Last night I had the pleasure of sitting down with a few friends to hash out some brutal games of Zombicide. Being my fourth session with the game I felt pretty comfortable with the rules, and so did everyone else. After all it's a fairly simple system.
Bushy-eyed, and ready for action our crack team of survivors eagerly anticipate the skinner walkers of Rue Morgue.
Team leader S gives us the lo-down. We played mission 9 from the rule book dubbed "Nosocomephobia". The mission is classified as hard, and recommends 6+ survivors. It requires all nine tiles, and offers up two different routes to victory.
"There is no cure. That could be a wierd relief if my teammates hadn't decided to retrieve all the scientific data these guys collected. It could, you know, "be useful later to find a solution to an issue we didn't think about now". Gah, the scientific mind. My own solution is here, in the barrel of my gun!
Yeah Yeah, I'm overreacting. Please understand me, I suffer of noscomephobia, fear of hospitals. Guess where the databank lies? In their headquarters- the greatest hospital around. Everyone knows hospitals are the worst places to hang around since the zombie outbreak!"
More than half of the game board consists of hospital zones. The hospital is only accessible through one door, and once that door is opened zombies are spawned on each tile within.
Essentially the survivors need to break into the hospital, clear a way to all of the objectives, and locate either the blue or pink objective along the way. Once one of the coloured objectives are located it can be used to lock the one door, thus preventing zombies spawned outside of the hospital from clambering into the headquarters.
Our strategy during the first attempt at this mission was to bum-rush the front door, and grab the objectives as fast as possible before too many walkers were spawned. We were met with heavy resistance at the front door, and were poorly equipped to deal with the 6 dice of zombies a turn.
Delicious Moshi break.
Seriously have you guys ever tried Moshi ice cream? If not do your self a favour, and go fucking buy some.
After being swiftly over-run and chomped on, our heroes were all "turned", and joined the denizens of the hospital headquarters as permanent roommates.
Shortly there after a new team of survivors stepped up onto the scene, with fire in their hearts, and strategy on their minds.
After the first game we regrouped, and strategized. I think this is when we all realized how much depth there actually is to this game. There are some very neat maneuvers you can pull off using all of the player's abilities in tandem with each other.
The back of the hospital seemed to be a gateway to hell which just continued to spew zombies each turn, creating a river of shambling ghouls for us to club our way through.
Here we managed to break in with two of the survivors ( Dan and Terry) who were tasked with collecting the objectives; the rest of us attracted, and dealt with the zombies from the corridor.
Woah! Where did all of those zombies go? With some cleaver use of Bear's Shove ability, and two expertly placed Molotov cocktails we laid those flesh eaters to rest once and for all.
Unfortunately the two heroes who laid their lives down on the line to take out the giant horde left themselves exposed in the corridor. They were poised to escape the hallway just fine, so long as the cards revealed didn't grant the runners any extra activations. It wasn't to be so! The very first card turned saw Travis, and Bear offered up as lunch meat. The mission would be left up to the remaining four survivors.
The one redeeming rule of this mission was that for every objective marker retrieved, a spawn die would be removed from the pool thus reducing the number of zombies appearing every turn. Activate clean-up phase.
This is how the mission ends. It's a success! The victory condition we chose was achieved by locking the zombies outside, and clearing the hospital of all zombie presence. Terry, Dan, Louise and Maddie make it out of the hospital with the "scientific data". Travis, and Bear will be remembered in our hearts, and minds.
After Thoughts
Wow what an insane amount of fun. I think everyone who played probably has a raspy voice today due to the sheer amount of yelling that went on during clutch dice rolls, and arguments over the best course of action for the team.
After my first two sessions with Zombicide I had decided that the only real depth this game had to offer would be found in the player versus player mode, but this session changed my perspective on that drastically. Devising tactics to unleash hell on the zombies was actually quite stimulating. For instance, one trick we used more than once: Maddie would use her bloodlust ability to jump into a group of zombies, and swing wither her Saber/Knife combo with 4 actions, then Terry would give her an extra activation per his special rule. If Maddie failed to wipe out the zone she was working on Dan could then use his life-saver ability to pull her out of trouble, and then use his remiaing actions to shoot into the crowd.
Seriously this game can be too much fun with the right group of people. Anyways, thanks for reading!
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