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Creepy Fun: Zombies the Card Game

Zombies invaded my household awhile back and occupied my family’s attentions night after night for several weeks. By “zombies” I of course mean the addictively amusing table game from Twilight Creations.

Zombies the Card Game Zombies invaded my household awhile back and occupied my family’s attentions night after night for several weeks. By “zombies” I of course mean the addictively amusing table game from Twilight Creations. I’m not enough of a game aficianado to know the correct term for this kind of game; it is card-based but also has a board that is assembled piece by piece as the game progresses. And the coolest part of the game perhaps are the plastic zombies that serve as obstacles to the players. In the expansion sets, there are even cooler variants of these zombies including glow-in-the-dark “radioactive” zombies and zombie dogs.

The object of the game should be familiar to anyone who knows a thing or two about zombies and that is, brute survival – and since only one person can fly away on that helicopter at the end (the victory condition) the side objective is making sure that other players don’t escape before you do. The theme changes nicely based on the different expansion sets, ranging from Night of the Living Dead (zombies original recipe), Dawn of the Dead (zombies in the mall), Day of the Dead (military zombies) and on to zombie dogs, college zombies and sewer zombies. Our household has got ’em all and they’re all great though the expansion sets, obviously require the original Zombies! game. One piece of advice I’d pass along is to pick up an extra “Bag o’ Zombies.” The number of zombies figures in the starter box isn’t really enough for even a middle sized game. And who wants to run out of zombies?

The artwork on the cards graphically illustrates the action of the card. In fact there are a couple cards whose illustrations are so intense that my daughter insists we take them out of play. The only drawback to the game that we’ve found is that the board sometimes ends up snaking out larger than our table, especially when adding an expansion set. The remedy that we’ve found is to push all the furniture to the edges of the room and play on the floor!

In short, Zombies! is a blast. Games without an expansion set seem to take a little over an hour which is a nice length for an evening’s entertainment — with an expansion set or two… well, don’t start one of those if you don’t want to be occupied til the wee hours. And heck, Zombies! or any table game is a great excuse to shut off the TV and actually look at the members of your household.

http://www.twilightcreationsinc.com/zombies/

One reply on “Creepy Fun: Zombies the Card Game”

One thing I really like about the game is its unpredictability– you don’t know who is going to win until s/he actually wins! This is due to the two-ways-to-win factor as well as the action cards. Those cards can make for some devastating changes, like when one of your “friends” fills up with zombies again the very same building that you just emptied of the biters. Then there are the dice that determine whether you kill a zombie or not; sometime your luck runs out and you die instead. You need multiple strategies and a lot of luck to win.

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