Zombicide

[Eclipse]

So, last night we conquered the first real scenario, but its certainly not easy. Fighting as a team becomes rather crucial and a lot of our success had to do with periodically realizing the waves had gotten out of hand, gathering as a group in one spot, and spending a couple turns back to back killing huge waves of zombies. A lot of the difficulties in the game's turn order and targeting rules go away when you're all on the same square, as the range guys can shoot out at things nearby while the melee guys can focus on the immediate threats. We had about 4 groups of 7-10 zombies coming our way, but together they went down.

One thing I think is a bit disappointing is the character advancement. The main problem is that you don't get any choices at all until the orange level, and you can't really take advantage of the red level at all. As soon as you hit red, you need to be a round or 2 away from victory, as zombies hit the table in so many numbers that nothing you get at red level makes you able to really deal with them. This is particularly true due to the "if you don't have enough figures, its a zombies take another turn" card. Even with the extra tray, 75 of my 98 zombie figures were on the board when we won. Zombies take another turn is the most brutal and honestly unfair card in the deck and will regularly outright kill characters with no recourse. Honestly, that's kind of cool and thematic, but a little unfair. We actually lost another game earlier simply because this card took out 2 of our characters early on and the game doesn't let up just because you're handicapped.

On the characters themselves, they can be judged mostly on their blue and orange skills I believe, and while certain powers are unbelievably useful, I don't think there's many duds in the set. Slippery is, probably without question, the best ability in the game. It becomes extremely important as the game progresses, so any character that has it is probably pretty good. Tough is also extremely helpful, but harder to use late game. With these two preferences in mind, John McClane is probably the best character, and honestly, I'm ok with that. Sheldon's ability to make extra molotov's is also extremely powerful, though the weapons themselves can be quite dangerous, simply because it allows one character to get so many kills its easy to accidentally spike red and bring about the apocalypse.

Of the first 9 characters, I think there's probably 2 duds. Doug is sadly underwhelming. Matching Set should be awesome, but more often than not he pulls a can of beans or a non dual wield weapon and has to trade around just like any other schmuck down an ability. He gets to choose from 3 great abilities at red level, but that's too little too late. If he got Ambidextrous at Orange he'd probably be a better choice. The other underwhelming option in my mind is Phil. The pistol just isn't a very impressive weapon and starting with one gives you no real advantage (someone else always has one as well). Generally turn 1 someone will find something better and Phil will be left out. He also gains little at the Orange level and again, has all the interesting abilities in the red zone. Moving Sniper to orange would make a huge difference on the guy.