New Year's Eve of the Living Dead

I was browsing through my camera roll and found these shots that I took over New Year's Eve while my friends and I were playing Zombicide. One of my friends had received it as a Christmas present and we were all eager to get it on the table top since no one in our group had yet been given an opportunity to play it.

Zombicide is a cooperative board game which pits the players in the role of zombie apocalypse survivors against the masses of undead that want nothing more that to devour the survivors' brains. Each of the survivors has a unique skill and progression tree that allows them to develop new abilities during the course of the game by shooting or hacking up zombies for experience. The mechanics of the game are quickly grasped. Basically, you can move, search a room, or attack. Find weapons, hack up zombies and try to achieve the objective before you're overrun by zombies.

Here is our little party of survivors starting out. We're trying to search the town for food and supplies and we've drawn the attention of some walkers.

And here's one of the survivors (in orange) who has decided he would try to risk making his way to an objective marker on his own.

Around the corner a couple of survivors bit off more than they could chew when trying to investigate a building and one poor sap was mobbed by a herd while the other survivor made a break for it. Although the zombies move predictably, they begin to overwhelm in numbers, and the way that groups of zombies begin to herd together is very thematic. It totally captures the right feeling for a zombie survival game.

With dwindling numbers of survivors, and herding zombies, our little party was soon overrun in defeat.

We played a few more times over the next day with much better results for the players. Now I'm tempted to procure a copy of my own. And yes, a large motivator for me wanting a copy is to paint all of those glorious miniatures!