So a little about me first, I’m quite new to proper boardgaming, however I have been playing Warhammer all my life and also RPGs for the past few years too, so I’m not completely new to this scene. Do I like zombies? Yeah, zombies are cool, along with ninjas and pirates, but everyone thinks they’re cool right? I don’t think I’ve ever met someone who doesn’t think zombies, ninjas or pirates are cool. I’m not a zombie fanatic, I haven’t watched every zombie movie ever, but I’ve watched a few (even starred in one, sort of). I decided to pick up LNoE and GH after hearing a bit about it and have now played every official scenario (from LNoE, Growing Hunger expansion, Stock Up supplement and the 2 online scenarios) so I thought I’d write a review of this.
I will give a little overview of what the game is though. I’d probably call LNoE a survival horror game, it pits a team of hero players controlling 4 unique hero characters against a team of zombie players controlling 14 zombies. LNoE is scenario based with a modular grid based board, so the game objectives are different depending on what you pick. These range from simply killing lots of zombies to defending a manor house as zombies approach from all sides. Play generally involves the heroes moving around the board, searching for useful items in buildings and trying to fulfill their objectives while the zombie player tries to stop them. It’s a game for 2-6 players and quoted as taking 60-90 minutes to play.
So on with the review, I’ll start with the components.
Overall I think the components are great, you do get quite a lot in there. I have made a full list of the components for LNoE, which can be found here
The board - I really like the board, I love how it’s modular and how you can flip over the centre board for different scenarios. I think the artwork is pretty good, it’s sturdy cardboard. My only issue is I find some of them aren’t cut quite right so they don’t slot together absolutely perfectly sometimes.
Miniatures – They’re fantastic, I think they’re really well designed. They’re soft plastic like the D&D miniatures so you don’t have to worry about dropping them too much. One problem I have found is that in the box, if they’re squashed against something for too long they tend to lean a bit, but it’s easily fixable. One occurrence of this left my group nearly wetting themselves when one of the zombies came out and looked like a drunk guy trying to find something to steady himself.
Cardboard components - You get quite a few cardboard tokens in this game and they’re good thick cardboard, you get plenty of them and tokens that aren’t even used for player made scenarios which I think is fantastic, adds a lot of extra potential if you’re feeling creative.
Cards – I really like the artwork of the cards, but the actual cards are a letdown. I like that they’ve got very distinct backs for the two decks so they don’t get mixed up and I love the photographs and the little quotes. However, the cards were stuck together when I got them (as with pretty much every other person) and they’re incredibly difficult to shuffle well. Since making sure the decks are shuffled well is a huge deal for this game this makes it very frustrating.
Dice – The game comes with 16 little d6es which is enough for a 6 player game, it’s very rare for one person to roll more than 4d6 at once. Some people don’t like little d6es, I quite like them.
Rules – The rulebook is very good I think, in colour with nice pictures, explains most things really well. There are however, a few little things on cards that aren’t quite so obvious what happens.
Soundtrack CD – I didn’t think the soundtrack was great, not that it was bad but it didn’t really fit the zombie theme very well in my opinion. But since it’s not essential for the game play it’s not really a big deal.
The box – The box is a good size. The insert is really good, if you ignore the tokens. It has space to fit all the cards, scenario and character cards, CDs, miniatures, etc. But it has nowhere to put all the little cardboard markers which is incredibly annoying, especially seeing as there are quite a lot. What I’ve done is taken the insert out and put everything in baggies to organize it a bit better, it also fits all the other official material currently published.
•Generally excellent but with a couple of downsides
Setting up the game
If it weren’t for all the little tokens and the poor insert the setup would be quick and easy, it can take a while to get all the markers separated and fish out only the ones you need. Otherwise, all you need to do is assemble the board, pick a scenario and characters and get the two decks shuffled, pretty simple. My above comment about using baggies really helps the setup time if you have them organized properly.
•Setup isn’t very quick due to trying to get the tokens organised
•Pretty quick of you organise your box well though, if you play this game a lot, this is essential
Learning the game
It’s not too hard to get a grasp of the rules for the game, the basics of it aren’t very complicated. After the first game my group (of non-board gamers) had a good grasp of the basic rules, even with my awful teaching.
•Easy to learn
Mastering the game
Mastering takes a little longer, but still, it’s not too long compared to other games. The main challenge of mastering the game is learning what the different cards are. To help with this I’ve made a list of all the cards in LNoE here. It takes perhaps 3 or so games to get a good feel for the game.
•Easy to master
Playing the game
Initially, especially if you start with the basic game, the game isn’t quite as fun, I think when the entire group starts to master the game is where the real fun begins. When a player is new to the game (or new to a team) the play gets slowed down a bit as every time they draw a card they have to read what it does and figure it out, so it’s not quite as fast. Especially seeing as when they play that card, every other player wants to read what it does. However, once the group knows most of the cards and knows the rules well, the games go really fast and there’s hardly any downtime. If it’s not you’re usually closely studying your opponents moves to try and figure out what’s the best course of action on your next go and how it effects your overall strategy and discussing it with your team mates while trying not to give it away too much.
So the luck factor, there is a lot of luck in this game. I don’t mind luck in my games, I quite like it, but it can ruin this game sometimes. There’s the dice which are used quite a lot, which you might think was the most significant, but it’s actually the cards. I find with the heroes, especially if they have Jake on their team, they can amass an arsenal of the best weapons and a big handful of event cards to make sure they win if their weapons don’t make them. Even so, I find that if the players are experienced, even when the heroes are drawing and rolling well it still comes down to the line. I’ve had perhaps 2 or 3 games out of nearly 25 that there has been an obvious advantage. But usually it’s incredibly close and the balance keeps tipping backwards and forwards. I think this is the biggest draw of this game to me, there’s a huge amount of tension, the majority of the games I play are incredibly close and it really sucks you in.
I think the player balance is great, it plays just as well rules wise with 2 as it does with 6 and it doesn’t really slow down too much with more people if they’re all experienced. I love how it’s a team game, so you get both co-operative and competitive game play at the same time. I do think the more people you have the better it is, tends to be more fun, I mostly tend to play 3 or 4 players. 5 players is a bit of an oddball as its 4 heroes vs. 1 zombie but it’s still fun.
However, I have found that the heroes do have a higher win ratio. I’ve played quite a few games, we do shuffle the teams around quite a bit, and the heroes do tend to win most of the time…just. I wouldn’t say it’s easy for the heroes, because you really do feel the pressure and if you have to keep on the ball if you want to win. I think this can be alleviated somewhat by making the heroes pick random characters. The problem is the hero team will usually pick from the same 6 or so best characters. This also makes it a little stale so working in your own house rule for some sort of random hero selection definitely helps.
•Incredibly tense throughout
•Lots of player interaction
•Competitive and co-operative gameplay at once
•Plays well with the full range of players
•Different playing experiences due to modular board and several scenarios and heroes
•Not very much downtime
•First few games you probably won’t get why people are raving about this game
•High luck factor but tends to balance out
•By default rules, heroes do tend to win more, but it’s still very close most games
Conclusion
Overall I really love this game, I got this about a month or two ago. I’ve only played around 25 games as of writing, might not sound like much to some, but I work evenings until 11pm and if I get a decent run of days off I’m out of town visiting my girlfriend. Last month I was playing this twice almost every evening I’ve had free at home with my friends. It was only then that it had started to get a little stale since we had almost overplayed it. I’ve had a little bit of a break from it when I got A Touch of Evil, but I’ve just played a few more games and it had my friends and I enthralled all night. Right now this is my favorite game and I don’t ever see myself getting tired of it so long as I don’t go crazy overplaying it again. I was going to say something about the games length, but I don’t actually have any idea how long it takes my group to play a game because we always forget what time we started and we lose track of time really easily because we’re drawn in so much. Suffice to say, however long it takes, it doesn’t feel long. Whenever I finish I either want more or played it so much I don’t think I could stomach taking on another zombie horde without a nervous breakdown.
Now I’m going to a brief overview of the scenarios.
The Scenarios
“Die Zombies, Die!”
Basic scenario to kill 15 zombies.
Good for getting to grips with the rules, but that’s it. It’s not particularly exciting, the heroes have always one this one by far.
“Escape in the Truck”
Find some gasoline, fill up the truck in the centre, find the keys then escape.
With this scenario I find the heroes usually find the items quite quickly, occasionally they do win on the first few turns. If not, it’s usually a case of the zombies swarm the truck while the heroes try to find weapons so they can hope to survive. An enjoyable scenario, if the heroes have really good luck it ends pretty fast, but usually it’s pretty close. Not in my favourite pile (if I include the GH scenarios) but usually one I’ll consider if I’ve recently played all my favourites.
“Burn ‘Em Out!”
Heroes must find explosive items to destroy 3 spawning pits.
One of the few I have only played once, although I did enjoy it, the heroes actually wanting to go to the zombie spawn pits is not a common sight. Again, not a favourite if I have the GH scenarios to pick from as well.
“Save the Townsfolk”
Heroes must find 4 townsfolk and survive until morning.
Don’t like this one too much, this is one of the others I’ve only played once, main reason for this is I was the zombie player, the heroes were obviously going to win from about halfway through, they were camped out in a building on one space with awesome weapons. It was almost impossible for me to beat them. Usually if there’s a big imbalance, it ends quite quickly, but this one had to be played till the turn meter reached zero.
“Defend the Manor House”
Heroes must defend the manor house from the zombies.
This is one of my favourite scenarios, the heroes usually start off outside the manor trying to find weapons before rushing back to defend it from all sides while zombies swarm to them.
In summary, I think “Defend the Manor House” is definitely the best of the 5 included in the base game, however, “Escape in the Truck” and “Burn ‘Em Out” are also very good. “Die Zombies, Die!” is only any good for beginners for learning the game. I didn’t like “Save the Townsfolk” too much but I think I’ll give it another go sometime.
Web Scenarios
The designer, Jason Hill, was awesome enough to publish two free web scenarios on the LNoE web site available here
"We've Got to Go Back!"
In this scenario, the heroes managed to escape but must now fight their way back in to find two bio canisters containing chemicals which can stop the zombie plague. This has a very unusual game setup where all 6 corner pieces are used. You can see the setup by opening the pdf file for this scenario.
I quite like this one, the board has an unusual setup and it's focused on getting in then getting out as fast as possible. However it's not quite so easy as it sounds as the markers with the numbers 1-6 on them are placed face down in random buildings on the board. Two dice are rolled at the start and those correspond to the markers they have to find. Say they roll a 2 and a 5, when a character finds the 2 or 5 marker, he finds one of the bio canisters. When they're found, the heroes have to return with them to the truck to escape. I like how very different this is to the other scenarios, both in how the board is set up and how the heroes win. We don't play this one a whole lot but it's great when we fancy a change.
"All Hallows Eve"
This one has a regular board setup, but like the previous scenario, the heroes have to find a certain numbered marker. This time however, each marker is placed with a townsfolk marker in random buildings. One of the townsfolk (determined by the die roll at the start) is the zombie master and has used the book of the dead to summon the zombies. The heroes must go around the board questioning the townsfolk while also trying not to get eaten by zombies. When they find the zombie master they must kill him and burn the book of the dead to end the zombie invasion.
This is another one I quite like to play when I fancy a change, although the base mechanic of searching locations for the objective is the same as the previous scenario, it does play completely differently.
You can read my review for the Growing Hunger expansion here
Last edited on 2008-10-23 10:35:58 CST (Total Number of Edits: 4)
Posted Wed Oct 22,2008 01:23 am
