Eaten by Zombies!
# Players: 2-4 (best with 4)
Suggested Age: 13+ (if your child can read and isn’t bothered by brain-seeking zombies go for it)
Playing Time: 20-40 minutes
MSRP: $25.95
Our Price: $20.76
Thanks go to Todd for demoing this game to Tillman, Zach and me at our board game night last night. The Zombie theme is perfectly executed. Each turn you venture out of your house looking for bigger and better swag. Zombies are lurking everywhere so it’s only natural that each turn you encounter at least one. If you successfully fight or flee from it you can scavenge your neighbor’s houses for swag – guns, ammo boxes, sandwiches, etc. The last player standing is the winner…unless the Zombies win by driving someone insane. That’s the best feature of this game – even if you lose as a living player you may win as a Zombie. You’re never out of the game.
Eaten By Zombies! is another in a long string of deckbuilding games. Like Dominion it has many different decks – called swag here – to play with making this a very variable game depending on which combination of swag items the players select. Each piece of swag has one or more of 4 symbol types on it meaning it will add to your fight or flight score, add extra swag points, or allow you to draw cards. The symbols are very clear and easy to remember making reading the cards almost unnecessary.
Those Zombies wandering around that I mentioned earlier come in 4 types each with varying degrees of swiftness and toughness. (The toughest is a little girl – go figure.) Your turn starts with you flipping a new zombie over. Sometimes it’s just one. Sometimes your “friends” might add to the zombie horde you have to deal with. Bastards. You can run from zombies or fight them. Fleeing always results in you dropping items. This is good if you want to lose low level cards from your deck or get lucky and drop Zombies from it. Successful fights result in a Zombie going into your deck. This is only good while you can screw your buddies. If you’re caught with 6 zombies in hand you go insane. Successful fights and escapes result in you picking up new swag. What I found frustrating – but great – is that no matter how good a hand you just played you are limited to 6 cards in hand. Even if you could pick up 20 pts worth of swag, if you have one spot open in your hand you can only take a single card. Ugh!!! But it does balance the game nicely. As much as this frustrated me I still liked it.
You die when you have no more items in your deck – you’ve been overrun by Zombies. Once you start losing a lot of items this can happen quickly. When you die you become a Zombie. Flip your player card over and start playing by Zombie rules. These are evil. Make it so live players can’t play Zombies, thus filling their limited hand with Zombies and driving them insane. Or make it so they have to drop two items at the end of their every turn – also frustrating. There are 6 evil ways Zombies make the living players lives harder. This means once one player dies it quickly comes to who can outlast the rest.
Another selling point: the box for this game looks like an ammo box and has plenty of room for expansions. They provided tall dividers for each swag type making the game easy to set up and easy to put away. Since each swag type only has 5 cards I expect the expansions to come quickly and cheaply. We’ll see.
Eaten by Zombies!
Vampire Counts
