Since I apparently do not sleep anymore due to the Olympic Games (all competitions are happening in the middle of the night – if you live in Brazil, that is), I decided to do some reviews between one competition and the other.

In my reviews, I usually don’t go much into the rules and this one will be no exception. I will just give you my impression about some features of the game.

What’s the story?

Zombies! Some mad scientist has done it again and zombies are rampaging through the city one more time. You and a bunch of other pals have taken shelter in a mall. The problem is that several other people had the same idea, and there’s just not enough room for everyone – somebody has to be thrown to the zombies!

The Actual Play (roughly)

Each player controls a group of movie stereotypes: a big guy, an armed “negotiator”, a beautiful girl, etc. In any given turn, once a special condition arises (the room has too many girls, there are too many zombies banging at the door, etc.) one person will have to be thrown to the zombies so the others can escape.

What you are gonna do is vote who’s going to become zombie food, utilizing some neat secret disks. Your objective is to convince other people to let you live and, at the same time, feed them to the zombies.

Each character is worth some points that are balanced considering their usefulness (the special power of the blonde is to attract more zombies! But she is worth a lot of points in the end. The guy that carries a club can send the zombies away, but is considerably less valuable, and so on). The winner is the one with more points by the end of the game, which is triggered when enough people has been eaten or when the zombies have taken lots of rooms.

To spice things up, add to this mix some hidden movement between rooms and cards with special abilities.

And the game has zombie miniatures, if you are into this kind of thing (oh, well, who isn’t?).

Ok. Then what?

That’s it. Mall of Horror is a very simple game of negotiation and manipulation. You have to use every little dirt psychological trick to convince people to not vote on you. I’ve seen everything: wives threatening their husbands with a chastity vote, friends betraying each other and all the women on the table united against the men. All of this followed by yelling, wild gesticulation, some punches on the table and a lot of laughing. This is probably the noisiest game of my collection.


And what I think about it?

The game is great fun. It is not deep, but it is a nice filer (did I wrote this right?).
A word of warning, though: I tried it with three players and it was a dreadful experience (I know better, but I was making a trial run for the rules). 4 players is OK if you are low on options, but I can’t recommend this enough with 5 or 6 players.
A second word of warning: the game is simple enough for children, but the cards have some strong scenes printed on them. Nothing too intense, miniskirts and blood basically, but Candyland it ain’t.