Zombicide Review: Part One

As a fan of the horde of the living dead, I naturally got into the Zombicide Kickstarter pretty early on... I believe my exact words were "shut up and take my money", but I digress. The international orders shipped a little while ago, and I was lucky enough to get my last week. It has sat in the corner of my room calling to me for a few days, but I withstood the temptation until I had more time to open it up and breath in the goodness. Zombicide is released to everyone pretty soon so I figured I'd chuck out a review over a couple of parts so people can see what they'd be getting when they purchase it.

Zombicide is co-op game for 1 - 6 players, for ages 13 & up. It's designed by Guillotine Games in association with Cool Mini or Not. I'll break the review down into a couple of sections. Game play will be up in a few days. I'm gonna solo play a mission tonight and hopefully get a quick game in tomorrow night with a few friends.

Right away Zombicide captures your attention. I gotta say the box itself looks mighty impressive.

Box Cover

Box Bottom

The box is a big chunky affair, and has a pretty good weight to it, which always makes people happy. The cover art is enough to capture most peoples attention from the get go; and with its animation style art you get a feel for the feel of game from the very start. But let's take a look inside...

Contents

The first thing you notice is the way all of the contents are neatly packed into their own compartments. As someone who gets quite a few board games, I gotta say this is a pretty important  thing for me. There is NOTHING worse than getting a game with miniatures and they're all just stuck in a plastic bag to bend around and get damaged during transit. I imagine that the good folks at CMoN had a hand in making sure the miniatures were well packaged. The tile holder is a nice touch as well. I'll be keeping all the inner boxes, as well as the plastic trays... The tiles and tokens are thick card stock and are pretty tough. Everything is double sided, including the game board tiles; locked doors on one side, busted down doors on the other. I like the Pimpmobile car (look for it in later photos) a little to much... Which is disturbing... ^_^

Survivors... Except that Big Grey guy.  I suggest running...

"You're gonna need a bigger Gun..."

The mini count for the game is 71 in the box (Let's not bring up the Kickstarter pledge rewards just yet...). 6 Survivors, 40 Walkers, 16 Runners, 8 Fatties & 1 Abomination. I can handle those numbers... I might have to engage in some batch painting *shudder*, but I can handle those numbers... Yes good reader, I am trying to convince myself... Big thanks to Regan for offering to paint ONE miniature, you're all heart... Let's see what else is in the box...

Character Tiles

Blank sheet on the back of every tile.
Very groovy.

If you know nothing about Zombicide then the character tile shows an important point. Your characters get better with the more zombies you kill. I like this, I like this a lot. One of the bigger problems with other zombie games is that everything is pretty static character wise, also you've got an inventory too... Quite important when deciding to ditch that baseball bat for a chainsaw... Chainsaws make noise people! Zombies are attracted to noise! the blank sheet on the back is cool, means you get to make your own characters down the line... I think I'll be laminating mine. Each sheet comes with a XP tracker to stick on, but I still think dry-board marker might work better...

Zee rules...

Rule Layout. Clear and easy.

The rule book is 28 pages long. Everything is laid out in an easy to understand format and flows nicely. Game play will be discussed next time in case you're wondering... The back page has a turn summary. A couple of those for people to hold onto and pass around might be needed in addition to the rule book. Small issue, but easily rectified. There are ten missions in the rule book, there is also a map Map Editor for creating your own missions. I'm not sure if that is available for everyone just yet, or only the Kickstarter crew? I'll put up a link to it when I find out...

The cards. Zombie Spawn pile and player items.

The cards are pretty standard, although a touch smaller than I'd like, means they're quite fiddly. But since it's co-op you can lay your cards out in front of you. So what does it look like all laid out? Well, here's a small sneak-peak:

PIMPmobile... Oh god, I have a problem...

"Quickly! To the pimpmobile!"

Next time, I'm gonna talk about the game play. So  if you've come this far, maybe you're willing to go a little further... Ten points for the movie quote...