Creating Drama and Tension in Board Games Using Luck
How Zombicide Induces Moments of High Drama and Tension Through Luck-based Outcomes
You, along with five other survivors, are tiptoeing your way through a ruined section of the city. You kick open a few doors, scavenge what weapons and supplies you can find, and take care of any zombies that lay in wait. Scouting ahead of the rest of your party, you pause to examine the door of an unexplored building.
You open the door with your trusty crowbar and step inside, only to come face-to-face with a pair of zombies. No problem, you think to yourself, as you pull out your sawed-off shotgun, aiming it at the chest of the zombie closest to you.
BANG!
You open your eyes to see that same zombie still ambling towards you. In a panic, you quickly reload your shotgun and aim at the torso of the same zombie.
BANG!
The zombie is intact. You hear the footsteps of your comrades outside, reacting to the sound of gunfire, but it’s too late: the zombies are right next to you and they kill you before the others can come to your aid.
Worst aim ever, am I right?
The above is not some overly cynical fan-fiction set in the zombie world, but actual scenarios that can happen inside the world of Zombicide, a co-operative survival board game set in the post-apocalyptic world of the zombie outbreak. Up to six players can embark on missions to find supplies, weapons, and complete objectives while doing their best to survive.
In Zombicide, players are given a set number of actions where they can move around, search inside of buildings for items, grab objective tiles, trigger doors and switches, and of course, face-off with zombies in combat.
Combat in Zombicide is much like combat in the world of pen-and-paper games: weapons are given statistics that determine range of attack, how many zombies can be attacked simultaneously, what damage each weapon does, and what number on the die constitutes a successful attack. With these stats, players are able to declare that they are entering combat, roll the appropriate number of dice, and figure out if they were successful in vanquishing their zombie opponents.
However, there are a few fiddly things about combat that need to be discussed:
- There is a “hit order” for ranged weapons. That is, firing into a crowd will hit the targets in a specific order, with other survivors being the first to get hit, followed by zombies, broken down by type.
- Leaving zones occupied by zombies cost extra actions. Meaning that if I was in the same zone as two other zombies, it would cost me two extra actions, in addition to one action for movement, to move to the next zone, making retreating relatively difficult.
- Some shotguns require an action between shots to reload. Effectively reducing your maximum number of attacks in half.
- Certain zombies require weapons with higher damage. Fatties, a type of zombie differentiated with their substantial girth, require weapons with 2 damage. Abominations require 3. In the original game, only one weapon was capable of destroying Abominations, now two weapons with the second season of Zombicide.
To put it simply: melee weapons are guaranteed to strike only zombies and not survivors, but retreating when sharing a zone with a zombie can be difficult, and certain zombies are harder to kill than others. That’s if you can successfully hit them at all.
Altogether, combat in Zombicide appears to be designed to specifically create moments of panic and tension, and it’s magnificent.
Originally, I wrote about the difficulty of playing games that utilize random number generators (like dice, in Zombicide) to determine the outcome of actions. However, after trying to come up with an alternative way to perform combat that feels more skill-based, it dawned on me that the high drama of missing rolls and the tension from impending doom is far more valuable than the ability to kill with certainty and skill.
There have been dozens of times when a friend has foolishly run into a huge pack of zombies with a chainsaw, and declared that they will defeat all of them. Three dice rolls later, exactly two zombies out of ten have been defeated. They can no longer retreat because they have used all of their actions on combat, never mind there being too many zombies sharing their zone, and other survivors cannot aid them with ranged weapons because they would shoot said survivor before hitting the zombies.
These are the moments I cherish.
What follows is usually a lengthy discussion about our choices — do we risk having more people wade into the fray and take care of the rest of the zombies, or do we cut our losses (they were stupid anyway) and make a break for it?
These discussions around strategy and tactics in Zombicide make the game really fun. We all come up with crazy ideas, that are usually borderline suicidal, when it comes to extracting our friends from the jaws of death. I haven’t experienced any games that feel similar to Zombicide, even after a full year of playing board games on a weekly basis.
I believe that one of the strong points behind the game design for Zombicide was allowing luck to determine the outcome of combat, regardless of the skill level of players.
This ensures that players are making smart choices before entering combat, but also penalizing the bravado of players who decide to run into packs of zombies because they are wielding a chainsaw. Given that, players and teams who decide to play conservatively and intelligently are still bound to run into terrible situations from time to time due to the luck involved with dice rolls, and thank goodness for that.
To summarize, Zombicide is an adventure game like no other. A single dice roll can make the difference between life and death, and the moments preceding these rolls are some of the most tense moments I have ever felt while playing board games. It is not without its shortcomings and oddities, but for a board game, it certainly felt more action-packed and thrilling than I previously thought possible for cardboard maps and plastic figurines.
Overall, you kind of feel good even after losing. You would have spent an hour or two bravely fighting against zombies with your friends, grimacing when bad rolls occur but feling elation after having destroyed a room full of zombies.
Definitely worth grabbing five friends and praying to the dice gods for success. Good luck.
