Post by BloodyMonkeyZ on Jul 4, 2015 13:14:56 GMT -6
Zombicide: Rue Morgue is the latest “Season” in the franchise of zombie board games that has changed the landscape of horror gaming. I have been remiss in reviewing the previous ones, but decided to start here with the most recent one and then add the others in the coming weeks.
Zombicide is a tile based co-operative miniature zombie board game. The game comes with 12 unique playable characters, 80 zombies (5 different types), 9 large tiles, about 150 cards (several different decks), 8 dice, and a whole mess of tokens.
The Characters: There are 12 characters that come with the base game, and they actually designed this one with half male and half female characters. I know many women gamers will be happy to hear that. Dan is a fireman who starts with the Lifesaver skill that allows him to pull another player out of a room full of zombies, Louise is a mechanic who starts with the ability to draw an extra card every time she searches, Travis is “Daryl” a badass who gets a bonus kill every time he scores at least one kill, Parker is a medic who can heal wounds and she also knows how to fly a helicopter. I won’t list them all, but each has their own skill set that differentiates them from all other characters. Whenever a zombie is killed, that player earns an XP point. As their XP goes up, they level up. At 7 points a new skill is earned, at 19 you get to choose between 2 skills and at 43 you choose between 3 skills. But don’t get too excited about the new skills because the zombies get tougher too.
The Zombies: There are 5 types of zombies in Rue Morgue. They introduced a new mechanic in this version, skinner zombies. When you kill a zombie now, it isn’t dead, it becomes a crawler that you have to kill. The types of zombies here are: Walkers – the basic run of the mill shuffling zombie, Runners – these guys move two spaces at a time, Fatties – bigger zombies that are harder to kill (takes a weapon that deals 2 points of damage), Crawlers – the residue left over when you kill one of these “skinner” types of zombies, and the Abomination – a huge bad guy that requires a weapon that deals 5 points of damage.
To start the game, you pick a mission from the book (it comes with 12 that can be played as a campaign, plus 2 tutorial “easy” missions.) After you set up the board you choose characters. Each mission will state a suggested number of characters needed as well as if you need any special skills (like helicopter pilot.) Don’t worry if you don’t have a big enough group, you can play more than one character at a time. For the purposes of this review, I played 3 characters and Ian played 3. I got the game from their KickStarter, so we had some extra character options that don’t come in the box. Ian had Seth based off Liam Neeson in Taken, I had Cat based off Daisy Duke from Dukes of Hazzard (95% of the characters in the game are riffs on someone or something.) At least those are the characters we had in the game I took pictures of. I didn’t keep track of all the ones we used as we played with my intent on writing this review.
At first we played the second tutorial (having played the first one several weeks ago) which claims to be EASY and needs 6 characters with an estimated 60 minutes of game time. Probably took us closer to 2 hours, 2 of my characters died (Travis and Cat) and we used a house rule to allow Parker to live. As this mission played out, we made the mistake of not searching very much to try and get better weapons. We sent Parker and Dan out in the helicopter to get the key to allow us access to the exit leaving the group in the midst of 3 zombie spawn zones with weapons too weak to deal with the zombies. As you gain XP and level up, the zombies spawn differently. There are 4 options of zombie spawning depending on the level of the highest character. So it is important to play smart and not have one character rack up kills while the others lag behind in the blue (first) level. When a character dies, it isn’t the end. The character card is turned over and they play out the game as a “Zombivor” (instead of a Survivor.) Zombivors can still help but are slow and less skilled. Every character starts the game with 3 actions (move, search, attack, open door, get in helicopter, etc.) and can gain actions as they level up. When you become a Zombivor you drop to 2 actions and your skills usually don’t have bonus action options.
At the end of that first mission, our pilot was still in the helicopter and didn’t “make it to the exit.” I thought this seemed silly as she was in a helicopter. Granted, the scenario said go to the exit, but I made a decision that she should be allowed to survive. It wasn’t like we all got in instead of going to the exit. As for my 2 Zombivor characters, there was a KS expansion that I got which adds characters you lose to the zombie hoards you face. I decided to have my 2 Zombivors become “Lost” and we had to deal with them in the next mission.
Finally we started the campaign itself with mission M01: Gas Run. This map used 6 of the tiles and had 4 spawn zones for the zombies. I picked two new characters so we still had 6. This was still an Easy 6 character 60 minute game. The 4 spawn points adds complexity though because you have zombies spawning all over the place, some far away which means they will wind up as a bigger pack before you get to them. This was a relatively uneventful game. We made our way efficiently through the map getting the objectives we needed and working together to get better weapons and deal with the zombies. In the end, I still lost one character even as we managed to kill off the 2 Zombivors I had unleashed in the previous mission. It did take us more like 3 hours to play it though.
Our final mission for the night was M02: No Way Out. This mission was pretty cool in concept. The idea is that we landed our helicopter to explore an area looking for supplies. But the helicopter attracted a lot of zombies and now we are far from the helicopter fighting the hordes of zombies between us and it. This was a brutal mission. There is a new game mechanic they introduced where you trigger an event that spawns zombies in rooms around you. The first one we managed to deal with easily, but the second one was triggered without really thinking about it and it caused 2 of my characters to be killed and become Zombivors. We dealt with the third one easily, but the last one Ian was impatient about. I wanted to send one of my dead guys to trigger it so we could deal with them on our terms. He ran ahead and triggered it anyway. The resulting mass that spawned was 15 zombies and they all got to do an extra action. All 3 of his characters got killed trying to deal with that mess. We managed to get to the helicopter without actually losing anyone completely. The character Bear has this insane ability called Shove that allows him to push all zombies in one area to a different area. We used that just right so we could open up paths just long enough to get all the slow Zombivors to the helicopter.
It was 5 am when we stopped and we had played Rue Morgue for almost 9 hours (even though the suggested time amounted to 3 ½ hours. We lost 8 of the 9 characters we had played with and hadn’t gotten past the Easy missions yet. The next 3 are Medium difficulty, then there are 5 Hard ones. The last 2 are actually competitive missions. Not sure how I feel about those. I haven’t played this game with the new PVP rules and I may not ever do so. I like the cooperative version. There is actually an expansion that came out the same time as Rue Morgue, Angry Neighbors. Angry Neighbors is a game that requires a main game in order to be able to play it. I hope to get some time soon to play it and review it as well. Right now on KickStarter they have a new version Zombicide Black Plague.
I love the Zombicide game franchise and easily give it 5 stars. It is a game you should check out (if you are in the St Louis area get in touch with me and we can get together and play!)
I am also giving away a copy of Rue Morgue. I like this game so much that I bought an extra copy just to give to one of you. This is going to be a Share, Like, Comment contest. You can get an entry for each of the following. Join the forum here and comment on this, Post the link yourself on your social media and send me the links, Share the FaceBook link that I post, Like the FaceBook link that I post, ReTweet the link that I tweet out, Share the link from the Little Bunny Cthulhu Page, Comment on the Little Bunny Cthulhu page. That gives a possibility of 7 or more entries. I am going to call a cap of 10 entries per person though, just to keep someone from spamming from multiple accounts.
The contest will end at midnight Tuesday August 4th 2015 with the winner announced Wednesday August 5th 2015
Zombicide is a tile based co-operative miniature zombie board game. The game comes with 12 unique playable characters, 80 zombies (5 different types), 9 large tiles, about 150 cards (several different decks), 8 dice, and a whole mess of tokens.
The Characters: There are 12 characters that come with the base game, and they actually designed this one with half male and half female characters. I know many women gamers will be happy to hear that. Dan is a fireman who starts with the Lifesaver skill that allows him to pull another player out of a room full of zombies, Louise is a mechanic who starts with the ability to draw an extra card every time she searches, Travis is “Daryl” a badass who gets a bonus kill every time he scores at least one kill, Parker is a medic who can heal wounds and she also knows how to fly a helicopter. I won’t list them all, but each has their own skill set that differentiates them from all other characters. Whenever a zombie is killed, that player earns an XP point. As their XP goes up, they level up. At 7 points a new skill is earned, at 19 you get to choose between 2 skills and at 43 you choose between 3 skills. But don’t get too excited about the new skills because the zombies get tougher too.
The Zombies: There are 5 types of zombies in Rue Morgue. They introduced a new mechanic in this version, skinner zombies. When you kill a zombie now, it isn’t dead, it becomes a crawler that you have to kill. The types of zombies here are: Walkers – the basic run of the mill shuffling zombie, Runners – these guys move two spaces at a time, Fatties – bigger zombies that are harder to kill (takes a weapon that deals 2 points of damage), Crawlers – the residue left over when you kill one of these “skinner” types of zombies, and the Abomination – a huge bad guy that requires a weapon that deals 5 points of damage.
To start the game, you pick a mission from the book (it comes with 12 that can be played as a campaign, plus 2 tutorial “easy” missions.) After you set up the board you choose characters. Each mission will state a suggested number of characters needed as well as if you need any special skills (like helicopter pilot.) Don’t worry if you don’t have a big enough group, you can play more than one character at a time. For the purposes of this review, I played 3 characters and Ian played 3. I got the game from their KickStarter, so we had some extra character options that don’t come in the box. Ian had Seth based off Liam Neeson in Taken, I had Cat based off Daisy Duke from Dukes of Hazzard (95% of the characters in the game are riffs on someone or something.) At least those are the characters we had in the game I took pictures of. I didn’t keep track of all the ones we used as we played with my intent on writing this review.
At first we played the second tutorial (having played the first one several weeks ago) which claims to be EASY and needs 6 characters with an estimated 60 minutes of game time. Probably took us closer to 2 hours, 2 of my characters died (Travis and Cat) and we used a house rule to allow Parker to live. As this mission played out, we made the mistake of not searching very much to try and get better weapons. We sent Parker and Dan out in the helicopter to get the key to allow us access to the exit leaving the group in the midst of 3 zombie spawn zones with weapons too weak to deal with the zombies. As you gain XP and level up, the zombies spawn differently. There are 4 options of zombie spawning depending on the level of the highest character. So it is important to play smart and not have one character rack up kills while the others lag behind in the blue (first) level. When a character dies, it isn’t the end. The character card is turned over and they play out the game as a “Zombivor” (instead of a Survivor.) Zombivors can still help but are slow and less skilled. Every character starts the game with 3 actions (move, search, attack, open door, get in helicopter, etc.) and can gain actions as they level up. When you become a Zombivor you drop to 2 actions and your skills usually don’t have bonus action options.
At the end of that first mission, our pilot was still in the helicopter and didn’t “make it to the exit.” I thought this seemed silly as she was in a helicopter. Granted, the scenario said go to the exit, but I made a decision that she should be allowed to survive. It wasn’t like we all got in instead of going to the exit. As for my 2 Zombivor characters, there was a KS expansion that I got which adds characters you lose to the zombie hoards you face. I decided to have my 2 Zombivors become “Lost” and we had to deal with them in the next mission.
Finally we started the campaign itself with mission M01: Gas Run. This map used 6 of the tiles and had 4 spawn zones for the zombies. I picked two new characters so we still had 6. This was still an Easy 6 character 60 minute game. The 4 spawn points adds complexity though because you have zombies spawning all over the place, some far away which means they will wind up as a bigger pack before you get to them. This was a relatively uneventful game. We made our way efficiently through the map getting the objectives we needed and working together to get better weapons and deal with the zombies. In the end, I still lost one character even as we managed to kill off the 2 Zombivors I had unleashed in the previous mission. It did take us more like 3 hours to play it though.
Our final mission for the night was M02: No Way Out. This mission was pretty cool in concept. The idea is that we landed our helicopter to explore an area looking for supplies. But the helicopter attracted a lot of zombies and now we are far from the helicopter fighting the hordes of zombies between us and it. This was a brutal mission. There is a new game mechanic they introduced where you trigger an event that spawns zombies in rooms around you. The first one we managed to deal with easily, but the second one was triggered without really thinking about it and it caused 2 of my characters to be killed and become Zombivors. We dealt with the third one easily, but the last one Ian was impatient about. I wanted to send one of my dead guys to trigger it so we could deal with them on our terms. He ran ahead and triggered it anyway. The resulting mass that spawned was 15 zombies and they all got to do an extra action. All 3 of his characters got killed trying to deal with that mess. We managed to get to the helicopter without actually losing anyone completely. The character Bear has this insane ability called Shove that allows him to push all zombies in one area to a different area. We used that just right so we could open up paths just long enough to get all the slow Zombivors to the helicopter.
It was 5 am when we stopped and we had played Rue Morgue for almost 9 hours (even though the suggested time amounted to 3 ½ hours. We lost 8 of the 9 characters we had played with and hadn’t gotten past the Easy missions yet. The next 3 are Medium difficulty, then there are 5 Hard ones. The last 2 are actually competitive missions. Not sure how I feel about those. I haven’t played this game with the new PVP rules and I may not ever do so. I like the cooperative version. There is actually an expansion that came out the same time as Rue Morgue, Angry Neighbors. Angry Neighbors is a game that requires a main game in order to be able to play it. I hope to get some time soon to play it and review it as well. Right now on KickStarter they have a new version Zombicide Black Plague.
I love the Zombicide game franchise and easily give it 5 stars. It is a game you should check out (if you are in the St Louis area get in touch with me and we can get together and play!)
I am also giving away a copy of Rue Morgue. I like this game so much that I bought an extra copy just to give to one of you. This is going to be a Share, Like, Comment contest. You can get an entry for each of the following. Join the forum here and comment on this, Post the link yourself on your social media and send me the links, Share the FaceBook link that I post, Like the FaceBook link that I post, ReTweet the link that I tweet out, Share the link from the Little Bunny Cthulhu Page, Comment on the Little Bunny Cthulhu page. That gives a possibility of 7 or more entries. I am going to call a cap of 10 entries per person though, just to keep someone from spamming from multiple accounts.
The contest will end at midnight Tuesday August 4th 2015 with the winner announced Wednesday August 5th 2015
