Escape: Zombie City

EvEvanstar4,6

Having recently expanded Escape, I hoped this game wouldn't hold up. Turns out I wasted my money on those Escape expansions. Escape Zombie city is a much better, much smoother version of escape. Like escape, players are rolling dice, and exploring the board. Black dice get locked, yellow dice unlock 2 black dice belonging to any player in your spot. Also like escape you have 15 min to win. Here are the important differences. Whenever a tile is revealed, you flip a card. The card might spawn zombies. zombies are killed by rolling the right combo of dice, but if they are ignored, some of the cards will move them. If a third zombie moves to the center tile, everyone loses, so there's an interesting tower defense thing going on. The player's goals are to run around collecting different items and bringing them back to center. These items can all be gotten by a single player, so unlike in escape, in this game, there's reasons to split up and then unite together again depending on the situation. The curse system is also seamlessly brought into the game through the flipping of cards, and the curses use very clear iconography. All in all I think this replaces Escape for me, even though my escape set is all beautiful and expanded. I also own Zombie 15, but even though both are 15 min long real time zombie games, the feel of them is very different. I don't think they actually overlap that much. ★ Art, Iconography and components functional ★ Clever or interesting mechanisms ★ Reasonably low downtime between turns with mildly AP players ★ Multiple plays stay interesting ★ Low or mitigatable luck elements ★☆☆☆☆ Raw enjoyment

AnAndystar7,2

This game does not get the rating it deserves on BGG. This is a simultaneous dice rolling survival game. The game mat/area is a random arrangement every game and you can choose the difficulty in your gameplay. Want to add more zombies? cool, want to punish players for talking or dropping dice while playing? you got it. Up to 4 people can play and gameplay always ends at 15 min because it is timed and dictated by an .mp3 file. This game has great replay-ability and definitely gets exciting towards the end. Can be stressful however to those who are looking for a more relaxed game night. Rules are easy to learn 10-15 to explain to greenhorns.

MCMitchell Cstar4,6

I'm not a huge fan of realtime games, even though I'm pretty quick. They stress me out too much and there's too much room for error. This was still pretty fun.