Zombie Tsunami Review

The tide of zombie games has receded from my part of the beach of late, leaving the sands splattered with the odd rotting limb and comically half bitten brain. In fact, the tide seems to have gone out so far I had almost been able to forget about them… Wait… That shadow on the horizon… Growing, getting closer…! It’s a Zombie Tsunami!

Players: 3-6
Time: 30 mins
Ages: 10+
Designer: Jeremie Torton, Vincent Vergonjeanne
Artist: Mateusz Komada
Publisher: Lucky Duck Games

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Zombie Tsunami, like my recent review of Plague Inc, is a board game that has grown (or shrunk?) from a mobile app for one player to a cardboard competition for many players, and comes from the same team that produced the very enjoyable Vikings Gone Wild last year. But will Zombie Tsunami make a splash? Let’s find out!

Please note this review is based on a Kickstarter prototype. The components will definitely improve between now and its release and I am already aware that the publishers have included expansion material into the base game that I didn’t get chance to play.

Much like the app, Zombie Tsunami is a dead sprint through the very badly made roads of a city full of tasty survivors to add to your horde. Naturally humanity will try and stop you but they’re little more than a nuisance and it’s the other players around the table that you really need to worry about, each with their own horde of zombies. Whoever comes out of the city with the most cute green zombie cubes will win.

The game is played over three escalating rounds, each featuring a number of little events dictated by flipping cards and placing them out on the central road board:

Everyone resolves these cards as they come out and generally everyone can act at once, keeping the game sprinting along at suitably 28 Days Later speeds. Occasional smaller rewards pop up between cards, like fresh zombie reserves, but fundamentally the game is resting on the quality of these card events…

A Zombie’s Dream Day Out

Jumping over holes and dodging traffic

The city authorities have done a simply terrible job of maintaining the roads around here. The pot holes are lethal! These types of cards see everyone rolling their zombie cubes and loosing those that land face side up, up to whatever limit is set on the card. This is fundamentally a catch up mechanic and may not sound like much but is actually quite fun. The fact that zombies (famously) only have one face means it feels unlikely you’ll lose many, upping the emotional payout when they do for someone. It’s amusing and very quick to resolve. Perfect light-hearted party game fodder for starters.

Pushing heavy things

Various cars, tanks, buses and planes have selfishly blocked up the road and need to be pushed out of the way. However, the number of zombies needed to shift such obstacles is typically larger than any one player will have collected, and so appears Zombie Tsunami’s best mechanic: groups. Players select one of their three coloured vote tokens to determine which group they are going to be in. All players in the same group add their total zombies together to see if they succeed. Failure, naturally comes at a cost. But you are totally allowed to manipulate this vote in whatever way you please, surreptitiously waving tokens at players you hope to ally with, betraying people horribly, trying to leave the leader on their own. It’s great fun and limited only by the imagination of your group.

Blowing shit up

There’s nothing a zombie likes more than a carefully placed explosive and you’ll have numerous opportunities to blow one another up. Doing so either kills an opponents zombie or all the human survivor tokens they may have collected, meaning, as a human, your chances of being eaten are actually pleasingly low… Assuming explosions are a preferable way to go? This system becomes something of an issue: it’s almost never worth taking a civilian when bombs are available as you can all but guarantee a following player will annihilate them anyway. Cards like the above become a frustrating non-choice. Anywhere the bomb/survivor mechanic comes up, it runs into this problem. Not good.

Dressing up

To try to alleviate the bomb issue you have hidden roles each round, in particular someone out there is probably the Quarterback and wants you to try and blow them up with a bomb (no, I don’t know what quarterbacks have to do with this either). But I’ve never seen this have much effect on the above problem. There’s only one Quarterback out there. To make matters worse, the Quarterback player has little in the way of influencing whether they get hit: most of the time players will target the current leader with their bombs.

At least the other roles allow the holder to play an active part in their completion, but I wouldn’t exactly call them especially interesting, and certainly not balanced. The Tsunami, Ninja and Big One are much easier to accomplish than the Quarterback or UFO. The Head and Tail are racing to identify the other, which is definitely the best pair of roles but, one, not everyone gets to play them, two, one card is randomly discarded each round, potentially disrupting the role, and three, it’s only used at higher player counts.

All in all, the hidden roles here just aren’t something that excite me, and I tend to like hidden information and social deduction. The reason for this is that there isn’t much scope or motivation for deducing what other players are. Instead they end up acting as personal objectives, without feeling like you’ve achieved that much when you complete them, because there is little acting against you. I feel Zombies should probably stick to the rotting clothing they tend to wear…

Shopping

If there’s one lesson we learnt from Dawn of the Dead its that you can’t keep a zombie away from a good shopping mall, and that’s as true in Zombie Tsunami as it was there. On the board there are two shopping spaces where players can spend coins that they also receive as they go past these spaces. If only the shop keepers realised there were coins littering the pavements just outside!

Anyway, the shop offers various little bonuses like stealing a zombie, protecting a zombie the next time they take damage, survivor chips that suffer the same problem as before as you can also buy bombs. There are also cards that let you interact with the secret role cards, like swap two or look at one, which is not something I honestly care to do. Unless you’re the head or tail there’s simply not that much to gain.

These regular shopping breaks also disrupt the neat flow of the main game’s card events for only a limited benefit. The choice of what to buy is generally uninspiring and since cards can only cost one or two coins, some are better than others for the same price, further reducing how much of a decision you need to make. Zombies might like shops, but I don’t.

Zombie Tsunami is intended to be a quick simple party game. Some elements fit perfectly. The rolling challenges are quick, simple, fun. The group forming is brilliant. I wish they had focused in on these elements that work so well. Instead we have more stuff that, in my opinion, gets in the way more than it adds to the experience.

Shopping actively snarls up the flow with a decision that is neither interesting nor quick. The hidden roles aren’t bad, a couple are quite good. But there’s not really much opportunity for deduction, social or otherwise. Then there are the bombs and survivors. Ostensibly these should have a fun and interesting interplay. A bit of a take-that explosion, some risky collecting. But they just don’t…

Then there are a couple of event cards that are either pointless filler (take a zombie or a coin!) or potential brilliance ruined. One of the best rolling events offers you a choice between losing at most 1 zombie or losing every zombie that rolls face up, but gaining two zombies. It’s a good decision! A good card! Then there’s a mechanically identical card where the reward is to look at another player’s role. Urgh. Why would I ever risk everything for something so pointless?

I can’t recommend Zombie Tsunami. It is 25% brilliant, 25% good, 25% indifferent and 25% bad. And in some ways, because of this, it feels like a game with too many components bolted on. It’s interesting seeing how they have constructed this from the app game, and you can certainly see the connections. But here’s the thing: even the best part of the game, that group selection system with all the above table deal making and sneakiness? It’s already a great game, that isn’t held back by anything else. It’s called Dead Last, and you should probably just buy that.

Rating: Dead in the Water

This review of Zombie Tsunami is based on a prototype version of the game sent to us by the publishers, Lucky Duck Games. 

If you’re interested in this Kickstarter, it will be running until June 1st. Link here.

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