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Tips & Strategies (24)

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11
Miniature Painter
Expert Advisor
Inventor
Advanced Reviewer
21 of 21 gamers found this helpful
“Cycle Through Event Cards Quickly”

Some of the event cards can be game breaking. It is imperative to find those as soon as possible. Always discard an event at the end of your turn. Even if it may be useful soon, you are better off finding a card that is useful now. If it is almost your turn and you haven’t already played a card, play anything just to get rid of it and see another new card.

This strategy will help you draw more cards than your opponents and increase the odds that some of the highly situational cards will actually match correct situations.

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4
Gamer - Level 3
Rated 25 Games
15 of 15 gamers found this helpful
“Perma-Death”

When I play this game with people who can’t tolerate the long length (My wife especially, who loves the game until it goes past an hour and a half), I adopt a perma-death rule.

*Start the game with 4 hearts and 3 bullets

* When landing on a space with a zombie, roll 1d6. Result of 1-3, the zombie has knocked you down, you lose a heart, and the turn goes to the next player. Result of 4-6, you defeat the zombie as normal.

* Once you lose all your hearts, you are dead. Game over.

* You can allow hearts to go past 5, we usually max at 7 so that it gives newer (and unlucky) players a bit more chances.

* For 2-3 players we still leave the zombie kill count at 25. You can lower this to 20 for 4-5 players. This can also be removed altogether, leaving only the helipad way to win (but in my experience does make the game a bit longer usually).

* If all players die, the zombies have won. One player must still make it to the helipad per the base rules, to win (or kill the set number of zombies)

ADDITIONAL VARIATION (To make the “Rush for the helipad” not so easy)

* When the helipad comes out, have the person with the lowest kill count (zombie pile) choose where to place the “pilot” on the board (has to be in one of the named buildings). In order to flee using the helicopter, a player must get the pilot and then proceed to the helipad. If the player with the pilot dies, the pilot is dropped on the last square that player occupied.

* If an opposing player lands on a square with the player possessing the pilot, the opposing players enter combat to see who “steals” or “keeps” the pilot. Both players roll 1d6, highest value takes the pilot.

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3
I'm a Real Player!
25 of 26 gamers found this helpful
“Chits”

Turns can easily get bogged down in placing the bullet, heart, and guts tokens. We handle this a couple of ways:

+ I keep my bullet and heart tokens in old prescription medicine bottles. That way they can easily be distributed, and it kind of looks cool.

+ Flip over the heart chits when you use/lose them, don’t put them back in the bag. Odds are, you are going to pick up some health at some point and this will just save time.

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7
Miniature Painter
Intermediate Reviewer
Master Grader
14 of 14 gamers found this helpful
“Make a game board from heavy paper”

I have a piece of construction paper that I cut so it holds 20 cards (4 across x 5 down). I placed the cards on the paper and cut ***** at the corners so the cards could be tucked under (like business cards in a binder). When done, the cards are removed and I stick the board to the fridge. Now, instead of a slight bump moving all my pieces or spinning my cards, they all sit still and we can get to playing!!!

ps Prior to this, we tried putting the cards under plexiglass but the static always moved the cards.

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7
Miniature Painter
Stone of the Sun
I'm Completely Obsessed
Novice Advisor
14 of 14 gamers found this helpful
“It's All Relative - Cooperative Play”

Since becoming introduced to cooperative games, I’ve found myself wishing more games provided a cooperative variation. Zombies!!! lends itself to playing in cooperative mode. In this variation, rather than every player for himself, the scenario we play at the Moore household is that this is a family of survivors, committed to sticking together. (Think the, “Never leave a man behind,” cliche.)

Essentially, the game functions the same, with one major change: success or failure rests on the group, and if one player dies and re-spawns back in the town hall, it is up to the rest of the players to help him reach the helipad with the rest of the survivors. Once any one player dies twice, the game is over and the mission failed. The mission is a success once all players have reached the helipad, or once all players have killed 25 zombies.

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3
I'm a Real Player!
24 of 25 gamers found this helpful
“Quicker Movement”

Rather than rolling 1d6 for movement in Zombies!!!, we use the house rule of HEATH + 2. So everyone starts with a movement of 5, and can max out with a movement of 7.

It gets a little tricky when you play event cards that effect the movement roll, but you can decide whether you want to adapt them to this rule, ignore them, or roll in that specific instance.

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3
I Got What I Wanted
22 of 23 gamers found this helpful
“Faster games”

Instead of restricting the use of area specific cards in the associated area, let the players use any action card at any time. This makes for a much speedier and more dynamic game.

If there are no health or bullet tokens on a new area tile, let the player place a single token of their choice in the centermost square, encouraging movement and risk taking for more supplies.

Lastly, shuffle the helicopter tile in the upper half of the tile deck, not the bottom.

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11
Miniature Painter
Expert Advisor
Inventor
Advanced Reviewer
22 of 23 gamers found this helpful
“"Coloring up" your zombies!”

Our group uses zombies from a few different sets including a Bag o’ Zombies. We STILL run out of figures when playing.

One of our solutions is to only keep basic grey zombies in our trophy collection (switching them with others from the board as needed). When we have more than five, we trade them in for a zombie clown (5 for 1) and use those as “five zombie” tokens. This also helps keep each players personal area more organized.

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7
Miniature Painter
Intermediate Reviewer
Master Grader
12 of 12 gamers found this helpful
“Set up the city beforehand”

Our group likes to set the city up before the game starts with all the zombies out and the pieces visible to all. The game loses some mystique with everyone seeing what is where, but finding stuff isn’t the purpose of the game, surviving is! Having it all set up allows the players to just play and get right to fighting. Want to make sure they go for the helipad: add a set of keys or a pilot as an objective!

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3
I'm a Real Player!
21 of 22 gamers found this helpful
“Adding People”

For people who already dislike the game because of its occasionally epic length, this rule won’t help you.

But, if you find yourself in a game night with more than 6 people, Zombies can easily be expanded if you have every player pieces (and if you own Zombies 4, then you should have 6 extra guys). We just added in the 7th person, got rid of the zombie-kill win condition, and added in a smaller expansion (which included an extra helipad).

The result was a long game by virtue of the amount of turns in a round, BUT the ending was very fun, and the number of folks playing event cards on each other was out of control. So next time you suddenly have too many folks to play a normal board game, try this out.

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1
19 of 20 gamers found this helpful
“Build Toward the Helipad”

Our gaming group much prefers this:

When you build the Town Square, build the Helipad as though they were on opposite corners of a 4×4 grid, and then build your way toward it. Players are not allowed to build outside of this 4×4 grid, except for dead-end buildings which can go on the outside of Town Square. If you want, also allow tiles to go on the outside of the Helipad.

This way, players don’t depend on the randomization of the Helipad, and the players that are building their way on the completely opposite side of the board aren’t punished. This way everyone has a direct and clear goal.

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2
10 of 10 gamers found this helpful
“Random Drops.”

Another way to help speed up the game is to have certain zombies carrying health or bullets. Label the bottom of the zombie piece for the added excitement. This way after killing a zombie you might find health or a bullet.

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6
Miniature Painter
Novice Reviewer
Knight-errant
9 of 9 gamers found this helpful
“Replace the counters for a better theme”

The single sided counters in this game are awful. Hard to find the ones you need, have to struggle to get them off the board without knocking the zombies over, etc etc.

I replaced my bullet counters with empty shell casings a friend gave me. I then went to a bead store and picked up a bunch of little red hearts. Now the counters are easier to find/see, and they actually add a bit of theme to the game.

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5
Rated 100 Games
Gamer - Level 4
Supporter
24 of 26 gamers found this helpful
“Keep those cards separate!”

One of the great things I love about Zombies!!! are all the expansions. But you can run into some serious grief if you don’t do a bit of card maintenance at the end of every game and keep the cards for the various expansions separate. It seems like common sense but it’s something that a lot of us forget to do.

If you are running a tutorial game or are playing with newer players it can cause a lot of confusion if you have the cards all mixed together but aren’t playing with the tiles for that expansion.

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7
Cooperative Game Explorer
Novice Grader
Knight-errant
6 of 6 gamers found this helpful
“Adapting online to offline”

The digital version of this game offers a survival game, where one player runs through the city to the heliport to escape (prebuilt layout). In this version, once you are dead, that’s it, no respawn. I can’t see any reason why this version could not be adapted to this version as well.

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3
I'm a Real Player!
21 of 24 gamers found this helpful
“Bag o' Zombies”

If you play this game a lot, and especially with expansions, then do yourself a favor and buy a bag of zombies. I often found myself running out during some longer play sessions.

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2
Smash Up: Zombie Faction Fan
10 of 11 gamers found this helpful
“pick up”

a bag of extra zombies, even with the core rules often run low with 4 aggressive players.

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6
Canada
I'm a Real Person
Treasure Map
Video Game Fan
7 of 8 gamers found this helpful
“Alternative Tokens”

If you are looking for plastic tokens to represent your bullets and/or hearts instead of cardboard ones.

You can go to this site for some alternative tokens that you can use with Zombies!!!

http://www.litko.net/categories/Shop-By-Compatible-Game-System/Zombies%21/

I am not affiliated with this site in anyway.

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6
Legend of the Five Rings Fan
Crane Clan - Legend of the Five Rings
Smash Up Fan
7 of 8 gamers found this helpful
“Never go for Zombies”

Of the two win conditions collecting 20 zombies is bar far the inferior option. Players are crazy-mortal in this game and each time you die you drop half your zombies. Secondly, if your group is anything like mine they will move waves of zombies away from a player clearly running for zombies. In all the years we’ve played we’ve only ever had one player win by Zombies, and that was purely by chance.

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3
I Am What I Am
14 of 17 gamers found this helpful
“Zombie Move”

In most games of Zombies you will end up with a section of the town that you do not go to, but zombies are there. Once the Helipad comes into play, when we roll to move zombies, you can choose to move zombies from the area of the city that no one is going to to the starting place or to move the zombies as normal.

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