Zombies!!! Tiles!!! Exclamation Points!!!

Rule 1 of tabletop gaming: never believe the suggested play times. Games always take longer than you think. This is true for games everyone is familiar with and doubly true for games no one at the table has played before. In that instance, add an extra thirty minutes to any suggested time. Gives everyone at the table ample time to read, misread, and muddle through the rules and first few rounds.

My main complaint about Zombies!!! is its length. The box suggests an hour. The box lies. Ninety minutes into the game everyone around the table was actively helping each other just so the game would end. This is partly our fault. We were all new to the game. Also we had drank a fair amount of whiskey prior to starting the game. The combination of booze, hunger, and fatigue might have made the game seem longer than it was.

Zombies!!! is a winner-take-all light strategy game from Twilight Creations, makers of Zombies!!! and an endless amount of re-themes. You and your friends are the last survivors of the zombie apocalypse. Each turn you add a new tile to the map, make your way to the Helipad and try to kill as many zombies as possible. There are two win conditions. The first player to reach the Helipad and kill the zombie there, wins. Alternatively, the first person to kill 25 zombies wins. At the start of the game you have three hearts and three bullets. Rolling dice determines how much you can move and if your efforts to kill zombies succeed. Bullets help add to the dice roll total. As the map expands, buildings and extra lives and bullets are added.

Zombies!!! has 11 different expansions, which can all be mixed and matched. The number of expansions combined with the high variance throughout the game make it pretty re-playable. No two games will ever be the same. Expansions can be combined if players desire a longer game. For our first play-through we only used the core set, which felt pretty long by itself. The game also requires a large enough table to fit all the map tiles and still have space for dice rolls.

While not a perfect game, there’s a lot to like about Zombies!!! It’s light enough to be taught fairly quickly to new players. The randomness might also appeal to people who don’t usually play board games. A word of caution, though. There’s a lot of dice rolling in this game. Anyone with Wil Wheaton’s dice curse  will not enjoy this game. Players need to roll a 4, 5, or 6 to defeat the zombies, and sometimes the different between victory and defeat comes down to a few bad rolls.

There’s a decent amount of player interaction, although it’s mostly of the “screw your opponent” variety. This usually involves the card deck, which can also feel very random. Many of the deck cards are site-specific, which can render them useless when your Meeple is on one side of the board and the Flower Shop is on the other side of the table, with a dozen zombies in the way. Perhaps the expansions address these dead cards (no pun intended).

With the core game and expansions priced anywhere from $15-$30 a set, Zombies!!! is a decent little game that won’t break the bank. I’d recommend no more than two expansions, and if your friends are afraid of clowns, avoid Zombies!!! 7.

 Zombies!!! quick facts

Possible Players: 2-6

Best With: 3-4

Expansions/sequels? Way too damn many

Games you could play in a row before moving on to something else? 1-2

Would we play it again? Earlier in the evening, sure.