Zombie Board Game

Weapons!

this is all looking pretty swanky. Computer keeps fucking up, but just seen the zombiecide review and had a quick flick through that reddit forum, gonna have a look closer look at last night on earth and city of horror cos they sound like they have some interesting ideas but for the moment...

was thinking what seems a definite for the game is a feel of suspense. Like thinking back to games like the serial killer game or heavy rain, although they're not boardgames, you would genuinely fear for your life when playing them. Looking at the zombiecide review, I'm not sure you'd get that as much as you should because I'm not sure its like...real enough.

I mean to get a suspense games, we need it to work where you'd act in the game as you would in real life

it'd need to have totally unpredictable and spontaneous things that occur randomly, but not too often it becomes frustrating

it'd need to not have massively confusing rules, where there's about a million different things.

And it'd need a sense of players really needing to work together, otherwise there'd be almost certain death and failure.


taking each of these points, I think realistic would be good because I reckon it's something a lot of them lack i dont mean as in "zombies and robots arent real" I mean, how it'd actually be if they were real.. Zombiecide seems like it lacks realism at least. He said in the review about the stupid rule where if you shoot and your friend is on that square, he will always get hit before zombies, and they're talking about exp, which probably is a good mechanic but I think it'd detract from the sense of "oh shit" and being immersed in the game. If there's exp, you're actively looking to try and kill zombies, I think it'd be better if you're actively looking to survive by whatever means possible, it's just very difficult to survive without killing zombies. Also makes me think of Last Of Us. There was always a sense with game of having to make split decisions of whether or not to shoot someone (and waste ammo that's very rare to come by) or try and scrape by in more difficult ways so you can save the ammo for future events. I think that'd be good. As opposed to going out and killing everything to gain experience of various perks that make it all more confusing, you're thinking "shit, what's the best way to survive this thing?" Similarly to real life, and I think it should have a gritty sort of feel to it. I'm talking about it as though it's a movie we're making, but you know, more of that struggling for ammo, arguing about decisions to make with your teammates, zombies that you fear more than they are a prop to unleash hell upon. I dunno how you do that though, so it's probably a pointless point to make.

in terms of spontaneous shit happening. I was thinking about the missions, and it'd be really cool if staring out the game, you plan what you're gonna do. I dunno, part of the mission involves getting somewhere and you're looking at the map going "this route is the quickest, but there's less places to search for this" or "there's a car if we go this way, what if we can't find petrol though?" and "we could take the long route round because it's less of a zombie hot spot, but we could struggle for food or whatever". you know, proper debate with the other players about what you're gonna do. What's good about that is not only you instantly get pulled into the game, not only does it get all the players involved in coming up with a plan, but also say someone does like the idea they decide upon and wants to do another one, you can just say "well if we die, we'll just play the game again with the same set up and everything, but try your plan out". Then it gets a second game going straight off the bat. so that'd be cool but at the same time, its not much fun if plans go perfectly, gonna need shit you could plan for happening, a spontaneous element. I dont know what or how it'd work exactly. Was saying on the forum with last night on earth how they failed a game cos they'd figured out this plan then 2 high school characters drew a card that had them start fucking instead of filling up the truck with petrol, causing them all to die. Kinda ridiculous thing to happen, but good sorta idea. Or one said about going in to search a place and the next thing they know, a load of zombies start coming up towards the only way out of the building. You know, just stuff that has you like "fuck!! whadda we do now??" Suppose you could do with every now and then, some amount of zombies spawn in some random location. Or maybe each character has some kinda habit or problem, and each item a downside. Like a baseball bat would snap, or a character is clumsy and can accidentally make a lot of noise or whatever, stuff we'd really need to plan out so it wouldn't make it too confusing or ridiculous, and these things could just happen at any given moment and turn your whole plan on it's head.

Having fairly simple rules is obvious. If they're too confusing, it's a lot of effort for people to learn, takes a lot of setting up and detract from the suspense of the game, as you spend ages pickng up all sorts of cards, rolling loads of dice, loading at things in inventory or whatever. i think all the decisions and plans you come up with in the game should be based more on common sense or atleast for simple reasons than even someone who didn't know the rules would understand, rather than tactical mechanics of the game. Say like need to get some object at the end of a road, but it's blocked with a load of zombies, we could have it how it'd logically be: you could for an outright attack with all your weapons and shit, hopefully kill them all, might be risky if there's a lot or you're low on ammo etc. You could try and take a different route round if it's possible. Then the other logical way of getting past it is sneaking. Maybe based on the amount of zombies in each...square/part, how sneaky or i dunno short your character is, means you need to roll a certain number to not get detected in each square...means there's a chance of saving ammo and all sorts but it might mean leaving the less sneaky players further behind where they can't help if you're noticed, or if you do get detected, you don't get the opening surprise attack on them. Also with simple rules, despite stuff like baseball bats that can snap and whatever, might just make it all overly complicated, unless we do it in a simple way. I think exp and getting perks for higher levels is an unnecessary complication, character should just have very few, simple stats that need nothing more than a glance at. The last thing we want is players going "hang on, is there something that's supposed to happen here?" or "oh fuck, we were meant to discard a card at the start of every turn, and we've forgotten for the last 5 turns" or whatever. You should need to think carefully about how you react to every problem you face, but thinking with just simple and common sense things, not thinking about the rules of the game too much.

players working together is obvious need, if it's co-op atleast, if there is a choice between co-op and non co-op. Like planning about a route at the start of the game together, and deciding how to act at each problem you face, whether to split up and go off separately to do different things if it's a 2 part mission, thinking "if I sacrifice myself, you guys could go on and win next turn" deciding who gets the axe someone just found, all'a that really gets people involved and yeah, the best way to get teamwork going is having to make decisions as a group. Said on that forum about City of Horror having people backstab eachother all the time, that'd be cool if we could get it to work, though it  might just complicate things, so definitely need to look into how that game works.

And yeah, how dying works needs to be good. I think respawning would take away the fear of dying as well as confusing the game. But at the same time, the guy said one of the big problem with zombiecide is some player making a mistake and dying early on, then sitting about bored for an hour while everyone else finishes. If there is lots of team discussion and decision making, they might be less bored, but still. So for this, we're gonna have to think carefully about combat. We don't want it tooooo likely for a group of say 4 people going into a big fight and one of them dying from shit luck and the rest surviving fine. Want it so if you stick together, its more likely you'll either all/most of you die, or just about scrape through. I was thinking instead of an outright death, say if you're in a fight and one of you dies, if the other players can kill off the rest of the zombies in the same turn, they're able to heal you, or at least keep you in the game. Maybe you can get bandages or some medical thing that won't give you back health (if we even have health, not sure about it really) but will stop you dying if other players are able to kill off the zombies and heal you in time..and if they do, you'd have to be injured somehow, maybe if there is health, you only have a little bit, or if not, you're really slow and a shit fighter for a few turns while you heal...which would mean the team would have to look after you/avoid fights as much as possible while you get better. This way there's still a fear of dying, but its less frustrating. It means if someone goes off on his own, it's his own fault, not the stupid rules of the game, and if you aren't able to heal someone in time, it's probably because you came very close to dying yourself...or you took a massive risk that clearly didn't pay off.

What i've essentially done is write a scrawl of words without really giving any ideas of how the game could work...i guess this is just a very vague starting place based on what i've read. So I thinking of writing up some actual possible rules at somepoint soon, even if we change them, just as a starting point? Cos it's a lot clearer than writing loads of posts like this. But you know, this is some basic thoughts before starting to write any rules, what dya think?

ahh that's the smart way to do it, a quick list of ideas to build from! This is all sounding so awesome, getting more and more excited about this

Just watched Last Night on earth review, that to me looks like the best of em, and here's a list of shit I thought of watching it

the loads of different playable characters it has, liked how you just get given a totally random one of the pile, makes each game different

rolling doubles (maybe have that for a critical hit? or something, because rolling 2 dice and getting doubles is always cool)

downside of cars could be the noise attracts and attention? and they can always break down at the worst time?

other human characters (needs alot of explaining, they said something about it in last night on earth, but i dont think it's what i was imagining....buuut maybe there's a deck of these other characters and occasionally you find a person in some building you go to search of whatever. They were saying about ones like a doctor who when you find him will heal you, but I was thinking a bit more like there's other people holed up somewhere, and he's not gonna just let you search his house, so you can either kill him in a fight and search the place, ask him if there's anything you could have (maybe roll a dice and if you roll high, you pick one item of a pile or something) or you can get him to go with you (some thing that decides whether he agrees to go or not) if he does, he just follows you and is an extra dice you roll in combat but dies super easy or something, and needs some downside, like i dunno, could betray you or something...just have an image of running into some building to find shit, seeing a frail old man and just shooting him in the face and searching him and his home.

big problem with last night on earth is that one player has to be the zombies, which i can always imagine people not wanting to be, and it also kinda singles someone out of the people playing slighty....dunno how you get around that though and still have zombies be able to move about in good ways and all sorts, also a lot of advantages to one person being the zombies...something im gonna think about alternatives for though

character descriptions, like you get on cards in magic, could make it slightly cheesy if not done well though

was thinking some kinda brief story or description at the front of the booklet, or as some thing that comes with the game that explains the kinda...world. Like a little story, not necessarily connected to the characters in the game, but explains why there's zombies, robots etc and just some cool little things that add a little bit of depth for

setting traps

food and drink? but could be a pointless complication

also, are we thinking one type of zombie, or different types, and also different move speeds?

Making 8 x 8in boards for map tiles >

These ideas are brilliant man! Of all the options, I do like having a marker on different map sections in different colours and having them spawn at harder and harder difficulties and having different outposts! Only thing is, depending on the size of the map, you might have like 3 outposts in only a 4 x 4 size map which would be a bit easy? I think only way to know for sure is to run actual gameplay tests, I like the idea of having the zombie player place a bunch on the board at the start, as they are most likely to be the only zombie player it makes sense, only thing is making sure they cant spawn kill the survivirs, I was thinking of also having the option to barricade a building from either side that can retain a certain amount of damage before it breaks! Say you have 2 survivors running from zombies, get to a builing and find some wood planks and a hammer, they then barricade the door and the zombies start to try break it, after a little while the door breaks, while the survivors have been equipting and looting more weapons then... CHAOS!

I think we need to begin writing up a good looking instruction booklet or at least the info that definately goes in it then I could mock up some art to put along with it! oh also got the sculpey of ebay and been working on figs

oh and Jade made a snake

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Some of the 15 event cards