A Deckbuilding Look at Eaten by Zombies

Eaten by Zombies!Deckbuilders have been appearing in many different forms in the last year or two, and the small-press Eaten by Zombies! (2011) by Mayday Games is another that pushes the genre in unique and new directions. That’s not just because it features a well-themed zombie apocalypse, but also because Eaten by Zombies! uses cards and currencies in new ways.

The Game

Eaten by Zombies! is a game of out-surviving your opponents, so that you’re the last (wo)man standing in the zombie apocalypse.

On a standard turn you choose to either fight zombies or flee, depending on the amount of fight or flee ability you have in your hand. If you flee at all or if you fail at fighting, then you’re wounded by zombies, which removes (trashes) cards from your deck. If you succeed at your fighting or fleeing, then you get to use your fight/flee ability to also buy new cards for your deck.

When a player dies, they become a zombie and get to start playing cards to make the zombies better. Eventually the last human standing wins (unless one of a couple of sudden-death victory conditions occur).

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More Solutions to Naked Aggression

Viticulture GameboxAfter Jamey Stegmaier read my article on The Problem with Naked Aggression, he posted a comment to say that he’d been considering the same issue for his own game, Viticulture. He asked if I might be interested in a guest blog on the subject. I accepted, so the following is Jamey’s take on the topic. One of the things I particularly like about it is that Jamey talks more about why naked aggression can be bad, while I jumped straight to solutions. Also, when he looks at solutions, he looks toward the euro sort of scarcity conflict, which is a nice alternate take on the issue. –SA, 9/14/12


More Solutions to Naked Aggression

by Jamey Stegmaier

I stumbled upon Shannon’s blog entry, The Problem with Naked Aggression, a few weeks ago. Shannon touched upon some key elements of game design that I often think about. I asked Shannon if I could share those thoughts on his blog, and he graciously agreed.

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Dissecting Dominion, Part One: The Original Game

DominionBy now I’ve written a pretty extensive series of articles on deckbuilding games. In doing so I’ve always compared the games to Dominion — but I’ve never rally looked closely at the mechanics of Dominion on their own.

So this week — partially in honor of the 73rd Dominion supplement, Dark Ages — I’m going to consider Dominion as it was presented in the original release, talk about its mechanics, and also give my opinions on how central those mechanics are to the deckbuilding genre as a whole.

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