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).
Some Packaging Notes
I don’t usually write about the packaging of the deckbuilder games, as it not that sexy to talk about. However, Eaten by Zombies!‘s packaging is pretty close to perfect for a deck builder — which offers a few lessons that other games could learn. Here’s why:
The Base Game: The base game comes packed in a long card box, which is a big win in and of itself, because it means that the game is small and portable. Ascension is the only other game I’ve seen approach this ideal: they sell a long card box if you want to use that for Ascension transit, but by default Ascension comes packaged in a big box, like a lot of the field
Beyond that, Eaten by Zombies! takes a lesson from Thunderstone by including thick, tall dividers to separate the cards and foam to allow for extra space in the box without your cards flopping all over until you fill it. Eaten by Zombies!’s dividers even include comprehensive rules explanations for the cards, which seems like it might be more convenient than looking that sort of thing up in a rulebook as you must in Dominion.
The Expansion: In Cahoots, the Eaten by Zombies! expansion similarly comes in a card box, but one just the right size for the cards in that set. It also does one other thing that I love: it includes the starter cards and has been produced especially for two-player play.
Ascension similarly made their first expansion able to support 2 or 3 players. Some people have complained about the repeats of basic cards, but Eaten by Zombies! partially resolves that by having starting cards with new art (though sadly the standard zombies all have the same ‘ole art). Personally, I think it’s worth the repeats to get a separately playable game, but then I bought the similar Ascension expansion so that my wife and I could play it before I had anything else.
No Randomizer: I think that Eaten by Zombies! makes one major mistake with their packaging, and since I talked about the good packaging, I’ll talk about the bad too. There are no randomizers for the various decks. Instead, the rules suggest that you take one card from each deck and keep it separate to use as a randomizer. Perhaps it was a good idea in theory, but in practice it totally fails if you want to hand select decks (say, to play the standard assortments suggested in the rules), and it’s a bit of a pain if you’re playing with randomized decks as you have to combine the randomizer card at the start of play and separate it at the end.
The Rest of the Good
Here some more stuff that I think generally expands the deckbuilding genre in interesting directions:
Cards Are Life: In most deckbuilding games to date, cards in your deck act as currency, victory points, and/or provide special powers. Eaten by Zombies! does something new. Its cards also act as a measure of life for their player. When you’re wounded, you lose cards, and when your cards are gone, you’re eaten by zombies!! It’s a clever alternate way to look at the deck that’s at the heart of deckbuilding games.
A Hand Ecology: Most deckbuilder games pretty blindly have you discard and redraw at the end of each round of play because that’s what Dominion did. Some more recent games let you hold onto cards, to try and build up good combinations from turn to turn, but A Few Acres of Snow is the only game I’ve played that goes further than that, creating a full ecology where cards go into and out of your hand and/or into storage — all through player action.
Eaten by Zombies! has some similar methodologies (though not quite to the same extent). You can play cards to get them out of your hand, but only certain cards can be played on each round. You can also play zombies to get rid of them (as we’ll see momentarily). You never actually discard cards, so you have to think about how you’re going to play things from round to round, so that you can redraw, which is a pretty interesting variant of more standard deckbuilder play.
A Zombie Ecology: As I’ve already alluded to, the zombies integrate well into this. When you kill a zombie it goes into your discard pile, which means that it’ll later end up in your hand. There, it’s useless for normal play, but you can play your zombies to stalk your opponents on their turns — at which point the zombie leaves your hand, and possibly enters your opponent’s. I find this transfer of certain cards into and out of hands fascinating, and something that you don’t see in other deckbuilders.
On a slightly different topic, the need to get zombies out of your hand also force each player to attack his opponent — which can be a useful element in many aggressive games.
Good Card Complements: A few different games have included cards that are notably complementary. I’d place Thunderstone #1 on the list, since you need exactly one adventurer per weapon. Eaten by Zombies! doe something similar by including ammo that only works with weapons. However, it’s a lot more forgiving, as every ammo makes every weapon better and every weapon makes every ammo better. Personally, I think this simpler sort of complement works better in the very constrained deckbuilding evironment.
Two Currencies: Having multiple currencies is no longer a new thing in deckbuilders, as both Ascension and Penny Arcade have done it. However, Eaten by Zombies! does a few fresh things with the idea. First up, many cards show both currencies (fight of flight). More notably, the “currencies” have a different result in Eaten by Zombies! than elsewhere. In Ascension and Penny Arcade different currencies allow you to buy different things, while in Eaten by Zombies! the different currencies allow you to take different sorts of actions before buying the same ‘ole things.
Modal Play: As far back as Thunderstone — where you could either buy items in town or fight monsters in a dungeon — there’s been some modality in deckbuilders; you could take very different actions in different rounds. Eaten by Zombies!’s choice between fight and flight is somewhat similar. However, what I find much more interesting (and a much bigger expansion of the deckbuilder genre) is the fact that after a player gets killed he takes on the role of a zombie, and starts trying to aggressively harass the other players. This sort of total change-up in gameplay hasn’t really shown up in other deckbuilders (though I think the zombie role could be more fully fleshed out here).
The Rest of the Bad
As usual, I did have some complaints about the way Eaten by Zombies! works too.
Inherently Fragile: Some of the cool stuff that Eaten by Zombies! does makes it inherently fragile — possibly opening it to problems, depending on your style of play.
That starts out with the whole zombie ecology. If you never fight zombies, then those zombies never make it into your deck. As a result, you don’t play zombies on other players turns, and the zombie hordes never get tough enough.
The whole “cards = life” mechanic can also be fragile, depending on the composition of the decks that are put out. If it’s too easy to successfully fight, then players can stay ahead on their card count for a long time.
I personally had a game that went a couple of hours. When one of the four players finally died, we decided to call it. But other folks have told me it’s worked fine for them. I suspect among other things that you need to be really aggressive for the game to work best.
Somewhat Simplistic: Finally, I found the initial game a bit simplistic, with most (not all) of the cards just modifying the standard attributes: fight, flight, draw, or provide ammo. The In Cahoots expansion/standalone game provided a bit more variety and complexity.
Conclusion
Eaten by Zombies! provides a lot of new ideas to the deckbuilding field and is well-themed as well. I think it’ll be appreciated most by players who lean more to the American side of gaming. They’ll probably play the game more aggressively and will also appreciate the strong theming more.
