So, Pottse and the Berserker (who just now received that name from me, upon thinking of his Zombies! playstyle) came over and made an army’s worth of crepes, which I ate a lot of.
Then I watched those two and?Mrs. G?play “Can’t Stop” while I punched out bits to other games, and attempted (unsuccessfully) to read the rules of Arkham Horror, which I am desperate to play.
So, once Can’t Stop was over,?Mrs. G?went to read the new HP, and the men committed to Zombies!.
Our final layout
3/4 Perspective:
The game-play is simple and quick. Each turn, you draw a tile from the stack, and set it down any where you want, as long as it joins correctly with an existing tile. If you draw a tile that contains a building, it usually has a number of “bullets”, “life” tokens and, of course, Zombies that must be placed (hopefully strategically) by you on the newly placed tile. Somewhere in the stack is the helipad. This is the only exception to the normal tile laying rules. Whoever has the least amount of Zombie kills gets to place the helipad. Once the helipad is placed, it is a mad dash to the helicopter on it’s center square. The player who reaches that space first wins the game.
Once the tile is placed, you roll a die to determine how far your character can move. If you land on a square with a zombie on it, you must fight it, also by rolling the die. A roll of 4 or higher is a successful combat, the zombie is eliminated, and you continue moving the allotted spaces. If you rolled a 6 for your movement roll, and travelled through 6 squares each with a zombie on it, then you will combat 6 times that turn.
Now, if you don’t roll a 4 or above in combat, you have a two options. You can spend “bullets” to raise your die roll, or sacrifice a “life” token. Each player starts the game with 4 of each type. As an example, say I am in combat with a zombie, and I roll a 1. At this point I have 4 life tokens and 4 bullets. It would cost 3 bullets to succeed, or 1 life token to re-roll. Since that is such an awful roll, I will use a life and re-roll. This gives me a 3. Not good, but better. I spend a bullet, my roll becomes a 4, and my combat is successful. Remember the scenario above… if I am moving 6 spaces each with a Zombie, I have to do that 6 times.
Once you have completed your movement, you now make a zombie roll. This allows you to move that number of zombies on the board one space. This is great for screwing your friends, or sometimes, un-screwing yourself.
At any time during any turn, yours or your opponents, you can play cards from your hand. These range from weapons like the fire axe, to special effects, like the fear card which you will see below, to movement enhancers, like the skateboard.
In our game, I played very conservatively, building on to the map as far away as possible from the other guys, and staying away from Zombies at all costs. My strategy was to be the guy who places the Helipad, so I can just fly fly away, while the dopes are hoofing it to my little maze of paradise. The Berserker was a howling madman, and attacked everything in sight, as well as rolling Zombie-splattering sixes nearly every time. Pottse just had his usual?run of luck, killing everything that needed to be killed and gathering up lots of bullets and life.
My strategy was torn to bits when the Berserker hit a rough patch. In the game, if you lose all your life tokens, you spawn back at the start tile, with half of your Zombie kills deducted, but replenished tokens. Unfortunately, B did this twice! His Zombie count ended up just a shade lower than mine, so he had Helipad placement rights. Uh-oh.
But… when the Helipad was finally drawn… guess what he did… He put it right near my Zombie-free maze, and nearly zombie-free me! I have no idea why, but I wasn’t going to argue. (Pottse did though, hee hee.)
So, in the end, Pottse was right behind me on a skateboard, which gave him 2 extra squares of movement per turn. I was seriously sweating it. So, with the help of the adrenaline card, which doubles your movement rate, I took a chance and pulled off an amazing string of dice-rolling, moving and zombie-killing mayhem that ended with me on the Helicopter square, with no bullets and one life left. Just to punish himself, Pottse drew the card he would have had for the next turn. Which you can see below.
Gangrene’s ticket to safety… and his last life:
Pottse’s next card!
The Fear card:
