Items:

Families x 4

(Rich x 4, Poor x 6, Military x 5 and

Religious x 6)

Dice x 2

Normal Zombies x 24

Special Zombies x 12

Board x 1

Is Still the Same.

Each of the families now had specific rules following

them and governing the game play.

(NB: The Preacher and the Military Dad went through two drafts of their rules before

they reached this playtest. The Preacher went from invincible to just acting like the

Father, and the Military Father went from having the son in any square around him to

any of the three behind him, neither option was kept.)

There are six family members. They

have one safe zone on their colour

coded area (neighbourhood). They are

free to move even if a zombie is

adjacent. They are all free to move

independently and can save each other.

As there are more of them, it take

longer for all of the family members to

get home. 

There are only four family

members; Husband,

Wife, Pool-Boy and

Mistress. The Husband

and Wife cannot save

each other. Everyone

else can. There are no

safe areas on the board.

 

The Father drags the son with him wherever

he goes, so the son must remain within one

squares distance, inclusive of where the

Father is. There is a safe bunker on the

board, if a zombie is adjacent, the person

within cannot be harmed, but they cannot

move either. If a zombie tries to land on the

Father or the Son, Dad has a chance to fight

the zombies. He must roll higher then what

the zombie rolls. If he gets higher, he claims

the zombie as a trophy, if not, he loses

whomever the zombie was trying to kill.  

The religious family, like the poor

family, have six members. One of the

family members is a Preacher, who is

invincible. He drags a family member

behind him, and can use this every

round, but must get to the Helipad to

bring them back. The person he is

bringing around must remain one

square behind him. He can fight for

their safety like the Father of the

Military family. There are no safe areas

on the board.

Michael had come up

with the idea of new

zombies who were

worth two toughness

in a trade but were

harder to kill, as they

could move like

humans, but in the

opposite direction.

Event Cards:

With the new zombies, there was an idea

of trading the zombies in for event cards

which could be used against other

players. At thi stage the deck of event

cards was just an ordinary deck of cards

and the families were symbolised as

different suits. If you picked your own

family’s suit, you got to roll again, but

only the human roll, if you picked another

family, you got to make them miss a turn.

You could execute these at any time,

namely after a person had used a

zombie to kill your character you could

implement the card to say “no, undo

undo”.

This became a tad confusing, but very

funny, so this element was a keeper.

The basic zombie movements, human movements, end

goal and event card process stayed the same.

All of the new rules were attached to character

movements.

Another new rule was that if you had to bring an

immune person back, you got double human rolls to

facilitate faster movement, however, you has to use all

of your human rolls to get the immune person to the

helipad before you were allowed to move anyone else.

The game still took a few rounds before people grasped the rules and had to stop

gameplay to have the rules exlained to them.

The number of zombies ran out quick as there was still no form of regeneration; Patience ensued.

We only had ‘make a certain family on the card miss a go’ or ‘have your family repeat

their go’.

Did we need more cards to keep it interesting?

It was decided that if a player only had one more piece on the board, that person

could not be infected and was essentially immune until they disinfected someone

else, thus the player could never die. It took a long time before they could ever really

do anything and win the game.

The Preacher became a Dominant Strategy for the religious family. As he was

impossible to kill, this took over the fun of the game and it was no question of who

would win if the Religious team was playing.

All of the new character rules caused

more problems then they solved.

With all of the new rules, we lost the

point of the game.

There was simply too much for the

players to try and grasp in one go and

the fun was simply gone.

We stripped the game back to the basics of Michael’s original game.

There was no incentive for players to bring their character home if they could get infected straight away.

The event cards were not worth the danger of getting them.

We have to make them more interesting.We also made all of the families have a base amount of four characters.

No character had special elements and there were no safe zones on the board.