A Pox on your house

Black Plague is the latest version of Zombicide. It’s a coop but it’s a decent coop. If you’ve played any of the other zombicides then this is much the same again with a new lick of ye olde lead paint.
The copy we played was owned by our host and he’d gone elbows deep in the Kickstarter and had pretty much one of everything including the expansion. We opted for the heroes from Monty Python’s Holy Grail which were grand but not side splittingly funny.

The game is one of the better unstoppable mission based zombie horde games. Perhaps they’re a an acronym for that. It’s set in fantasy land with the usual dwarf, elf, human, whatever stereotypes. What if all elves are not good archers? Or dwarves prefer oil painting to cleaving. Anyhoe the Necromancers have something or other and bang! Zombies a go go.
Each character starts with a special ability like healing, magic missile (yes there’s magic) and maybe a starting weapon. An overall mission which might see you trying to gather food or kill x amount of zombies or whatever. Then it’s off to the starting spot and a surprisingly quiet set of streets. Don’t be lulled into a false sense of no zombies. They’re in the post. Remember those projects in college where towards the end you wished you did more at the start? Zombicide.

Each turn consists of moving you’re dudes and doing actions like opening doors (bad), searching buildings (probably good), culling zombies (good) and despairing. Once everyone has moved more zombies appear and then they move. Some in the case of the runners quite quickly. In the case of everyone else nice and slow. Don’t be fooled, it’s unforgiving and nails hard.

There’s a few zombie varieties some impossible to kill with you’re starting weapons and some apocalyptic. More If you’re masochist enough to buy the bigga bosses add ons.
As you kill zombies you start to level up and gain extra abilities like more moves/attacks better shooting but the flip side is now more and nastier zombies start to appear to match your level. Very quickly it goes from a small leak to a tsunami of zombie porridge.
The game is hard. The zombies are unstoppable this game is like left4dead only way harder. I’d played the original but a few versions on it’s become really really tough.
Now normally I don’t like coops but I make some exceptions. This is one of them. As dungeon bashes go this is very slick indeed. The production values are excellent. Better than Fantasy Flight. Granted we were playing the Rolls Royce Kickstarter but even the base game is very nicely appointed.

If you were going to dip you toe (and get it bitten) in the Zombicide world Black Plague is definitely the place to start. It’s a fine polished zombie game and if you’re a collector a game in itself sourcing all the extras for it if you’re one who just has to have it all. It’s also quick (scenario dependent), Pricey and only gorgeous.