Designed by: Martin Wallace
In Hit Z Road (also available as Route 666) you are trying to make it from one side of the USA to the other, avoiding the post-apocalyptic zombies milling around on the way. If you make it, you have a chance of winning. But you might not make it…
Every player starts with 5 survivors, and 4 tokens each of bullets, gas, and adrenaline. As well as helping you survive your journey, they double up as bidding tokens at the start of each round: a certain number of cards are turned over in pairs which represent the routes you can take. Players bid for choice of route, the catch being the higher you bid, the less resources you have to survive.
Once everyone has passed on the bid, highest bidder chooses their route and negotiates the cards one at a time.
Each card has (at most) three elements to it. First you scavenge, picking up more resources. Then you may have to deal with an event, that could be good or bad. Finally, you may have to fight zombies! This is a battle of two stages: you can use bullet tokens to fire on them from afar, then when they get close you can use adrenaline tokens to maximise your attack, or save a survivor from death. Or, you can use gas to avoid the fight altogether! But if the card has any victory points on it, as many do, you don’t get them by running away. You ran away!
The cards and zombies get increasingly harsh as the journey continues, but you only need to get one survivor to the end to be in with a shout of winning. If you’re the only one who made it – you won! If more than one player did, victory points on cards are compared and bonus points awarded for players with the most survivors and resources. Most points: wins!
Plenty - but mostly from the game rather than the other players. However: you can get stiffed in the bidding!
Very low. Unless you have someone who can't decide what to bid... apart from that element, there's nothing to slow you down here.
Again it's just the bidding that give pause for thought. But it's absolutely not a chess-like game of strategy.
It depends how much you like fleeing zombies, but the cards come out randomly and, well, so does luck.
1-4
Players
12+
Years
30-60
Mins
Sam says
Maybe not for everyone, but the right group will have a ball with this. It's one of the few games where player elimination feels entirely appropriate! And for us, the theme had us rooting for each other to survive the zombie attacks, despite the fact we were in competition. It generated a lot of laughs, in fact, but be aware though the artwork is pretty morbid, so definitely not one for young children.