Review: The Walking Dead Board Game by Z-Man

When I heard there was going to be a Walking Dead board game coming out this fall, I couldn't wait to get my paws on it. I'm a big fan of board games (Risk, Settlers of Catan, Scrabble, Scattegories...just to name a few), so a Walking Dead board game was basically combining two of my favorite things.

It came over a month ago, but I've been so busy being a boring adult that I didn't get a chance to sit down and give it a first go with some friends until last night. After having read about 50% of the instruction manual, we sat down to play at around 8:45pm.

The game set up wasn't difficult. It's a little like Clue, and each of your players has a different designated starting place on the board. You also pull location cards, a follower card, and a hero card. We each picked our own main character to start, but you're technically supposed to assign it randomly. They each have different benefits and weaknesses, so it's probably better to just pull them without choosing.

Basically the goal of the game is to scout three locations on the board (places such as The Greene Farm, The Prison, Wiltshire Estates, etc...plus some non-comic locations such as The Mall and The Airport). You can only scout locations when that location card is turned up, which means that the majority of the time you can only scout four of the locations. This leads to more competition between players and more strategy involved in your movements.

As you move, you leave behind you a trail of zombies. To move back through this trail you either have to waste gasoline driving through them, or you have to fight your way through--hence why it's a good idea to plan your movements so you don't end up cutting yourself off from your final destination.

As you scout locations, the tasks become more and more difficult. The tension of the game is also maintained by encounter cards, which are drawn on almost every turn, as you need to complete an encounter do almost anything. I really enjoyed the variety of tasks in the encounter stack. Some required you to fight zombies with the dice, some required you to roll hats (or "actions") with your dice set. Some even required that you poll your other players about what they would do in apocalyptic scenarios, and I was really impressed that the game didn't reward you for being the "nice guy".

The game took us a little while to complete (we finished about 2.5-3 hours later at 11:30pm), but part of that might have been that we had to keep stopping to read the directions and clarify some of the stranger encounter cards. The box says the game takes 30-60 minutes, but I doubt that. My guess would be that subsequent games will take us around 90 minutes or so.  But it was an exciting 2.5 hours, and the variety of cards in the encounter deck keeps it fun and fresh. Depending on which characters and locations you pulled, this game could feel completely different with each play.

I really enjoyed it, and I hope my friends will be down to play soon. The only thing that frustrates me is that it'll take a while to explain the game to new people and, admittedly, I'm pretty bad at explaining directions. But if you're willing to devote an hour or so to learning the game, it was pretty darn fun. Sometimes games with a gimmick like this are poorly thought out, but this one pretty much had it all. The only complaint I might have is that if you had enough followers, there weren't enough dice and you had to reroll some of them to add up to your full dice pool. But whatever, not a big complaint.

There is a TV show board game, which I haven't checked out yet. Seems a little ridiculous that they'd make two, but this version by Z-Man would make a great holiday gift for the gaming and zombie fan near you! It's available for $29.19 from Amazon and it can still be ordered in time for Christmas!