Zombicide | Rules, Expansion & Strategy

Hi welcome to want to played my name is rodney smith. In our series we take a game, we show you how it’s played and then over the following episodes. We actually play the game and we’re possible. We invite you to join us by helping us make gameplay decisions between the episodes. By doing this, we hope that you’ll be able to decide for yourself whether or not a game would be a good fit for you, your family or your gaming group. Now, this time we’re trying something a little bit different. This is the instructional episode. We will teach you how to play a game here, but then for the actual gameplay we’re going to do it in one crazy collaborative live episode over in our twitch TV account we’re gon na invite all of you to join us. I’M gon na be controlling one of the characters and you guys will get to control the rest. It hopefully will work and we hope that you’ll join us we’ll announce when that live episode is going to be in another, very short episode that will follow this. One will also mention on our Facebook and Twitter account so so watch it there. So what game are we playing we’re going to be playing the game zombicide? This is a cooperative game, so we’ll all be working together. We’Re be playing as survivors in the midst of a horrific zombie apocalypse and the game comes with a variety of different scenarios. You can play we’re going to pick one of the scenarios from the base game, but you can also get lots of free scenarios. They’Ve been released by the designers guillotine games. I think things like they’re releasing one every couple of weeks, if not more so, they’re also working on an expansion as well, but right now, let’s get you guys to the table, we’ll see how this game works. Here are four of the nine double-sided tiles that come with the game and these alejo to define the landscape that you’re going to be playing on to know which tiles to use. You look at the scenario that you’re going to play and it has a diagram that shows you which ones to pick and they’re easy to identify, because each tile has a unique letter and number code. That’S written right on it. Here you can see I’ve set the tiles as it shows on the diagram of the book. The diagram also indicates some other tokens that we’re going to have to add to the playing area. First up, we have the door tokens. These have two sides. This shows the locked and closed side, and over here we can see the doors been smashed. In most the times, we set up a scenario: you’re gon na be setting up with the doors locked and closed some scenarios, like the one we’re going to play, require these objective tokens and then over the course of the game. Zombies will come into these spawning point, and so here we have the board set up with all the tokens on it. We have our objective tokens here we have some doors to the buildings. Of course, our spawn points – north south, east and west. The game also has equipment, courage which you can identify because they have the reddish back from this deck you’re going to want to remove a couple of the cards. First of all, take out the evil, twins and mahse shotgun. These are only used in certain scenarios. Remove and set aside the two Molotov cards and then take a fire axe, a crowbar pistol and the three pans and just set them to the side. The rest of the equipment cards will then have to shuffle up and place them beside the playing area. Then we take the zombie card deck, these have a yellowish back. We give these a shuffle and we also place these besides the playing area as well, and the last cards we need to keep handy are the ones that say wounded on them, the zombie deck and the wounded currents. We’Ll talk about a little bit later. We also have the miniatures that represent the survivors and, depending on the number of players, you’ll be controlling at least one of them, but possibly more when you choose your survivor, you’ll want to collect the corresponding survivor identity card and then clip an experience counter to the Top of the card in the zero position, all of the information on the courage is the same for each survivor, except, of course, for their names and the pitcher and the unique abilities which you’ll find here just below the experience bar you’ll start the game with just The ability listed by the blue arrow and then over the course, the game, as you gain experience by ridding the world of zombies, you’ll, be able to unlock some of these other additional abilities. Allow you to customize your character. You then take the ax, crowbar and pistol cards that you set aside earlier and add a number of pans so that the total number of cards equal the number of characters that we’ll be playing in the game. Those item cards have been shuffled and one is dealt randomly to each of the characters to be their starting equipment. Believe me, you don’t want to get stuck with the pan. It’S not very useful, thankfully, for Phil his abilities, he gets to start with a pistol. Now that pistol does not come from those starting items; instead, you would go into the equipment deck and you would find additional pistol card and add it to his starting equipment. The equipment cards that you receive are placed in one of the five available locations here on your identity card. When you place cards in the front to positions, those ones are ready for action. Any cards you place in the back. Three positions are carried with you, but they’re not available for immediate use. The scenario will also tell you where to place all of the survivors which in this case is here, then the players may decide for themselves who will go first and that player takes the first player token. Now, very briefly, a game round works like this. The first player activates their survivor or survivors if they have more than one and each of their survivors gets three actions, then going clockwise around the table. Each other player does the same for their survivors. Once all of the survivors have acted. The first player passes his token to the player on the left. Then we go into the zombies turn, in which case all of the zombies will attack, then move and then new zombies will spawn out of these locations here, which will end the round. Speaking of zombies, the game does come with one or two you’ll notice. I’Ve painted some of the basis of these zombies, but this is for the gameplay. Video will be shooting later in your own copy of the game. All the miniatures will come unpainted like this fellow here, although the survivors as you’ve seen each come with their own unique color of plastic, which makes it easy to tell them apart. We’Ll have plenty of time to worry about these zombies later plenty of time, but for now, let’s get back to see how we use the survivors to understand the actions we’ll be able to take with a survivor, it’s good to understand how the game tiles are broken Down in the Street areas, the spaces or zones as they’re called the rules are broken up by pedestrian crossings like these here. So if you wanted to move two spaces, let’s say we had Phil here. He’D go one two, but keep in mind you’re not able to move diagonally. So Phil couldn’t go from this space to this space here now. If a door is open, let’s say this: tile was actually flipped over, so we could enter this building here. You can enter into a building through it once you’re inside of a building. The spaces are broken down by rooms and they have walls, divide the different rooms and then the rooms will usually have a space somewhere to indicate a door opening that you can pass through to move into the next space. Another consideration is line-of-sight, while you’re in the streets you can see any distance straightline is not interrupted by a building, so Wanda here can see all the way. This way, this way this way, and this way, however, like moving, you cannot see diagonally. So if Wanda was here, she would not be able to see into the space here while you’re in the street. You can only see one space into a building where the door is directly adjacent to the street space that you’re in so if Wanda was here, she’d be able to see into this space if this door was open, she’d be able to also see into this space, But not into this space, because again the distance you can see into a building is only one space. If the door happened to be in this location, Wanda would not be able to see into this building at all because again, she’s not adjacent to the space where the door is, and this viewing restriction of one space into a building is the same when you’re in The building itself, so, if Wanda was in this location, she’d be able to see into this room and into this room, not this room, because it’s diagonal and she wouldn’t be able to see into this Street space. Even though it’s a straight line, while you’re inside of a building, you can only see a distance of one space away, but now, let’s talk about the players turn on your turn. As we said, you will activate your survivors, one after the other, taking up to three actions with each before moving on to the next survivor and what are those actions? Well, first, you can move each time you move from one space to another. You were using up one action, so Doug here could use all three actions to move from this space to the space to the space here now there is one catch. If you are on a space with a zombie, then you must spend an additional action point per zombie to leave that space. So with this one extra zombie in his space Doug would have to spend two actions to move here. So if there were four zombies in the same space as a survivor, that survivor would need to spend five actions to leave that location which Doug doesn’t have in this case. So he’d be stuck here, not a desirable position to be in and he’s going to need to fade her away to that mess, but we’re going to leave him to those problems and we’re talking about another option over here. We’Re going to talk about searching. You can only search in a building space with no zombies, and you may only search once per turn. After taking a legal search action, you get to draw the top card off of the equipment deck and then you may add it to any equipment space that you have on your identity card. Even if that space already has an item. Just move that item to another available space anytime, you run out of room for new items. You may discard cards from your inventory, but keep in mind. They are discarded from play not tossed on the ground for someone else to pick up to help, you manage the items that you collect effectively as a single action. You’Re also able to reorganize your pack or, if you happen, to be in the same space as another survivor as a part of that action, you’re also able to trade with another player. So both the reorganizing and trading happens as a single action and you can do either or both. So in this case, if Ned wanted to trade with Wanda, he could give her this machete and then she’d be able to if she wanted to reorganize this pan into a backpack and then place the machete here, in her main hand, ready to use as a part Of that action, Wanda could have given Ned her pen in an exchange which he probably wouldn’t have wanted. Then again maybe he’d like to fry up some eggs. So if he’d wanted to, he could also turn that action reorganize his own items and maybe stick the crowbar in the backpack and half the pan a little bit suicidal, but Ned can be a little bit crazy. Sometimes the nice thing about this particular action is that, although it’s Ned who’s initiating the trade with Wanda, both of the players are able to reorganize the packs of the survivors involved in that trade. I should also mention there are a few items you will find that can be combined into a single item. For example, if you have a rifle and a scope, then you may, as a free action, combine these by placing the scope underneath of the rifle, and now this becomes a sniper rifle which you can also freely and immediately equip. Likewise, if you have a bottle and gasoline, you can discard both of them and replace them with a Molotov cocktail card. Another action is that you can open doors now door. Tokens like this are considered locked and can only be opened with an item or weapon capable of opening a lock. Now here are three different kinds of items, and they have distinct effects on locked doors items with no symbol in this area of the card are incapable of opening doors. If you see this door symbol located here or in the curd, that means that the item can be used to open a door. You just declare that you want to open the door for your action. You have to make sure your adjacent to the door and then you’re able to flip the door token over to show that the door has been bashed in and that door is now permanently open and then on future actions you can spend them to move inside of The building now you’ve probably noticed the symbols here are slightly different. One has a blue square and one has a yellow triangle. The yellow triangle means that when you try to open a door, it’s going to create noise, which makes sense, imagine smashing a door with an axe. It’S going to create noise and you’re in place a matching noise token in the location where you smash the door. The crowbar, however, with the blue square means it creates no noise when you use it to open a door, so you would not have to place a noise token there. How noise affects gameplay will come up during the zombies turn, but speaking of noise as an action you can choose to make noise. You just place a noise token for each action you spent jumping around and acting like a total fool in the middle of a zombie apocalypse. You can also spend an action to activate or collect an objective. Some scenarios like this one have objectives that you need to collect and doing so just requires that you’re in the same space as that objective and then spend an action to collect it. Getting in and out of cars also takes an action, but we aren’t going to be using cars in this scenario, so we won’t cover those rules in this video. But finally, we have your two combat actions: fighting hand-to-hand and shooting ranged weapons. Let’S start with hand-to-hand combat, mainly attacks must be made against zombies in the same space as you with a ready item that can be used to attack. For example, here Doug has a pan and a machete, but even if you’re holding more than one item, you may only use a single item when you make your attack, so Doug would probably pick the machete over the pan because it’s a better weapon. However, if he had two items equipped that were the same and they had the matching duel weapons symbol on them here, that means you may attack with both weapons in a single attack action like opening doors, you have to see if your items are able to attack Zombies, so if there is a symbol located in this position of the card, it means that they can be used to attack zombies and like before. If they have the Blue Square symbol like the machete, does they will not produce noise when you attack with them? However, this chainsaw no surprise does create noise. When you attack a monster in melee combat. There are some other details on the cards as well. First, we have the range shown here for melee weapons. You need to see a zero. Then you can see how many dice you roll for the attack as well as what number you need to roll equal to or higher in order to successfully hit the zombie and finally, if the damage level of the weapon matches the damaged level of the zombie. When you hit it, you will have successfully killed that zombie to understand these different damage levels. We first have to look at the four kinds of zombies that come in the game. We have the walkers which have this sort of Chamblee kind of pose to them and then there’s the fatties which are fat. Then there’s the runners which have a rather dynamic running, pose to them and then finally, the Big Daddy of fear and destruction himself. The abomination, when attacking a zombie, if your weapon does not match or exceed the damage level required for that kind of zombie, then your weapon does nothing to them, even if you hit them walkers and runners require at least a level one damage weapon. So both the pan and the machete would be able to kill either of those kind of miniatures. Fatties, however, require a level two, so the pan would do nothing to the FATA you could swing and hit that pan on the fatty all day long. It would do nothing to him, but a machete as soon as it rolls as soon as you roll a four or higher on your die. It will in fact get rid of the fatty abominations. They’Ll require a level three damage weapon and, as you can see here, neither these weapons have a level three damage, so they will not be able to take care of the abomination you’re going to find a better weapon. You can also use an action to attack with a ranged weapon. These weapons will often let you attack a space that is outside of your own space, but again always in a straight line and never diagonally. This rifle, for example, can target a zombie either one two or three spaces away, but not within its own space, because you’ll notice there’s no zero on that particular card. The shotgun can target both within your own space and one space away. Again. This tells you how many dice to roll what’s required to hit and the damage level of that weapon. So the rifle could take care of both a runner or a regular Walker zombie, whereas the shotgun to take care of both of them as well as a fatty. Still, though, no answer amongst these for that abomination, when using an attack action with a ranged weapon, you have to decide which square you’re targeting. So let’s say that Josh was using the rifle here and he wanted to target this space, which is within the range of the rifle. If there are other survivors or zombies between you and the space you’re targeting these will not block your line of sight. So josh is able to target these zombies without penalty. However, there are some risks when attacking with a ranged weapon when you attack with a melee weapon like Amy’s doing here, she gets to pick what she wants to target in the space that she’s in she could pick this runner or she could target the Walker. However, if Josh wants to fire a ranged weapon into a space, let’s say he was firing into this space. Here there is an order in which you must target things. First, any survivors in the space you’re, targeting like poor Doug here, are going to get hit by any attacks that you roll. If Doug survives the first hit, then the second hit will also target Doug. If Doug was no longer in the space, then, when attacking with a ranged weapon, the player is able to target walkers next. If there are no walkers in the space, then any ranged attacks will first target fatties or abominations. Then you can target runners so runners, because they move so quickly will always be the last thing. You’Re able to target in a space so well ranged weapons. Give you the benefit of being able to attack from a safe distance, melee weapons. Allow you to go in and target the specific zombies that you consider the bigger threat. The exception to this is, if you have the sniper rifle remember: that’s when you combine a scope and a rifle together. In that case, the special ability of the sniper rifle is that you can shoot with it as a ranged, weapon and yet target who you want to take out in the space. So this means now Josh could attack and take out the runner first if he successfully lands a hit. The other item worth noting is the Molotov. This is the only weapon in the game that will take out an abomination, so here’s poor Amy in this location, if Doug was fortunate enough to have the Molotov he could throw it into this space. It has a range of either zero, so we could target his own space or one meaning keep tired of space one space away. You don’t have to roll any dice, it’s an automatic hit and it removes all the models in that area, which means I’ve dug through it into here. Well, Amy would be going to in that situation. Amy would probably have preferred that Doug had taken the other action available in the game, and that is to do nothing. After all, the players have taken their turn. It is, then, the zombies turn, but before we get to that, let’s talk about experience and leveling up whenever you defeat a zombie which hopefully will be often you get to remove it from the board and collect a certain number of experience points you collect one point For walkers runners and fatties, and you collect five experience points for defeating an abomination. When you collect those points, you then move the experience marker here on the top of your character card to indicate the points you’ve collected when the experience that you’ve collected causes your marker to move from one colored zone into the next you’re, going to gain new additional Abilities once you move into the yellow zone, you’ll collect the ability here by the yellow arrow. Once you move into the orange zone, you’re going to make a choice between these two available abilities and then, if you make it up to the forty-third level here, you’re in the red zone, you’ll get to pick one of these three red abilities. The game comes with little markers to help you identify which of the abilities you’ve chosen. The trick is this: bar here is actually the danger bar and it tracks the kind of zombie attention you are creating for your party of survivors. If you’re on a wild tear through town, fighting zombies, they’re going to notice and more zombies will come, which you’ll learn about now, because we’re going to discuss the zombie turn so, as we said, after all, the survivors have taken their turn. The zombies take their turn, which starts with any zombie in the same space as a survivor like this one here, which is in the same space as dug snatching, if possible, a piece of equipment from that survivor. So this zombie would take the shotgun that Doug was holding because it’s the only item he has. If he had more than one item he could picked, which item was going to be removed and then that item is replaced with a wound curve and it goes into the same position where that item had been on his card. If Doug had not had an item to snatch, he would still take a wound card. Wounds are bad for two reasons. You can move them around in your inventory during a reorganization action, they can never actually be removed. So you’ll always have one less space to store things, but, more importantly, if you have to wound Kurds, your survivor is eliminated. You are removed from the board along with all of your items. If there is more than one survivor in the space, then the players decide who would get any wounds or if there are multiple wounds you can split them up between the survivors. Now an important thing to understand is that when zombies attack, they attack as a group. So again, let’s put Doug alone here, keeping in mind, he’s already taken one wound from one of these zombies. Let’S say this: one now is going to attack as well. He would then take his second wound, and that means he’s now been eliminated from the game. These other two zombies are considered to be in a feeding frenzy right now and so they’ll be attacking Doug. For this turn, even though only require two of the zombies in order to finish him off, unless, of course, there had been another survivor in this space, in which case these other two zombies would have taken care of that survivor as well. The important thing to understand is that zombies involved in the attack portion of the zombie turn will not be doing anything during the next phase, which is the movement phase for zombies. So any zombies, not chowing down, will move and they will move one space towards survivors. They can see – and this is where noise becomes important, because if they can see more than one group of survivors, they will go towards the noisiest group, which may not always be the closest to help illustrate this. Let me just rearrange the board a bit when determining how noisy a space is count. One noise point for every survivor in a space, so survivors always count as creating some form of noise as well. One additional noise point for every noise counter placed in that space. From smashing doors, shooting guns or whatever else so in this situation, amy counts as a noise point, along with two other noise markers, so a total of 3 noise in this space. And then we have three survivors here and one noise token for a total of four. So these zombies, although they’re closer to Amy, are drawn to the noise that’s being made by these survivors over here. So during their movement, that’s the direction! They’Ll move! If another survivor had been in the space with Amy so that there was an equal amount of noise in both of the locations, then Zombies would split up. Meaning two would have moved this direction, and the remaining two would have moved towards this group of survivors here. When splitting up zombies remember to split them by groups, so if there had been two runners in this space as well, then one of the runners would have gone this way and one would have gone this way. Occasionally, though, you’ll have an uneven number of a zombie group, let’s say there had been a fifth Walker zombie located in this space here when they were required to move. So it’s not a way for us to split this zombie in half or is there the rules? Actually say that when you have to split a group and there’s not an even amount – add another zombie to that space so that you can create an even number of zombies to split up. Maybe the survivors were so distracted. They didn’t see that additional zombie at first one nice thing, though, is that abominations never split. You can only ever have one of those on the board at a time, so the players we get to decide in which direction the abomination is going to go. Now we’ve had some fun moving and splitting up zombies, but sometimes things are much simpler. This group of zombies here at the back can only see one group of survivors, so that’s the direction they’re going to move. Sometimes, though, a group of zombies can’t see any survivors. These ones here can only see down the street this way and this way and there’s no survivors there, but they can still hear things so they will move to wherever the most noise is being made. In this case, the noise is in this direction, so they would have to move this way. Not this way, so they’ll go there and as before. If there was more than one location with the highest amount of noise in opposing directions, then these zombies would have split up so that half of them could go in one direction and then half in the other, no matter how zombies travel, though they’re always going to Take the shortest possible route to their destination. Runner zombies are a bit of the exception to the rules. I just gave you on how zombies act normally, if a zombie has attacked during its turn, it will not move likewise. If there was nothing for it to attack, it will instead move runners on B’s, however, will attack if they’re able to and if not, then they will move, but whether they attack or move after they’ve completed that first action. They then get to take either another attack action or a move action. Whichever applies here. We have Doug he’s perfectly healthy. He has no wounds. This runner on its turn. First thing is going to do, is attack, so Doug is going to take one mooned card. We’Re going to add that to his identity card now the zombie gets to take another action because there’s a survivor in it space it will attack again, and that means poor old Doug has been killed if Doug had started the turn or the zombie round. With one wound already on him, then, when this zombie activates he would have done a wound to Doug removing him from the board, and this zombie would get to act again. Now, there’s nothing here to attack, so it then gets to do a move action. To put it over in the space with Josh, let’s instead say that the zombie phase has started like this, so this runner here for its first action cannot attack. So, instead it will move for its first action, and now it gets to repeat actions again because it can attack. Then its second action will be to attack Josh in the event that there have been no survivor here, then this runner zombie for its first action would have moved and then because there’s nothing there to attack for its second action. It would then move again into the space with both Phil and Amy keeping in mind. You still have to follow the rules for how zombies behave based on how much noise is in the area and what they can see. After all, the zombies have attacked and moved. It’S now time for new zombies to enter the board. The scenario will show you, the various spawn locations which are represented by these tokens. We’Ve set up around the outside edge of the board when spawning always pick one spot to be your starting spawn point and then draw one card from the zombie deck for each space, resolving them in order one. At a time I like to start from where I perceive the top of the map to be so we’re going to pick this location here and draw a card for it. Let’S take a look and see what this card means. Once you draw the card you check to see who, in the party has an experienced tractor in the highest-level color of the danger bar so far, if everyone is in the blue section, then I would look at the blue section of the zombie card and place that Number of zombies of that type into the spawning space that we had chosen. The silhouettes of the zombies tell you whether it’s a walker, fatty runner or abomination. The abomination silhouette is very similar to the fatty, except it has a big white cross in the center of them. As soon as even one of the survivors hits. The next highest level in the danger bar like Doug, is done here going into the yellow area. You will then always look to that color when you responding zombies to the different spawning locations as soon as at least one survivor moves into the orange section, you will then look to the orange section of the zombie cards to see what spawns. So, in this case, we’ll be spawning two runners, a lot worse than the one Walker, if we’d all stayed within the blue zone, of course, because we’re going to be fighting zombies constantly it’s very difficult to stay in those lower levels for very long. So once you’ve picked the right level to read off the zombie courage, you then spawned those zombies into the space with a spawning point. We would then move to the next spawning location for the new carrot and add zombies there, based on what that card said, and we continue all the way along until we finished all the spawning points now, I hadn’t wanted to wait until I’d shown you how these Zombie cards worked before I explained spawning zombies inside of buildings, which will happen during the player’s turn as soon as they smash open a door for the first time. Once you do that similar to spawning points, you will then pick a room in the building and you will draw a card and place zombies in that room. Then you’ll go to the next room point to it flip over a new current and then spawn zombies into that room and continue to do that until you’ve filled all of the rooms inside of the building, but keep in mind. You only have to do that once the first time you open any door from outside of that specific building Fatty’s actually follow a special spawning rule when they come out on to the table, let’s say a fatty spawned here they actually bring two additional regular walkers with Them whenever they spawn on to the board, remember before I said there can only ever be one abomination on the table at a time. So if you were forced to spawn a second one instead you would place a fatty and two walkers. Now, while the game comes with a lot of miniatures, should you ever have to place a type of zombie when you are currently all out of them to place because they’re already on the board? Instead, all zombies of that type will get an extra activation. That turn, that means they’ll be able to attack and potentially move again now. This is generally a good indication that things have taken a serious turn for the worst. There are two other special kinds of cards in the zombie deck. The extra activation card like this one here, which means you do not spawn any new zombies to that location, but instead, as we’ve just discussed, you give an extra activation to all the zombies of the type shell card. This case, it says all walkers take one extra turn, and this is true of both the yellow, orange and red levels on this card and the blue level, though nothing happens, which is great. There is also this manhole cover card here which functions a little differently as well, because, instead of spawning zombies to the spawning point on the board, instead you’ll be looking for manhole covers on the map. Here you can see an example of a manhole cover here and one here as well. If there is a survivor in the same space as a manhole cover, then you will spawn a number and type of zombies, as indicated on the zombie card to that location. So this spot, because as a survivor, would spawn a zombie whereas this location, because there’s no survivors, wouldn’t once you finish spawning all required zombies. That round is over so you’ll be able to remove all the noise tokens placed during that round and then the first player token will pass from the first player to the player on that players left and then that player will start the next round and there you Have it you made to the end of another watch, it played rules. Explanation it’s a lot to take in. If there’s things you didn’t understand, don’t worry about it. Just ask me your questions in the YouTube comments below I’m only too happy to help you out there and we’re going to do a live play through this game. So anything that doesn’t make sense here, hopefully we’ll all come together when you watch the game played, and hopefully you won’t just watch we’d love to have you join us actually for that as well. Now things are a little busy around here, so I can’t pin down at this point in time exactly when that live. Playthrough is going to be, and you may be watching this video long after the live episode is over, but don’t worry we’re going to have that recorded and you’ll be able to watch it anytime. You want, but those of you wanting to join us live I’m going to announce it, as I said earlier on, our Facebook and Twitter accounts, and you can also look for a quick, very short, video, that I’ll post here on a YouTube channel case. You don’t follow us in those other locations and hopefully you’ll be able to join us, but until next time, thanks for watching