Zombicide!

A few weeks ago, Zombicide, a boardgame Kickstarter project done by Cool Mini Or Not and Guillotine Games came in the mail.  I've played it a few times with different groups of people, and I think it's safe to say that it's a pretty decent boardgame with a heavy miniatures component.

The rules were pretty simple to grasp, and it took my players on average maybe 1 more game beyond the tutorial to get into the rhythm of the game.  If anything, players sometimes asked if they could do some more complicated things!  After playing with different numbers of players, it seems like an ideal group of people would be 4+ players.  I've tried it with 3, and it just wasn't as fun.  With more people involved, coming up with strategies and just laughing about the game in general took on a life of its own. Scenario wise, I think the game could have done better with a more continuous narrative campaign instead of a collection of standalones.  It would have also been cooler if the characters who have died via zombie could come back as zombies somehow, as getting killed off early left players feeling bored... Letting them move the zombies and pulling out encounter cards alleviates this somewhat, but some of my players would have liked the option to come back a turn or two later and try and hinder the players still left alive.

Character wise, there's a good variety of them and although some abilities may see kinda lame or stupid at first, but when used in the right situations it could actually be of great use to the team.  I think as the owner of the game, the most annoying aspect of playing is the setup and takedown.  There are so many pieces and miniatures, the game cries out for a better storage solution.  Some small ziplock bags should have been included to keep pieces sorted, and people complained about the excessive packaging used for the special heroes that came as a Kickstarter bonus.

All in all, it's a pretty good co-op multiplayer game,  Once the game is set up, the rounds go by pretty quickly, and before you know it a couple of hours pass by and many zombies get killed before you know it.  I give this game 3.5 chainsaws out of 5.