Zombie Plague

I told you I would talk about it eventually, and talk I shall!!! There is so much about this game that I love and adore. Granted it's not the greatest game and generally needs a bit of tweaking to really get to a solid playability. I might cover some of my personal rule preferences on a later post, in fact I could probably do a few posts on this game because there is a lot out there for it. This post, however, will just cover the basic game and some strategies to wet you whistle. I'll provide links at the end to more stuff but I will not cover them fully until later.

About the Game:

The goals:

The premise of Zombie Plague is survival. Good for 2-7 players (it says 2-6, I've played with 7 many times) but works really well with five, one player takes the role of Zombie Master (or ZM if you will), the other players are survivors. You goal as a survivor is to work together (optional, there have been many fine Coopers in this game) and find a way to escape or barricade yourselves inside the house. As the ZM, you goal is to munch on some flesh.

Note: If you do not get the Cooper reference, please use this time to watch Night of the Living Dead.

Below are links to rules, maps, cards and other helpful printouts. Don't worry about going through them all, the first three will provide you with all you need to get started. The fourth one just links to the Board Game Geek database in case you get bored with the basic rules and maps. After you get a chance to look over the rules and maybe even play a round, have a look at the strategies I listed below for some tips.

Main Game - Original and very basic but a good starting place if you want to get a feel for the game.

Kwanchai's Zombie Plague Redesign - Updated version with nice board, slight rule changes and additional cards. You may choose to start with this one as it is a little more polished but you will have to print more.

Miniature Cutouts - If you want to try the game but don't have figures then feel free to use something like these print out miniatures. Nothing real great but they can get the job done.

Archives - If you get into it and want to explore more options take a look through them.

The strategy:

As humans, working together is a must if you want everyone to survive. Organizing who searches where, how to fight, how to handle items and weapons, it's all very teamwork based and if you have a well organized group of humans then you will almost always beat the zombies without any trouble. The fun part of this is that people are never organized and there are so many mistakes made that it feels like an actual zombie movie.

As zombies. I've seen many strategies and they all have some interesting traits. One zombie master would move the zombies in carefully laid traps and ambushes, the problem with this is why there are many more zombies on the board than humans there will never be enough to set up traps and fight against the humans all at once and so while you have zombies waiting over by this one search square, they are running around to all the others and picking up shotguns and chainsaws that will tear through the zombies no matter how tightly they are packed in there.

Another strategy I've seen is to move the zombies randomly, not sure if it was really a strategy or just an experiment, but it was interesting none the less because it takes all of the human players out of their comfort zone and prevents them from really being able to predict where the zombies will go. The problem with this one is that it takes a long time for the zombies to get anything done.

My recommended strategy as the ZM is simple, play the zombies as zombies. Pretty much the only thing I do is move them towards the closest thing that's made of living flesh. It's predictable sure but almost always effective. There can be four times+ as many zombies as humans on the board at once so if you are playing with six survivors you begin to understand how chaotic it can get . Tight corners fill the maps and with every zombie close by wanting to snack on you it doesn't take much to get surrounded, and once you're surrounded, your not far off from being dead.

Later posts will include the zombie plague set I've put together to give you some ideas on what all you can do with this game and some rule changes that you may want to consider.