Head to Head Guilty Pleasure Horror Table-Top Game of the Yea
Head to head is a new kind of list we created for the express purpose of interesting debate. This kind of list is less like a list and more like an uneducated mudslinging campaign. I will tell you why my choice is awesome and why Dalton’s choice is dumb. Horror is one of my personal favorite genres of anything. Horror movies, horror books, horror comics, horror houses….err haunted houses (and I’m actually scared of those because they contain real people). Anyway, horror is an awesome category for our first Head to Head and table-top because I know both of those topics! On top of which guilty pleasure lends itself to this category like whoa, most people partake in horror in the first place as a guilty pleasure. We like being scared and we like not having control, kind of spooky isn’t it? Horror games are hard to come by and usually involve some kind of zombies. In fact both of our choices are about zombies ladies and gentlemen I present to you…
Zombicide vs. Dawn of the Zed
My game of choice for this wonderful contest is called Zombicide published by Guillotine Games. In Zombiecide 1-6 people take on the roles of survivors in more than 20 scenarios (including expansions) trying to complete various mission objectives before overrun by zombies.
Dalton’s game is called Dawn of the Zeds published by Victory Point Games. In a similar (but was less awesome looking fashion) various survivors are trying to get to the safe zone is Farmingdale before they are destroyed by the hordes of zombies in their current location.
I would like to start by simply stating why I believe both of these games were chosen as guilty pleasure games. Zombicide is what everyone wants in good zombie game, brutal hack and shoot mechanics versus waves and waves of oncoming zombies. The game can be very mindless but that is the best part. This is also why I consider it a guilty pleasure. Many board gamers play Euro games that are strategic and complicated with a many complex rules and interactions that will boggle your mind after a solid day of gaming. When those days happen I love to break them up with games like Zombicide. What should I do this turn? Perhaps you should murder all the zombies in your square! Thank you I would like that very much! Dawn of the Zeds was chosen I believe because it most represents one of Dalton’s favorite things, movies. The game pulls in tropes from all of zombie media and makes you feel like you are in a very intense scenario, in fact the publishers/players coined the term as States of Siege style play, where your backs are against the wall the entire game and you feel like you really had to get luck almost for the win. I much prefer the former myself, if I wanted a complicated game I would have played a historically based worker placement game not a character based zombie/horror game. The guilty pleasure comes in knowing I had fun and didn’t have to work hard for 3 hours to get it.
Let us move on to another aspect of why Zombiecide is better than Dawn of the Zed, components. Any gamer will tell you a game with better components is just flat out more fun to play. These are the components for Zombicide,
Thick, tough, flip able game boards, full color character sheets, large hefty dice, sturdy cards, and last but not least amazingly crafted miniature (which are also paintable):
The components in Dawn of the Zeds leave you moaning…get it?
They are simply all cardboard punched out from one sheet. I have not heard any testimony to the quality of these parts either. The game also has small itty bitty dice, nothing that you feel awesome hefting around. The best part is probably the cards which are full of beautiful words, which leads me right into my next topic
Game play mechanics of a guilty pleasure horror game should not distract from the game play. The rules of play for Zombicide are very easily explained based in the book, with scenario specific rules that are easy to remember. Once these rules are learned the cards literally explain themselves. On the other hand, DotZ’s cards are like reading a book, each one containing enough information to make anyone with the slightest bit of ADD run and hide. Below is a comparison:
I truly believe that Zombicide is an amazing horror game and it scratches an itch for rampant killing that we, as humans, oh so often need scratched. It is aided by the fact that each zombie that comes onto the board is accurately represented by an awesome miniature and not a token. So next time you want to fill a zombie killing void make sure you choose this,
over this,
That is it for this week folks make sure to tell me how I am wrong and stuff and I will respond promptly with a witty comment!!