Hello Moon!

I sacrificed Feburary on the altar of computer gaming and it was GOOD.  Now I am back and I need to find a way to balance my desire to read, write, read comics, socialize, excercize, and a bunch of other things with computer gaming.  Good stuff.  Anyway I am starting that by writing here so hello!

So the Zombicide season 2 kickstarter ramped itself up and I was seriously considering backing it but I seem to have finally talked myself out of it.  Whew.  The reason being is that despite the fact that I love me some Co-Op games I mean seriously they are my favorite type of game Zombicide just strikes me the wrong way and last night I realized why.

In Zombicide you are playing against a system.  Like almost specifically a system that you have to game in order to meet sucess.  So for example Zombies automatically hit you, Zombies always go towards the largest sources of noise, and when shooting in the same room as another survivor you will always hit that other survivor.  I mean shit even in Arkham I get to roll a pile of dice to see if I kill the zombie or not.  So right there you have two different instances where things will always happen and one instance where you can control groups of zombies based off of noise.  So you could sacrifice a player to have them make a lot of noise drawing the zombies away from the main group so that they don't automatically die just because there are zombies around.  Along the same lines you can't save said survivor because if you shoot into his zombie filled square you'll hit him first even though that doesn't make any sense.

There are more instances of this but in general when you play Zombicide you are gaming a system.  Lord of the Rings, Arkham, Sentinels of the Multiverse and Pandemic all, to varying degrees, have a mixture of luck, strategy, and  adaptation. In all the games I listed there aren't any real certainties except that things can go tits up very quickly.  In Zombicide you have the same thing but because of the various certain elements it forces "inorganic" game play choices.  You are less a group of survivors trying to beat back the zombie hordes to achieve some goal and more a group of people trying to manage a situation using highly artificial rules.  It isn't something that really becomes clear until you've played a co-op game.  Like in Sentinels I feel like I am a part of a group of heroes pulling out the stops to take down a villian.  Not a guy with a hand of cards trying to manage the villian's deck of cards.  In Arkham I feel like I am barely scraping a victory from the claws of an unnamable horror not just moving peices around to get results.  With Zombiecide I could be feeling that way too, but with two different types of auto hits and it feels more like a management game than anything els and thus it won't get backed.

Lunch is over and off I go.