Jane Austen’s Matchmaker with Zombies Review

“Oh Macey, have you heard about the Goodwins!”

“No? What’s happened?”

“Well it seems the Goodwins – you know the Goodwins don’t you?”

“Didn’t young Myrtle run off with one of their litter?”

“That’s right! Well, I was talking to Dr Price the other day… and apparently they’ve come down with a dreadful case of the Zombies!”

“Oh no!”

“Oh yes! I always said there was nothing good to come of the Goodwins. Another crumpet?”

So you read our extremely enthusiastic review of Jane Austen’s Matchmaker and immediately went out and bought a copy – wait. What do you mean “No”!? Ok, go read our review, right now, then come back here. Wait, even better! Go read our review, buy a copy, then come back here. Don’t worry, we’ll wait.

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You back? Great! Let’s talk about its expansion. How do you expand a game that contains every marriable character from the Jane Austen universe? You add Zombies! Why? Because of course you do…

What this actually adds is a whole second deck full of new, slightly gory, stuff, throwing a meaty spanner into the plans of England’s greatest matchmakers. It also includes some helpful cards like a ‘Discard Pile’ card, important to distinguish it from the forbiddingly named ‘Slaughter Pile’ this game will be generating, as well as the all-important ‘Cursed Player’ card! You see, one of your number has come down with a dreadful curse that is turning their ladies and gentlemen into terrible zombies. You can almost imagine the old dears gossiping over tea.

The Cursed Player will be drawing cards from the terrible deck whenever their turn comes around, or whenever a new happy marriage comes about (the zombies naturally being attracted to the ringing church bells!) applying the sinister effects as they do so. Once they’ve finished reading the card. Sometimes that takes a while.

Perhaps it will be a lovely gift! They must give it to another player, as a way of currying favour perhaps. On the other hand it could be a terrible (or occasionally positive…) event that effects all players and all too often sees everyone being attacked by the rampaging horde. Whenever a player is attacked by the deck, the characters killed are heaved on to the Slaughter Pile in line with traditional Victorian funerals. Finally a zombie card might appear, transforming one of the Cursed player’s characters into a zombie that sits atop the cursed card.

Why all this card positioning is important is that the Cursed player’s score is not his marriage pile, but the total virtue of all the dead characters in the Slaughter Pile, minus the total hand – horror! – value of any zombies on the Cursed card. S/he just wants to see the world burn! But without zombies shuffling around. Some happy middle zone would be ideal. Zombies can be killed, by using the gifts that are given out over the course of the game. While this helps the Cursed player, the others will want to do that as dead zombies are worth points to them at the end of the game.

Alternative routes to victory could be a great addition as the Curse can move between players during the game. No one wants the curse to begin with, but as the Slaughter Pile grows it becomes more and more appealing! If enough characters are killed (not unlikely!) the Slaughter Pile will be game winning. But. BUT! Players have no way influencing its movement! This is an utter disaster! 

Occasionally a random card will flop out of the expansion deck telling you to move the Curse (and its pile of zombies) to a new player, or a zombie card will come out and the Cursed player won’t have the right gender of victim to succumb to the transformation, and the Curse will move. That Cursed player then decides to whom the Curse will be passed. What were the designers thinking!? This ends up being the worst kind of King making I’ve ever seen! At the end of the game, with a big Slaughter Pile, this is literally choosing a player to win. There is no strategy, there is no control. This could have worked if the non-cursed players could do something to influence its movement, or if the deck moved in a predictable fashion so there was some hope of, by setting up the right number of marriages say, the Curse could move round to you for a victory. But there isn’t!

Interestingly, the expansion does have a few nice (and quite amusing) effects on the game. For one thing, many of the new cards are entertainingly tied to the players’ hands. So, a player can only use the Ming Vase to kill a zombie if they have a character with sufficient wealth. Only a gentleman can use the Woodman’s Axe. The Necronomicon is, quite rightly, the King James edition. These are nice little touches.

The fact that events and zombies can eat married (scoring) characters too takes some of the sting out of marrying a cad (a 0 VP gentleman), previously an emotionally scaring event, as you can happily shove them out to feed the zombie horde first. Likewise, decimation of the available characters means that all those, for want of a better word, mediocre ladies and gentlemen that never had the joy of a wedding day during the original game, suddenly become prime marriage material, proving that you can’t afford to be picky during the zombie apocalypse.

Sadly though, none of this makes up for what this expansion has done to the gameplay. It’s just a series of random draws occurrences that, unsurprisingly, merely randomise the outcome of the game. This is not fun for any halfway serious gamers, while the zombie theme is going to turn off all those players that love the base game for its Jane Austen theme. Having loved the base game so much I had such high hopes for its expansion. I hate to say it, but this zombie expansion sucks the brains out of a great base game.

 

Rating: Braaains-less

 

Our copy of Jane Austen’s Matchmaker with Zombies was sent to us for review by the publisher, Warm Acre games.