Zombie 15' Review

Since George Romero shuffled them through a shopping mall in Dawn of the Dead, zombies have been the horror genre's most popular thematic scapegoats, standing in for everything from rampant consumerism to racial tensions to the grief process. Yet surprisingly few board games have played zombies as anything but mindless bad guys. Maybe that's what's so mysteriously appealing about Zombie 15', a colorful, pop-punk embrace of youthful rebellion.

In suburban Los Angeles, an unknown plague has turned all the grown-ups into mindless, flesh-hungry undead. Only a handful of teens armed with skateboards and hockey sticks can get to the bottom of the mystery and find a way to put an end to the ever-growing Horde, a stampede of walking corpses that hits like a natural disaster. It's Shaun of the Dead skewed for the smartphone generation, with a splash of Hot Topic rebelliousness. It gives off a very World Ends With You vibe, with neon pinks, greens and blues that pop in stark contrast to the monotonous grey of the post-adolescent horde, as if to say "life ends after high school."

The energy of the theme is matched by the game's frenetic, real-time cooperative gameplay. Descended from the cheesetastic VHS games of the '90s (such as Atmosfear), real-time games have beome surprisingly trendy in recent years. The trend is not at deckbuilding levels yet, but they've started popping up often enough that the novelty alone is no longer a selling point. It's now necessary to ask: what is the real-time mechanic actually doing here? Does it improve the game in any way, or is it only a sticker feature? Or, worse, is it a band-aid to hide the game's ugly lack of genuine tension?

Don't freak—Zombie 15' makes good use of its real-time nature. It employs a 15-minute soundtrack, similar to Escape and Space Alert, that acts as both a game timer and a monster spawner; every 60 seconds, a zombie growl will drown out the music, meaning a fresh delivery of undead have appeared in the current player's space.

Yeah, I said "current player." Despite being a real time game, Zombie 15' has players taking turns, each of which consists of up to 4 actions. At the end of the turn, the hero has to fend off any zombies remaining in his or her space; if you can't, you get overwhelmed and knocked to the ground with a bite. 3 bites knocks a hero unconscious for the rest of the scenario. (Nobody dies in Zombie 15', except the zombies themselves. These are kids we're talking about.)

This growl-triggered zombie spawn turns out to be the game's magic ingredient. Unless your internal clock is superhumanly accurate, you can never predict exactly when the next wave of zombies will arrive. It could be at the start of your turn, it could come when you have just 1 actions left, or it could even happen after you already fended off the existing zombies but before you called out "Your turn!" to the next player. Without this mechanic, there wouldn't even really be a game here, since you could simply avoid any situations that would leave you overwhelmed.

Due to the time pressure, Zombie 15' keeps its mechanics clean and simple. Weapons kill a set amount of zombies with each shot and have a separate (often larger) fend-off value. These numbers don't change, so without the zombie sneak attacks, you could just steer clear of crowded spaces until you had the firepower and actions to take care of them. The growls remove this predictability, literally delivering tiny little crises like clockwork, crises that often necessitate teamwork, coordination, and snap judgments, all the hallmarks of a good real-time co-op.

I said "little crises," and that's usually the case: a normal zombie spawn of 1, 2, 3 or 4 (decided by a zombie spawn deck) can cause complications if it catches you off-guard, but the real emergencies happen when you draw one of 8 Horde cards. Drawn by heat and light, the Horde gets ever closer whenever a player uses a firearm or other noisy weapon, represented in-game by dropping 1 or more zombies into the Horde box with each shot fired. Then, when a Horde card's drawn, the entire contents of the Horde box appear in the active player's space. It will take the cooperation of all heroes to clean up this messy, particularly if the unlucky victim was understocked on ammo when the Horde appeared; you can't move, search or take most other non-combat actions while you share a space with a zombie.

The list of available actions is short and to the point. You can attack, hopefully with a weapon, although in a pinch you can do some bare-knuckle boxing and take a hit for every zombie you kill. You can also use light items, which mostly consist of ammo and medkits. You can use an action to move to an adjacent tile (street to street) or between the street and buildings on a single tile. Within a building, you can search, the most nuanced and time-consuming of the common actions.

Searching comes in 3 varieties If your area contains a facedown search token, you can pick it up and add it to your inventory. These include scenario-specific items like keys or fuel or "item bags" that let you pick one-time-use goodies between scenarios in the 15-scenario campaign. You also have the option of either a "Quick Search" or "Careful Search," both involving a special deck of Search cards. A Quick Search means drawing the top 3 cards and keeping any you want; the rest are discarded in any order you choose. The problem with searching recklessly is that many of these houses are still occupied; about half the Search cards spawn zombies instead of providing useful items, so it's always best to search before you run out of ammo.

If you can't afford that risk, a Careful Search lets you pick a card from the discard pile...if anyone was thoughtful enough to leave a stash behind. Even this can go wrong under pressure, though, because every card in the discard pile above the card you take is removed from the game, along with used-up weapons and items. You may find yourself out of safe supplies just when you need them the most.

The scenarios are both a blessing and a curse. There's a lot of variety in gameplay mechanisms, such as clear-the-map missions, base defense, nighttime scenarios, and a full boss battle at the end. However, each of these scenarios has its own map built from the 35-ish two-sided street tiles. Since each scenario is over in exactly 15 minutes, the relative time spent setting up feels like an infinity.

Like several of its predecessors, Zombie 15' is really a 4-player game with concessions to 2- or 3-player groups, plus an optional add-on solo campaign. Despite this and its lurching setup time, this is a high-quality, if not groundbreaking, addition to the real-time co-op subgenre, delivering every drop of fun and excitement its colorful cover implies.