I kick started Zombicide some time ago, and just recently got around to playing it for the first time. The game is about “surviving” post a zombie invasion. There is a continual stream of zombies coming into play throughout the game. There are scenarios with objectives which include getting enough food, collecting objective tokens, and often get to an exit or safe place.
We started off with the intro scenario. It’s pretty simple and got us acquainted with the rules. Then we dove into the first real scenario. There were four of us playing, which meant we all controlled a single survivor. So we started fine. Zombies kept on coming but we seemed like we had it under control, as we picked up the markers on one side of the map. Then one person leveled - which starts the waves of zombies to kick up a notch. That shortly turned into one of our party dying. It doesn’t take much to take someone down once there are a couple zombies in the same zone with a player.
So now we’re down a player, more zombies are coming, and we still have the scenario to complete as well as traveling to the exit on the other side of the board. So we had the horde chase us around this building in the middle, then run down and barricade ourselves in such a manner we could take them out as they followed us into the build. This sorta worked for a few rounds while we finished up getting what was needed to complete the game. Now we’re ready to complete it but there’s a couple zones of zombies between us and the exist. One person just leveled and got an ability that allowed her to slide out of a zone filled with zombies for free, instead of one action point per zombie. This allowed her to just run for the exist while everyone else died. I called that a successful mission for the first attempt. The game really feels like it’s on the edge of spiraling out of control during most of the mid-to-late game.
So, besides messing up a couple of the rules slightly early on (such as we didn’t escalate the zombies quiet fast enough) and the one player having not much to do once he went down, we had a bunch of one. I would call this a fun evening, even if it did take us months before we tried playing the game once we had our hands on it. I’d give Zombicide a 4/5, a fun co-op survival game.
