Walking Dead Board Game (Z man)

by Z-Man Games

• For 1 to 6 players
• 30 minutes of play time
• Become a player and take on the role of a survivor in a world suddenly full of zombies
• With only one companion at the start of the game, each player must struggle to gather resources

Product Details

• Product Dimensions: 12 x 1.7 x 8.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Shipping: This item is also available for shipping to select countries outside the U.S.
• Origin: China
• ASIN: B005312SGA
• Item model number: 7087ZMG
• Manufacturer recommended age: 13 - 17 years
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #14,440 in Toys & Games (See Top 100 in Toys & Games)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (23 customer reviews)

Product Description

From the Manufacturer

The Walking Dead: The Board Game from Z-Man Games transforms the Robert Kirkman comic book series into a board game, giving "fans the opportunity to play Rick, Shane, Andrea, and other favorite The Walking Dead characters as they deal with zombies, collect supplies and pick up the pieces of their lives", according to a press release announcing the game. Encounter and location cards recreate scenes and events from the comic book series.

Product Description

The Walking Dead: The Board Game from Z-Man Games transforms the Robert Kirkman comic book series into a board game, giving "fans the opportunity to play Rick, Shane, Andrea, and other favorite The Walking Dead characters as they deal with zombies, collect supplies and pick up the pieces of their lives", according to a press release announcing the game. Encounter and location cards recreate scenes and events from the comic book series.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars A fun game for the casual board gamer July 17, 2012

By Matthew Reed

Durability: 5.0 out of 5 stars    Educational: 1.0 out of 5 stars    Fun: 4.0 out of 5 stars   

To start off I am not the sort of person that gets real serious about playing board games and the way they are played. As long as it is fun then I am happy. Secondly I have only seen the first four or five episodes of the Walking Dead and read none of the graphic novels. That being said I was somewhat hesitant playing this the first time with my group because of the miserable time we had playing the other Walking Dead game and the fact I knew so little about the show. Shortly after starting I began to realize this is a very casual game and no knowledge of the books or TV series is necessary. My second observation and perhaps the biggest was just how random the game was. There was very little strategy with the majority of the game being left up to fate. Mainly which character you draw and what events you draw. The main and side characters are definitely not created equal. Some have very big advantages over others. Both the character imbalance and the dependence on luck can be eliminated some through either omission of some rules and creation of "house" rules but I'll leave that up to the forums to discuss and the individual to determine. The last thing I noticed was the game does play very quickly and a player in the lead can easily be eliminated from the game by making the wrong move or drawing the wrong card. The five of us played through three or four times and on average the games lasted about two hours with our longest taking around two and a half.

In summation this game will more likely be enjoyed by the more casual gamer than the more "hardcore" or serious gamer but should not be overlooked.

13 of 17 people found the following review helpful

2.0 out of 5 stars Needlessly Complicated December 1, 2011

By Paladon

Durability: 3.0 out of 5 stars    Educational: 2.0 out of 5 stars    Fun: 1.0 out of 5 stars   

The Walking Dead is a huge license right now. The comic has critical acclaim and is selling well, the AMC TV show is wildly popular and breaking viewing records. Why then would Z-Man games create a game that is complex enough to turn the hungry throngs of consumers away?

I've played both The Walking Dead games and to me (a casual gamer) looking for a product to bring me closer to this property I love, I have to say that I did not enjoy constantly having to refer to the rule book to figure out what was going on. We picked up on the rules of the AMC TV version of the game rather quickly, it was fun, and was the version we played again and again, setting the comic based version aside.

I understand if you like a more complex game that takes a while to master, and that's fine, I'm just giving you my perspective of a The Walking Dead fan and what me and my family/friends realized - when you have a huge license, know who your audience is and cast the widest net.

33 of 47 people found the following review helpful

2.0 out of 5 stars An ultimately random and unbalanced test of patience October 9, 2011

By Q

Durability: 4.0 out of 5 stars    Educational: 1.0 out of 5 stars    Fun: 1.0 out of 5 stars   

I am a zombie genre fan, preferring the shambling zombies of Romero, and the Walking Dead AMC series. Recently I've been spending a great deal of time, almost nightly, playing board games, as I've become almost entirely home bound due to an illness. When I saw this game, I was sold in seconds. I didn't bother reading up on it, I was sold by concept, and the over all quality that has been given to the Walking Dead series of products. I purchased this the day of release, so reviews were not available. It was a risk, and, to sum it up, a failed risk. I do not recommend this game, and I'll attempt to give a few key points on what they did well, and how they failed.

The art work is fantastic! I liked the quality of pieces as well.
Setup was moderate - I'm used to German style games, such as Agricola and Dominion, so this wasn't too much to ask. The worst part was having to turn over 70 small round zombie pieces so that the number side, that which should randomly dictate how many zombies are in a group, was down. This felt familiar, so I pushed on.
The basic concept is to attempt to find three locations of refuge about the board. During which you pick up fellow survivors to assist, adding some abilities and dice for your rolls. Your rolls require you to take special dice with faces representing "actions", "zombie kills", or a wild symbol, which fills in for one of the two based on the need of the roll. There is also a special cheat dice you can use based on your groups abilities, or use of ammo resource. Conceptually, sounds great. You wonder around the hexagonal map in search of either one of the three resources: ammo, gas, and good, or locations to call home (three for a game victory, if you meet their challenges), you leave a wake of zombie tokens on each hex-space.... More on that later. Once you make it to a resource square (usually in one or two turns, no problem there), you draw an event card/challenge card. These cards are my first major problem in the game. To succeed the challenges on them (and gain either a reward or punishment) you have various tasks or requirements to meet. These are SO random, imbalanced, and mostly not fun, that here alone the game looses most of it's promise! Some require you to role your compliment of dice. There are four dice, more on that later. These dice are the accumulation of your main survivor's dice set, and those that your group members add. So, for example, your main character might say "three blue dice" and a team member "add one red and one blue". So you have five dice of various color (and ability). These are used to meet physical challenges, and to kill zombies. Other challenges include having a number of resources, giving a number of resources to other players, sacrificing your resources to punish other players, or many other various requirements and tasks.

The problem is that these tasks vary in reward and punishment extremely. Some, "here is a gas", another "here are three gas". Some "challenges" are as simple as "ask if another player wants to give up two of something, if so, you loose one, else, you get one". This makes very little sense! "Sure, I'd like to loose two of something so you loose just one". Win or loose at the challenge, you get the resources you are challenging for. Locations use the same challenges, which make little sense, "give a player ten gas tanks" and you get a victor. You will find your resources and status in the game fluctuating more than Mario Party.

Sometimes you have to kill one or two zombies, other times eight or nine. Sometimes you have to ask someone to say "I will help you", other times you have they are asked to give up resources to punish you (though they are actually punished more). It's so incredibly unbalanced.

Dice. This is a key point to the game, and a MAJOR busted element. The game has four kinds of dice, each with a different color and set of symbols: red, blue, green, and a special black dice. The first three have a varying set of symbols representing action, action x 2, kill zombie, kill zombie x 2, and wild. The fourth, black dice is used as a sort of cheat, or helper dice, it has zombie kill times 1, 2, and 3 on three of the sides, and blam! times 1, 2, or 3 on the other three sides. Most of the time you spend ammo to roll this, helping in killing zombies your former set doesn't take care of. Each main character has some bonus they give, such as being able to move a little further in a turn (normally three squares), yes all of them have three variations on the red, blue and green dice. A huge balancing issue is that the blue dice is way more powerful than the other two. This was considerably noticeable as the person whose character had three blue dice always always won more challenges, had more resources, and so forth. The blue dice is the only dice with one blank side (ignoring the black dice), the others have two blanks. The blue is also the only dice with a wild symbol that meets action or zombie kill.

About the black dice... Suppose, which happened quite often, especially earlier on in the game, or for the poor soul who got "Otis" in their party (he adds the black dice to every role). The black dice guarantees kills, either adding one to three zombie kills, or one to three "attract" kills. Attract kills require you to place zombie tokens around the persons current board place, which can be (in a hex-grid) up to six places, and they can stack. This results in mountains of zombies all over the board, which give no benefit for being destroyed, so they are most often avoided. The pieces were often bumped into with fingers, thus moved around by accident - more frustrating than anything.

The rules leave several major holes, and feel incomplete. More time will likely produce a fan supplied FAQ or best practice rule set, though, these can't fix the inherent flaws of design.

So this has become a bit of a long review - I've tried to write it several times, but I didn't want it to get even this long. I don't want to sound like I'm coming down on the concept, or some sort of niche element that bugged me, but since this game is the only board game I've bought that ended up in the closet, and will never be touched again, I wanted to caution others. The game feels like a more complicated and tedious version of Flux.

I hope this review helps anyone make an appropriate choice. Read more ›

4 of 6 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Fun beer & pretzels game October 13, 2011

By A. Zipp

Durability: 4.0 out of 5 stars    Educational: 1.0 out of 5 stars    Fun: 5.0 out of 5 stars   

It's fun, and the artwork is nice. If you've ever played Last Night on Earth or Betrayal at House on the Hill, it's similar. A little random, there's no deep strategy, you move around and have encounters and roll dice.

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Make sure to Download/Print the FAQ January 25, 2013

By xRegardsx

Amazon Verified Purchase

Play this all the time with guys from the local game shop.
Definitely suggest only playing with 4 players and allowing only a new character card being used to come back into the game within the first 5 turns or so. Let the first person have a choice and the second person out in that time gets stuck with the last.
This allows for more competitiveness as too many people makes it feel more like luck, pulling your attention in
too many directions as you're often able to work towards a goal that stops someone else from winning their third location (ie. not letting them have the most resources/followers/wounds/etc).

You can draft the main characters one way and then draft the single followers the other, but there are way too many followers to go through and choosing your follower to stop someone else from creating a combo is often a greater disadvantage to you than it is to the other player.

Drawing completely random main characters keeps it balanced in the sense that everyone has to be mindful of the limitations of the character they get. The only choice being for the first person out in the first 5 turns helps balance out the handicap of being 5 turns behind. The 5 turn limit is there to make taking a new character a way to counter a simple bad luck streak early in the game (losing your only follower in one encounter and then having to beat a number of zombies you have no chance of beating for instance).

Once you bring your resources up a bit and/or gain a second follower... there really is no reason your character should die with careful management.

The other TWD game is very different, but also very enjoyable. Much easier to learn and faster paced, but with the same careful choices, resource management, and survival mentality thrown in.