J Boyes
United States
Unspecified
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This is a game I have been meaning to plug a bit, and since it hit the table a session report seems in order.
I picked this game up at Gencon, The guys at the booth were really nice and ran a good demo for us despite being pretty busy keeping up with booth traffic.
The game had a kind of mathematical brutality to it that appealed to me. I liked that you play against the game mostly, and that things are going to go poorly for you. Your main goal in the game is managing the pain.
The first game we played a month ago maybe, ended with zombies overrunning two of our countries, including mine. I don't feel too bad about it, as I don't think I made a tech roll until something like turn 6, so I was extremely far behind the curve.
The game we played just a couple of day ago went much further, and we nearly had a real win.
It was a three player game, with S playing Asia, K playing Europe, and myself playing Africa. S and I had played before, K was new to the game and she was skeptical and a bit intimidated by the board, which presents a lot of information. Not to mention the tech tree. But it only took a couple of turns before we had things rolling right along. I was going for a health strat with preparedness and red cross as early techs. S went with a military approach, taking sonic lure, and K took kind of a scattershot approach early on.
The first round we got an easy start, with one of the events starting off one of our spawing zombies face down. Letting both S and K kill them off with a military unit. I didn't do this for some reason, probably because I was fixated on getting preparedness on the board early. But this early push was nullified when on turn two we got the event that meant we couldn't trade Freedom points for Resources. I think this event would be no big deal in later rounds, but early on we didnt' have much to spend FP on. So we all lost like 4 FP that round, essentially giving the zombies a free turn to feed and get back in it.
By the middle of the game, things were looking a bit grim, with big waves of zeds about to swarm over us all. Just then we got the 'free barricade' event. Which let us wall off and corral most of the big threats. I sent my big swarms off to east Africa, K had isolated most of her zeds in eastern Europe, and had a nice buffer zone before a zombie free Western block. Her only threat was a stack coming in from Asia, but with the barricades, S and K worked together to block the zeds effectively. This led K to adopt, a barricade everything strat. Researching that, and then building a huge wall between her and S's Asia.
During this time K had a large section of land that was zed free, and was feeling good. She took the diplomacy tech, and was donating to keep her FP up. S too had a pretty good base of territory, but almost no tech, all of his FP's were going to military units, and sonic luring zeds around to keep his territory clean. I was pretty well crushed, down to three territories left, but they were isolated and safe.
Then things took a turn for the worse for K and S, as they both got behind the border outbreaks. All of K's wall building had left her without a miliatary. And S's lack of tech left him with limited way to mitigate his zombie troubles. I started to make a comeback, and teched up to teir 3 getting the nuke, so I could clear my one zombie trap area, and go for a win. The red cross I picked up early helped keep me at the 4 FP mark. As S and K fought off zeds I launched my nuke, and waited the next turn hoping for a zombie free round, but a red turn space and an outbreak got me, two zeds spawned in the middle of things and I had to go on the defensive as well.
We rode out the rest of the game like that, ending in turn 15. K who at one point looked like she was winning handily, was down to 6 Pop I think, I was at 7, and S ended up winning with his crappy techless society with 8.
I haven't done this in a while, but here we go!
   MINI REVIEW TIME!!!
Overview: Zombie State is an area control? game, where you are a despot trying to maintain control of your continent in the aftermath of a zombie outbreak. As zombies eat your people more zombie appear and things spiral out of control.
Mechanics: The engine that drives the game is zombies eat people. Eaten people turn into zombies. If they zombies don't eat, they wander around looking for more people. Left to their own devices I would guess that the zombies would overrun the board in 6 turns maybe? Just a guess.
The players turn consists of collecting resources, the two kinds are Freedom points which allow you to do almost everything in the game. Freedom points are tied directly to how much land you still control. As your society dwindles you can do less. The other resource is resources! These are things like oil, food, lumber etc. You spend these on growing military units, or researching technology.
You really have very few actions to take, so you need to make every FP count. This is the kind of game where you may only have one thing to do in a turn, but it is still worth your time to really consider what that single action is, because it can have some drastic effects.
The tech tree is daunting at first. It is a big list of technologies that you can research that let you break rules or manipulate the board in some way. Most of these have a FP cost associated with them as well. The variety of techs would seem to give you lots of ways to build and go for victory.
What I like about it: I like that the game is unforgiving. If you make a mistake bad things will probably happen to you. However it isn’t the kind of game where there is a single optimal thing to do every time. You are always over the barrel, trying to find the best move for this turn, but perhaps investing in a tech would be better for you later on. A bad move hurts you, but there are enough good moves that you still have choices to make.
At first the game seems low in player interactions. But like the limited number of actions you are forced to choose from, the moments when you do interact with your neighbors seem important. With zombies bleeding over borders, our neighbor doing poorly really means that you are doing poorly as well.
I like that this game doesn't look like a euro game. It isn't afraid of rules and the occasional chart as well. All the rules are grounded in the logic of game though, so they never feel cumbersome or too rulesy.
The zombie movement is deterministic, and you can plan your moves around it, but there is a random element with outbreaks and random events every round. The random events don't normally ruin your plans so much that planning feels pointless. Things are kept just random enough that you have to be flexible. This game handles the the balance between rewarding board reading and pre planning, and chaotic board swings better than most games out there.
After a couple of plays I'm giving this game a tentative 8.
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