Each counter represents one survivor or one zombie. You choose your star, your “mini-me” if you will, and arm him or her with one of four weapon types. But you’re not alone as you then recruit a few other survivors to form your group.
Then it’s off to explore a beautifully detailed map representing deserted cities, suburbs, and rural areas. But are they really deserted? Not if you count the zombies, the seemingly endless hordes of zombies. But soon you realize that the zombies may be the least of your worries as you run into other survivors. Are they friendly or hostile? Well, the game mechanics determine that. With luck you can recruit them to use in future games. But sometimes it spins out of control
Which leads us to combat. There’s two ways to have combat in All Things Zombie the Board Game. Trust me on this; shooting is what you want to do. Yes, when facing one zombie it’s easy to handle him in hand-to-hand combat but get them in bunches and that’s when they are really dangerous. Better to shoot them from afar. Better All Things Zombie City Mapto shoot survivors too.
Where and when you explore determines how many zombies and survivors you’ll meet. Stick to the rural areas in the daytime and your chances of running into zombies are slim. Prowl around at night in the cities and you may have more zombies than you can handle. Why go there then? Because that’s where you can find the most stuff. Better weapons, medical supplies, even the cure to the virus. But hey, it’s up to you.
ATZ is built around the Reaction System. Simply put, when something happens it causes you to react immediately. This reaction causes the enemy to immediately react. The reactions go back and forth until it is resolved. For example, one member of your group steps around a corner and comes into sight of a hostile survivor. This triggers a reaction test to see what the hostile survivor does. The hostile survivor scores high on the In Sight Test and fires back, but he misses. This causes your group member to take a Received Fire Test and he returns fire but misses as well. The hostile survivor now takes a Received Fire Test and ducks back out of sight, breaking the reaction chain.
The Reaction System is only one piece of the game mechanics that allow the game to be played either solo, on the same side with your friends, or head to head. But whatever you choose to do the Zombies are handled by the game mechanics so it’s always survivors versus zombies.
