dark they went with the German forces, I really wish they had gone with a light gray color for the Italians, perhaps tinted with blue or green. Oh well, we are stuck with the brown so I can only hope it isn’t as bad in real life as it is in the pictures. Even Larry Harris listed this as one of his largest complaints in the production version of the game.

Overall Italy should bring some much needed new dynamics to the war in Europe and Africa. It also provides a nice new player slot and the possibility of 3v3 games.

China

The addition of China is very welcome and was carried out splendidly. A Chinese army made up entirely of infantry very well represents the limited offensive and logistical capabilities of the Chinese army while at the same time allowing them to defend adequately and gain strength if ignored by Japan. The low value and large number of Chinese provinces also correctly represents the difficulty Japan had occupying large amounts of Chinese territory. This increase in Chinese strength and making China independent from the US in terms of IPC was a huge step forward in making the Asian land war more realistic. For the Japanese player it makes it much more challenging though probably less fun as he is now going to face the same issues with diffusion of strength as his historical counterparts.

Naval Balance

The new transport rule will have far more impact on the game than the new cruiser unit. It will make naval operations much more interesting and combat between fleets generally more bloody. I can’t wait to see how naval campaigns play out now.

The new cruiser unit is actually relatively unexciting, despite being touted as one of the game’s main selling points. I’m not sure it was even necessary, since its basically a mini-battleship. The main advantage of cruisers historically was their fast speed combined with long endurance which made them ideal for scouting and escort purposes. This is difficult to represent in Axis and Allies, but I think giving them a speed of 3 would have been the best way, and Larry Harris said he did consider this before rejecting it. I disagree but we will just have to wait and see.

Technology

We still don’t have the full list of technologies but already I think the method of obtaining them is improved. There is still a ton of randomness in the system overall which is annoying but I would much rather play with this sytem than any of the previous ones.

Some of the new technologies we do already know about are very cool. The Mechanized Infantry and Improved Artillery techs are especially clever, as they improve the value of tanks and artillery respectively while still maintaining the value of infantry as well.

Strategic Bombing

The strategic bombing system has already been the subject of extensive debate, especially in relation to the technologies that effect it.

Leaving out the discussion of technologies for a moment, I think the system has been greatly improved, and now has more meaning and more options for both sides. Whether or not to bomb, and where, combined with the decision to repair or not repair damage adds much needed depth to the system without overly complicating it. The reduced cost of bombers also makes strategies involving strategic bombing more viable. Capping damage at 2 times the value of the territory makes it costly to repair but also limits the effects of the bombing past a certain point and nicely represents how much more vulnerable dense industrial economies were to strategic bombing. I think the changes have all been for the better.

The technologies associated with strategic bombing complicate things substantially and I am going to have to wait and see how balance works with these.

Summary

Axis and Allies is very much a “Design For Effect” game. Very little of what is going on is meant to represent discrete, concrete actions taken by the nations, but the overall feel of the game is intended to loosely represent the flow of WWII as it could have been if the odds between the sides were more even. The single best example is the National Objectives which allows for the simple representation of a number of concepts without complex rules for incorporating them each individually (such as Lend-Lease). In this manner the Anniversary edition achieves this goal far better than any previous edition.

Hardcore wargamers may still not be impressed, and the ahistorical balance between the Axis and Allies is still going to turn away many people who are more historically minded, but overall AA50 has given the series a nice step up in complexity and a very large step up in historical detail.

At the beginning of the game, you seed the house with a certain number of Threat markers depending on the difficulty you decide on. There are also 3 Points of Interest (POI) markers on the board at all times, which are usually victims that need to be rescued, but may also turn out to be false alarms. You may also place out some Hot Spots and maybe some Hazmat tokens onto the board, then you choose your starting Role (in the experienced game, anyway), place your firefighter pawn/fireeple next to the building, and place the vehicles (fire engine and ambulance) where you want them at the start of the game.

Player Turns

On each firefighter’s turn, they basically get a certain number of Action Points (AP) to spend doing things. In the Family Game, everyone just gets 4 AP, but each Role in the Experienced Game has a certain number of AP and a special ability.

AP can be spent to do things like move (1 AP alone or 2AP when carrying a victim or moving through fire), extinguish (1AP for smoke or 2AP for fire), open or close doors (1AP), chop through walls (2AP to place a damage cube, 2 cubes destroys a wall space), change roles (2AP, only when at the fire engine), or do some other actions with the vehicles.

But how does is compare to Pandemic?

As much as I almost hate to even go here, enough people compare Pandemic and Flash Point: Fire Rescue that I feel compelled to do so as well. First off, however, I need to say that the games really aren’t nearly as similar as some people would lead you to believe. Other than including a few similar elements (action points, roles, and being cooperative, of course), pretty much all the other mechanics and, more importantly, the whole feel and flow of play is different.

Pandemic is a great game near the top of my collection , and in rating them against each other, Flash Point: Fire Rescue doesn’t really do anything to threaten that position. But while I prefer Pandemic for a lot of reasons, there are certainly a lot of things that Flash Point does better. I feel like I have a greater ability to affect the outcome in Pandemic since it’s less random, and it’s also a lot more elegant and seamless. But Flash Point is more flashy and intuitive, and is probably a little bit lighter overall if you’re looking for something more along the family-game lines.

And again, being a big coop game fan, I’m very happy to have both in my collection because they really do have their own strengths and scratch different itches for me.

Once I got past some of the fiddlyness of managing the game, Flash Point: Fire Rescue has begun to shine as a thematic and exciting cooperative gaming experience. Even just the base game has a lot for me to continue to explore, and I can see myself, my game group, and my family playing this for years to come.

• Rules: As long as someone knows what they’re doing to manage the game, most players will have no problem picking up on what to do.
• Theme: Totally awesome, and done really well.
• Downtime: Even though it’s cooperative, players can take a little long on their turns deciding how to best use their action points.
• Length: 30-60 minutes, which seems very appropriate for the pace and depth of the game
• Player Interaction: Solid cooperation with both niche protection and lots of teamwork

After watching the Dice Tower over glowing review of this game, I immediately bought in to the hype and gave it a try after purchasing this above average priced game. The game-play left me flat. Combat is a real bore. Bad luck creeps up here and can kill your chances at winning if you have bad space sectors surrounding your base. Real negative events can come at once and regardless of any decision you try to make, game over. Sorry to say, it is now trade bait for me.

The game’s components are top notch. The game play is fairly simple once taught. My only negative side to this game is due to my own tastes. I prefer a bit “more” to my games. Maybe the game is too simple for me but again, the game is still fun to play. Seeing the many blips “on the screen” coming towards you down the hallway is some really tension filled fun.

Many game mechanics have borrowed from Puerto Rico and for good reason.The game challenges you to plan ahead, be flexible in your planning if something goes wrong, and making the most out of your turn if there are crummy options left for you. This was my post-Catan game the pulled me in. Great game.

I really enjoy the way the market works in this game. The more product you buy, the more expensive it gets. This wighs heavily on your decision making when it comes to buying the right amount of supplies for your power plants. Non-gamers may feel out of place here as this is no UNO or Apples to Apples. But a fun thinking game for those well on their way into the hobby.

I have played this twice and found it to be just “ok” reference my tastes. To me the mechanics on the cards are too fiddly. I hate that word but I can’t think of another way to describe it. If asked to play, I would not dread playing it but would rather play Warhammer:Invasion or learn a new LCG.

If you own Kingsburg, then this is a no-brainer. Adds just enough to the game to make it fresh again. Also adds more buildings and other add-ons to make the game even more fun to play.

Fun working-together-game that can be stressful in an entertaining way. Highly recommended.

I’m not a huge fan of euro style games but I found this to be lots of fun. Plenty of decisions to be made.

I would like to see more games like this with a different setting. Incorporate this in a war game and wow, you would have me there.

Have a bunch of people wanting to play something simple? This is the game for you.

Game is fun. Better than most dice game sout there.

If you like number crunching, this game is for you. Has very little to do with it’s pasted on theme.

Too simple with too much luck.

Fun little card game non-gamers should enjoy.

I wanted to love this game and I ended up just liking it. Maybe with expansions it will get better IMHO.

Great game for hard core gamers. Had a hard time getting non-gamer types to play it again.

Chase Jack the Ripper through the streets of London. Our group has a blast everytime we play!

The game is not just about killing enemy troops but finding and protecting Runes. Great game.

I love Clue and had high hopes for this one. Slightly dissapointed with the deduction process.

Ok for newbies to the hobbie.

Some of the haunts are bad for and enjoyable game for the most part.

Game allows you so many choices. Random events and enemy AI ships galore. Lots to like here.

Great, fast playing game.

Not a bad game. It’s sequel is much better. (Wrath of Ashardalon)

Love this hybrid game. Top notch components. A must buy.

Fun co-op game. Lots going on makes a fun game.

Wonderful, fun, light game.

Game forces you to be on the attack. Built in game timer keeps gameplay at a perfect amount of time.

Not much content. Still a must buy if you love the base game.

This game is too light for me. FOR TRADE

I just didn’t have fun with this. Puzzles feel out of place. FOR TRADE.

I really enjoy this game. Solid , deep, gameplay. Multiple paths to victory.

Really makes Catan a meaty strategy game.