Zombie Nightmare Review
Luigi Saggase’s Zombie Nightmare is a free solitaire board game that pits Jeff against a growing horde of zombies as he tries to make his way across an infested graveyard.
The game is available as a downloadable PDF which you cut out and assemble into a nifty little solitaire time-killer. The art by Michele Saggase is simplistic and a little bland but perfectly functional and the board is square-tile based, about 11.5″x7″. Also included are cutouts for 12 zombies, 2 zombie dogs, a gate counter, a revolver counter and of course the Jeff counter. All you need to supply are a pair of six-sided dice.
The game works in three phases: You roll to see where a new zombie will spawn, then you move Jeff and then you move the zombies. The zombies spawn on one of 15 board tiles and move one space toward Jeff. Jeff moves three spaces and then each zombie moves two in the direction of Jeff. At Jeff’s disposal are a number of open graves which he can occasionally lure zombies to fall into, a few assorted obstacles that impede the zombie’s progress and his revolver which has exactly one shot. Other than that it’s up to foresight and a little luck to get Jeff across the 18×13 board to the gate and into safety.
The main twists to the basic gameplay come when the player rolls doubles, which the requires rolling on a separate table to determine various effects which can be anything from the arrival of a horde of new zombies to a surge of adrenaline that allows Jeff to move further for a couple of turns to the dreaded zombie dogs. Each game takes about five minutes to complete but the game does have a strong addictive quality that has you saying, “One more try” until an hour or more has disappeared.
There is a bit of a problem in relying on a small percentage of rolls to provide the majority of the intrigue in a game. During my playtest I went through at least three rounds where no doubles came up at all which led to some pretty dull passes. It’s not actually a bad game even when the special events don’t kick in because the random spawning locations of the zombies requires some careful consideration of your moves to avoid being surprised by an unfortunate roll, but the game really sparkles when those unexpected events pop up such as having your often game-saving revolver fail on the first roll or getting a well-timed adrenaline burst that saves an otherwise hopeless situation.
The biggest problems with the game aren’t due to the mechanics but the presentation: If you have a large-format printer I strongly recommend printing the game board on heavy stock paper at about 150% or larger. At the default 8.5″x11″ size the counters and tiles are very small and makes placement an unnecessary chore, not to mention the one-time hassle of small scissors cutting for the teensy, closely-spaced counters. I also found that tape was necessary to keep the counters manageable on the small board and some of the smaller counters like the gate and revolver are too small for a standard Scotch tape roll without some frustrating fiddling. The final (and perhaps biggest) complaint about the presentation is that the online rules are the only place the mandatory event table is located—it should definitely have been included on the game board template.
One other middling beef is that the game instructions don’t explicitly say anywhere (that I could see) the movement rate of the zombies. The included diagrams indicate it is two spaces and this makes the game feel balanced, but an explicit indication would have saved some confusion.
On the bright side as far as the presentation goes, this is the kind of game that begs for customization: Homebrew boards and counters or even more elaborate miniatures-based setups are certainly possible and in this case perhaps even preferable. I can also easily imagine an online, perhaps Flash-based variant of the same game.
It’s difficult to say how much staying power the game has. It’s certainly easy to store once you’ve assembled everything and with a printout of the instructions you can give yourself something more interesting to do than play card solitaire during some downtime, but after a few dozen plays some obvious strategies reveal themselves that makes losing more a matter of crummy die-rolling than anything else. Still, the game is free and very enjoyable for a time, plus it’s a solitaire game about zombies so you can hardly go wrong.
Recommended