To wrap up October I’ll stick with the theme of undead fun for solo play enthusiasts who like print and play games.
This week the print job is amazingly simple for the game Escape of the Dead, a mini game designed by Jason Sondoh back in 2010.
In the game “you are a survivor of a zombie apocalypse and you’re stuck in a house with a broken car and hordes of zombies are attacking in the lawn. But wait, you found tools enough to fix the car to escape from the hordes of zombies,” relates an online description.
So, in the game you are trying to fix the car while trying to defend yourself against hordes of zombies. You’re given four action dice per turn, distributing those dice between three sections of the game; shooting a zombie, fixing the barricade and/or fixing the car. This is where the game tension comes in, a limited dice pool, and choices to be made in terms of where to allocate them.
The game then comes down to dice rolls, which can often be annoying on principle, but in a game like this do a good job of mimicking the chaos of fighting an undead horde.
You roll for success on each section, and hope the dice are coming up in your favour.
Of course zombies are pesky critters by nature, and relentless too. Any zombie that survived will attack the barricade.
When you have successfully killed 10 zombies you will be rewarded with additional power.
But the zombies can win too. If they break down the barricade you have been overrun — Game Over.
To win get your car to 100 per cent, get out of the house and away to freedom for the shambling dead.
The game is not the deepest, but it has it’s draw because of the simplicity to print your own version.
You need a single sheet of paper to print the board and ruleset on, add four dice, a pencil (not essential but handy), and you are ready to play.
As often happens with print and pay games, especially those with a following at www.boardgamegeek.com, Escape of the Dead has seen some variant designs uploaded to the files section, including one which makes the printed game fit in your pocket, so you can add highly transportable to the things to like about this one.
Escape of the Dead is a game that is ideal for a quick little solo gaming session, maybe on a night your hockey team is getting thrashed in the second period, and your interest in the game dissipated when your team allowed it’s fourth goal. Turn off the TV grab this game out of the drawer, and take on a few undead.
