This is a series of posts where I play 100 boardgames.
Game: Zombicide: Undead or Alive
Designer: Raphaël Guiton, Jean-Baptiste Lullien & Nicolas Raoult
Year: 2022
Country: France
Publisher: Guillotine Games / CMON
Zombicide: Undead or Alive is a Western-themed iteration of the popular zombie killing game Zombicide. The reason I wanted to play it was that I’d never played any Zombicide game before and I wanted to check out the zone-based movement mechanic. Undead or Alive was the version I was able to buy because the usual places where I buy boardgames didn’t have almost anything in stock. This is a common problem, as I seem to be regularly trawling through European webstores to find that one last copy of a game still available somewhere.
We had a lot of fun. The zombie apocalypse has happened and a bunch of Western stock characters need to survive. There’s a series of missions involving zombie hordes in a small Western town, where first you scavenge for equipment, then you kill zombies and try to fulfill objectives and finally you get out of Dodge. The zombies are easy to kill using the game’s familiar combat mechanics but more spawn every round.
The theme was presented very well, with both zombie and Western genres tangible in the physical game pieces, gameplay and general experience. Killing abominations with dynamite felt very appropriate. I liked the ridiculous numbers of zombies which kept spawning and getting destroyed; this is clearly a game with high toy value.
There are various ways roleplaying games and skirmish games model movement. You can measure movement with a ruler, or use squares or hexes. Several Fria ligan roleplaying games use a system where you have an abstracted set of ranges from close to far away. Zombicide’s system of zones feels like a compromise between the abstracted Fria ligan one and a more traditional miniatures-based mechanism where each character or enemy has a precise location.
The zone system also has the advantage that it can deal with the kinds of ridiculous circumstances specific to Zombicide, such as when you have 15+ miniatures in the same zone. It’s subjective in nature because the zones are not the same size. A big interior room can be one zone, the same as a small balcony. All characters in the same zone are within melee distance, while attacking other zones requires ranged weapons.
The rules told us that playing through the tutorial mission would take 10 minutes, but it was more like an hour and a half. But that’s how it always goes.