‘Army of the Dead: A Zombicide Game’ Board Game Review
When I first saw Army of the Dead: A Zombicide Game, I was a bit shocked. Not only is this a Zombicide game that took me completely by surprise, but I also noticed Netflix branding on the box, and the obvious likeness of Dave Bautista as a leading character. Not only did I not know that Army of the Dead: A Zombicide Game was coming, nor had I ever heard of the Zack Snyder movie that inspired it. Nonetheless, the team at CMON have done similar things before – with George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead: A Zombicide Game having snuck out around three and a half years ago and been met with a fair amount of critical success.
In truth, Army of the Dead: A Zombicide Game delivers a fast-paced, tough and very enjoyable Zombicide experience that builds on the current “modern” Zombicide rules and adds a few new and challenging rules and opponents, whilst also taking the best features (such as concentrated fire) from games like Zombicide: Invader and Zombicide: Undead or Alive. I am obviously very wary of suggesting that Army of the Dead: A Zombicide Game is the “best” Zombicide game, since there is so much subjective variation between them, but if I were to recommend a single Zombicide product today, then it would probably be the this one – albeit with a few caveats.
The first of those caveats is that Army of the Dead: A Zombicide Game is really tough – much more so than Night of the Living Dead: A Zombicide Game and easily up there with the toughest games in the Zombicide series. It’s very possible that you’ll be at risk of failing every mission, including the very first, and for me this makes the experience all the more rewarding – and it means that you’ll need to take full advantage of all of the new and fun tweaks to the standard rules.
Perhaps the most interesting of these is the inclusion of “sleepers” which are represented by tokens with a number on the back of them. These sleepers represent zombies that lay in a dormant state (as seen in at least one major scene from the movie) and only awaken when something triggers them. In specific Army of the Dead: A Zombicide Game terms, such triggers can include noise in an adjacent zone, other zombies moving into their zone or player characters who do not have the stealth ability moving carelessly through their zone. If a sleeper token is awoken, it will flip and reveal a number of basic zombies as shown on it. Players can also kill a sleeper token silently with a melee weapon for one action, and it repays them with AP (effectively experience points) equal to the number of zombies shown.
Sleepers add a whole new dynamic to the gameplay without adding anything material in terms of rules. If you end up exploring deep into a building and somehow manage to awaken them whilst deep inside you can end up in real trouble, whilst on some maps you may actively want to kill sleeper tokens to get the AP, if you have a character who is lagging behind the power curve. As with all Zombicide games, enemy spawns get larger and more punishing in Army of the Dead: A Zombicide Game as the player characters level up, so there’s a fine balance to be struck between building up your power level for the new actions and abilities it unlocks, and keeping all players in the same relative power band so that no one is left behind.
On that note, and playing to the theme of the Army of the Dead movie, characters in Army of the Dead: A Zombicide Game may have personal motives that manifest as mandatory side quests. In any standard game, two of the six player characters will receive a side quest and these must be completed in order to win the mission. Each personal motive reflects the actions of the characters in the movie, so you may find that a character needs to make a daring rescue to save someone else, whilst others might have motives that lead them into dangerous places in order to collect a specific item or sample.
These individual objectives definitely add to the difficulty in Army of the Dead: A Zombicide Game, because if nothing else, they ensure that at least the two characters who have them must survive. If either of them die, that objective cannot be completed and therefore the game ends – although you may sometimes have to house rule this simply because the game is so difficult at times. Many missions involve scenes from the movie and the most enjoyable moments come when you need to interact with things like the vault – which is presented as a separate board accessible only via a lift space. This effectively splits the board into two levels, which again adds variation and interest without much additional rules overhead.
Army of the Dead: A Zombicide Game is also generous with its abominations – which for those who aren’t familiar with the series are the boss zombies. In this version, there are a couple of variants of Zeus (the main zombie), as well as his Queen and his pet tiger – Valentine. Each of these has their own unique model and a specific attack that makes them dangerous, but in Army of the Dead: A Zombicide Game even some of the grunt zombies are dangerous enough. Case in point – there are no runners or fatties in this version, and instead we get Alphas – a variant of zombie that has both two actions and two hit points, making them both a runner and a fatty at the same time…. Scary!
To help the players mitigate this new and extreme difficulty level, Army of the Dead: A Zombicide Game includes the concentrated fire rule from a couple of other versions of the game. This means that if a weapon would normally do lots of smaller wounds on a single space, that fire can instead be concentrated against a single target. This means that instead of doing (for example) three hits of one to three targets (killing three zombies), you could instead declare a focussed attack on an alpha or an abominaton, and if you rolled three hits, you would deal three wounds (which would kill and alpha and may kill an abomination.) The counter to this (as if it needed to be any tougher) is that players now roll ammo die to see if their weapons run out of ammo when fired – in which case they need to be flipped until an ammo card can be discarded to replenish them.
In my opinion, Army of the Dead: A Zombicide Game is a really fantastic game, and whilst it has a lot less variability than some of the Zombicide games that were kickstarted, it includes plenty in the box for most people and comes at a sensible price. The ruleset now feels as though it has been optimised to a very sharp point, and Army of the Dead: A Zombicide Game really feels like it takes the best of all of the recent Zombicide games and even then it still adds more, whilst never actually expanding the ruleset to be much more complex than the vanilla Zombicide: Second Edition version.
Whether you are a returning player or brand new, this is definitely the Zombicide game to consider starting from. My only cautionary tale is that Army of the Dead: A Zombicide Game really is very, very tough indeed. Most missions will take multiple attempts and you’ll really need to optimise your turns, and even then, bad luck can sometimes turn a well-planned heist into a terrible bloodbath. Arguably, that’s exactly what cooperative dungeon-crawlers like this should feel like, and if you’re simply a fan of the movie, then I’d say that Army of the Dead: A Zombicide Game nails the experience pretty much perfectly as well.
