Designed by: Annick Lobet
Zombie Kidz Evolution is a super-simple puzzle game where the players work co-operatively to save the school – and themselves – from hordes of zombies at the gates.
Each player chooses a character – skate punk, bike dude, nerf gun boy or light sabre girl – and places them in the red room at the centre of the school. A zombie is placed inside the school grounds by each of the four gates, and the remaining zombies are placed in a row beside the board. Turns are easy: you roll a die and add a zombie from the row to the room rolled (each room is a distinct colour). Then you can optionally move your character one space (each room is a space; each gate area is a space), as long as there’s a connecting doorway. If you end your turn in a room with one or two zombies in, you eliminate them: remove them from the board and place them in the row.
Rules-wise, that’s pretty much it, except for padlocking. To win the game, players need to padlock all four gates. Padlocking happens automatically, but the catch is for a gate to get padlocked two players need to be present. And gathering two players together is a tactical disadvantage as meanwhile zombies will be gathering elsewhere…
If a room ever receives a third zombie you can’t enter – and therefore can’t eliminate. If you have to add a zombie and there are none left, you lose!
The game’s evolution suffix is due to the fact that as well as presenting a ten-minute puzzle, it can also be played legacy style: whether you win or lose, a sticker is added to the timeline on the back of the rulebook. When you’ve played a certain number of games, there’s an envelope to open which evolves the ruleset in some minor way: special powers distinct to particular players, further disadvantages from the zombie AI, and so on: so there’s an ongoing escalation of what the game actually does, introduced in increments.
None from the other players; it's all about working together to 'defeat' the game itself
Everyone's involved on all turns, as you'll need to co-ordinate plans. Even allowing for that, your turns come around very fast.
A light tingle
Zombie Kidz' basic puzzle is kind of repetitive, with variety supplied only by the beat-by-beat dice rolls. The envelopes being ripped open every few short games keep things fresh, however.
2-4
Players
6+
Years
5-15
Mins
Sam says
For my personal tastes, there's a lot of things Zombie Kidz doesn't do. For all the emergent powers of the envelopes, it never feels like a story you're immersed in, and for a dicc-chucking game about kids defeating zombies in a school, it's a little short on laughs: decisions can often feel quite obvious and it's not scoring high on the puzzle stakes as a result: so it ends up slightly unsatisfying as a puzzle, but slightly underwhelming as a fun narrative. All that said, however, I think Zombie Kidz lands exactly where it intends to: short and sweet, with just enough tactical engagement to ensure the game doesn't feel like it's playing itself. As a kind of my-first-Pandemic even very young kids can enjoy it, and who doesn't like tearing open an envelope to see where the game takes them next?