Zombicide!

Well here's a bit of a change of pace...Oscar's a big fan of zombie games like The Last of Us, and I'd heard a few odd things about Zombicide, so after selling some old bits and bobs I had no real use or intent for, I decided to give it a go...next day Amazon delivered a large parcel containing a rather sturdy box...

This feels like a quality product - the box is nicely produced and very solid. Opening it up we are greeted with...

 Taking out the rulebook...

 ...and then the counter sheet...

...reveals two boxes - one contains the "Survivors" (yes, the small box!), the other the zombies.

Taking these out reveals the player stat cards and the playing board tiles. All in all a full box that has been put together well and feels like a quality product. getting everything out and on the table looks quite impressive.

Taking a look at the miniatures themselves, they are really nice - this is Phil, a cop;

Very nicely sculpted, well posed and nicely cast, especially for a board game (though this is not aimed at your average family gaming audience, more the gamer/modeller market, so this is nice to see). The zombies, despite their number, are also nicely done. Here are a couple of the "walkers";

Again, nice poses and detailing. Next up is a "fatty";

And lastly an "Abomination" - you just get one of these bad boys (unfortunately my picture isn't great, sorry!);

The gameplay doesn't take long to get into, and the little starter scenario is useful to get a hang of the rules. Some bits we needed to jump back into the rules for clarity and some questions we couldn't find the answers to so did what we thought made sense (we were right about half the time, looking back!). After 40 minutes or so we were racking up a larger game to get into, and it was a ton of fun - absorbing 3 hours easily without feeling like that at all. Here's our game mid-session;

So verdict? It's a great game - there are very simple rules for the game, but the system is very elegant and surprisingly tactical, and does result in some very cinematic moments - Doug the office worker, for instance, plunging into a group of zombies with a chainsaw to clear the way for the group...survivors firing and making noise in a room to draw zombies one way, then ducking back through the building to escape out the other side....epic stuff!

The game is very clever in the way it escalates too...we were cowering at the beginning clutching pans and the odd pistol, fearful of more than a single zombie...at the end we were discarding katanas and wading into the fray, despatching fatties with machetes and Molotov's! Every survivor gains experience and skills for that experience over the game, and  the numbers and types of zombie that spawn are affected by the highest experience level of the survivors....very neat.

For less than £60 delivered, I can see it's going to deliver a lot of gaming fun, and it feels like money well spent...higher praise for a game it is difficult to give!