Zombicide: Black Plague is the successor to the popular Zombicide games, now set in a medieval/fantasy world. The game is basically an RPG-light dungeon crawl. You gain experience and level up within a game session; your skills and abilities don't carry over into subsequent quests. You and your friends take 6 or more characters I went withon your adventure, divvying them up among the players, and tackle a horde of zombies. Each quest provides you with a goal to accomplish that could involve getting to a certain location, finding items, defeating a certain enemy, or leveling up to a specific level. Along the way you will find new weapons and armor to assist you as you kill wave after wave of zombies. This is a game where you feel strong! You don't waste a whole turn trying to kill one enemy. No, each turn you are trying to figure out just how many zombies you can take out. Four? Five? Ten? Twenty? My best this last playthrough was one character taking out around twenty, but my best was thirty-seven (there was an enormous dragon fire involved).
After your characters activate, a deck of cards controls the spawning of new zombies and as your characters level up the difficulty of the zombies increases as well. Some cards allow the zombies to move an extra space and that is where you run into danger - when a lone survivor gets swarmed by twelve walkers and gets his brains ate.
So, that's what it is. Do I like it?
TOTAL PLAYS: 20 solo, 5 cooperative
COMPONENTS
I'll be honest, the art in this game (and this series) is my least favourite part. One of the main reasons why I have this game and not the original Zombicide or Massive Darkness (a new game that has the same mechanics but is a fantasy RPG with no zombies) is because those games have over-sexualized characters and somehow this one managed not to. Due to struggles in my past, I avoid games with scantily clad women at all costs. There are a few occasions where the game remains but a sticker or sharpie may show up on a few cards or artwork. Luckily for me, the female characters in this game and the Wulfsburg expansion all have clothes on! What, a female in a fantasy game can be strong AND where clothes? Who knew!
Anyway, even though I'm happy about that, I'm not a big fan of the blood and gore in this game. If there was an identical game in terms of mechanics but without the gore, I'd choose that one. I have little kids in my house and I'm nervous about them seeing that sitting on my shelf.
That being said, the components are great. The miniatures are amazing quality - maybe not quite as good as Gears of War, but still beautiful. All of the boards, cards, and chits are high quality as well, with the exception of my game box that split open within the first day of playing the game. They did send a replacement, but it took some time (Cool Mini or Not seems to have a reputation of taking a while to get back to you and this proved true for me). The plastic character dashboards that house your equipment, health, and levels are ingenious. 4/5
RULES
This is a big game with a lot of moving pieces and so there are a lot of rules. I actually find them to be pretty streamlined and very easy to learn. It doesn't take much to learn to play the game or teach it to someone else. The rulebook is laid out quite nicely and I don't recally having any major difficulties finding things. During my last playthrough I was trying to find out some information on abomination damage - I know it can't be blocked, but is it only one point of damage? Or does it instantly kill someone? I couldn't find it. But, that's been rare. 5/5
GAMEPLAY
My biggest complaint about this game is that I find it a little bit too easy. There are very few moments of real tension during the game where you don't think you're going to survive. Usually when a character dies, it's because of a really bad spawn card draw where one character gets surprisingly mauled. This is satisfying in an upsetting way, but is too rare. If you loot really well and don't take any big risks, this is unlikely to happen and you will probably win with all of your characters alive. That being said, if it's too easy for you as well, make it more difficult. Add more spawn points or something. That's what I did in this last game.
Now that I've spent a paragraph on the one thing that I don't like, here are the many I do. The leveling up system is really good and you have some big choices about whether you're going to make a character focus more on attack (melee, magic, or ranged), defense, or movement. Picking up and equipping loot does the same thing - you can greatly change how your character plays based on the items you equip to them. Combat is simple and involves a lot of dice chucking. You better upgrade your equipment so that you can mitigate some of those awful dice rolls! 4/5
REPLAYABILITY
The base game comes with ten quests you can play (and my Wulfsburg expansion adds another ten!). There are six (plus four!) characters to use. There is an army of zombies complete with walkers, runners, fatties, a necromancer, and an abomination (plus the wolfbomination and zombie wolfz!). Theses zombies are spawned from a giant deck of cards that is different every time. There is a giant stack of items that you can collect that will be in a different order each time as well. Yes, there is a lot of replayability, even in just the base game. 5/5
FUN
Yes. 9/10
Oh, did you want more than that? There is no denying how much fun it is to fire a chaos longbow into a crowd of ten zombies and explode them all or to step into that same crowd of zombies and cut them all down a flaming great sword. This game is FUN.
TOTAL SCORE: 27/30
There are a few things that I would change about this game, mostly the artwork and difficulty level, but it is just such a fun game, solo or cooperative. It just feels good to take out a host of bad guys, have them all respawn, and then try to do it all over again.
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