Board Gaming - Zombicide, Mall of Horror

As part of my recent travels, on my return stop in Canberra I once again had a gaming session with my host. This time also included a couple of other friends for some of the games.

Zombicide

^{The Survivors - Not my mate's painting - source - BoardGameGeek}

Recently he has been posting images of his miniatures painting, and mostly featured has been Zombicide minis. Having not managed to play this yet, I was quite happy to get at least a partial skirmish run to see how it works and to see the minis in their natural environment. Unfortunately there were no pictures taken this time around, so my images are not necessarily representative of the game we played. There are many expansions to the base game, but for the most part I think we were just using the base game. One key thing we took from an expansion was the character trays, as they are very good for managing the players in a smaller space.

^{Some of the Zombies. Also not my mate's painting - source - Geek and Sundry}

As you may have guessed by now, this is a zombie game, where you (the survivors) attempt to complete certain tasks, depending on the skirmish or scenario you have set up. We had a smallish map with 5 or 6 objectives that we were pretty sure we wouldn't finish before the others arrived. Regardless of the number of players, there are 6 survivors, and you share them out evenly among the players, so with just 2 of us, we had 3 each.

It really is a pretty simple game when it comes down to it. you have 4 actions to spend on each survivor's turn. You get 1 xp for each kill and 5 xp for each objective. After all of the survivors have moved, the zombies attack and new zombies are spawned. Rinse and repeat until all objectives are completed, or all the survivors are dead.

^{An example map layout, with unpainted minis. source - The Board Walk Games}

It is ridiculously fun game. It's pretty simple, there are balance issues, and huge amounts of luck, but it's still a lot of fun. Luck of the draw for spawned zombies could have you over-run really quickly with zombie dogs (we spawned 3 on about the 3rd round), or they may not show up until much later. Finding good weaponry from the giant stack of stuff is essential, so being lucky with searching will really help. The simple action of swapping equipment (use 1 action and 2 survivors in a room can swap weapons and/or inventory) allows for re-use of the same weapons more often, which is especially useful if you only have 1 weapon that can do more than 1 damage!

Speaking of damage, zombies don't hold damage, so you have to kill them outright. most of them only need 1 damage, but some of the bigger ones need 2 or 3 damage weapons to kill them. All attacks are done with d6 roll(s) with a target number to hit. equal or above and you hit. (like the rest of the game, pretty simple mechanic) Better weapons may roll more dice and/or may have lower target numbers to hit.

It's zombies. It's dice rolling combat. It's miniatures. And yet I loved it. I'm sure I'll get to play it again at some point.

Mall of Horror

^{Simple but effective artwork and pieces - source - Board Game Geek}

Another zombie game, because that seemed to be what we felt like. In this game you control 3 or 4 survivors moving between different locations in a mall. After the initial placement, a security chief is chosen, and they secretly roll the 4 zombie dice to determine where new zombies will spawn. Before they spawn though, everyone gets to move 1 survivor to a chosen location. the security chief shows where they're going and the other players secretly decide where they're going. Reveal, show where the zombies will spawn, then move survivors. Spawn zombies, including a bonus one in the most populated location and the location with the most women. If there is more zombies than survivors at a location, the zombies eat one of them and go away. Who gets eaten is decided by player vote, first just those that are there, then a tie-breaker with those that aren't there if needed.

The enjoyment in this game is working out where to go, and who to take there, as well as negotiating with the other players on who's going to die. Equipment is gathered from the parking lot, which is great, but it's also always going to have the zombies get in, so there's a high likelihood of death.

I did ok, and enjoyed it, it's still not my favourite genre, so I'll likely choose other games when given the option.

Other games played

We also played DC Deck Builder and Machi Koro, both of which I talked about in my previous post. This time around though, we were playing Machi Koro with 4 players, which I found changed the dynamics of the game quite a bit from 2 player. I found it was a lot better to get into the attacking cards, because they were so much more effective with multiple chances to trigger between each of your turns. Because of this I found it much less enjoyable a game with 4, as if anyone didn't get in on the attacking cards, it would effectively shut them out of the game. It did possibly make the game shorter, even with the 6 buildings instead of 4, but it made the game less friendly and less enjoyable.

DC Deck Builder was 3 player, which was also new for me, but I think having an extra player certainly didn't harm the game, and possibly made it better. I still suck at it, as I have no memory for the cards in the deck and don't know what combos might exist. It is fun though and I am still a fan of the deck building style of game.