Another Day, Another Kickstarter

Not long after I raved about the Fate Core Kickstarter, I was enticed to jump in on another Kickstarter that's currently ongoing: Zombicide Season 2.

I own the first season of Zombicide, but missed the Kickstarter for it and thus the exclusives (if anyone reads this and wants to spring for them for me, I won't argue! Just saying...).  This time around I had been waiting and ready, having seen the warning on Guillotine Games' facebook page that the Kickstarter was coming.  Apparently, I wasn't the only one waiting, because Zombicide Season 2 shot out of the gate, blowing past stretch goals faster than they could be revealed.  As I write this, the campaign sits at just under $860k in around about a week.  Amazing.

I'm pretty excited for Season 2 and the extras are awesome.  In case you don't know, Zombicide is a cooperative zombie survival boardgame.  Players work together to meet objectives and escape the zombie horde.  In my experience, it is very important for players to work together; when one person goes off aline it often ends in their untimely demise ir the group being left without resources they desperately need.  Worse, as players grow stronger, the amount of zombies spawning increases; if one person quickly outpaces the others, the whole group will be quickly overwhelmed.  Dice are rolled on either melee or ranged attacks and when successful, zombies die.  Players can also search for more useful gear if they choose.  Personally, this is my favorite type of game.  While I love lots of directly competative games (Bang, Catan, Fluxx, Risk, Agricola and so on), I feel like I do best when working with a team.  I instictively try to support other players and enjoy collaborative problem solving.  At the moment, this basically makes Zombicide my favorite game.

Season 2 of Zombicide is (so far!) introducing two new settings, two new types of zombies, a new type of character, and a new form of support for players.  The settings are a prison (possibly a reference to The Walking Dead, which I love) and a mall (Dawn of the Dead, of course!).  The new barricade and security door mechanics for these settings look cool as heck.  The new types of zombies are toxic zombies, who do blood splatter damage when melee attacked, and berserker zombies, who have to be melee attacked to be killed.  No doubt having both types present in a single game will be devastating   The new type of character is the zombivor, an undead hero trying to help the survivors; I'm not so sure on the concept, but I have no doubt it could be tweaked to something I like or simply omitted and the game played under season 1 rules.  The new type if support is dogs!  Survivors can now have pet dogs to back them up and help them search or do damage. As a side bonus, zombie dogs are also being released!

So far the Kickstarter exclusive survivors, who are typically homages, are shaping up  to be pretty awesome.  The first is Brad, who looks a bit like Clint Eastwood in Dirty Harry.  Then there's Dakota, who bears a striking resemblance to Pamela Anderson in a prison jumpsuit.  Aunt Rose looks a bit like Betty White and Kirk has a certain resemblance to Steven Segal if you squint.  Emma Stone in her Zombieland incarnation is there, too.  But the current title holder for most awesome is Fred, who is quite clearly Simon Pegg from Shaun of the Dead!  Very, very cool as a follow up to last year's exclusives who were lookalikes for Samuel L Jackson, Uma Therman, Angelina Jolie, Chuck Norris, Sheldon from Big Bang Theory, Bruce Willis, Danny Trejo and Bruce Campbell as Ash from Evil Dead.  I can't wait to see who is next.  Also I desperately wish I had the not-Ash survivor Troy, because seriously, he's awesome.

All in all, I'm thoroughly caught up in the Zombicide Season 2 Kickstarter, and hopefully I've given you a bit of a picture of why you might want to be, too.