Description

Zomburbs is the zombie apocalypse if it were to happen in your idyllic neighborhood. It is also an interactive deck-building game in which you shoot zombies, build your fort, buy loot, and ...ahem... "help" your neighbors, in order to thrive during the zombie apocalypse. We felt that the deck-building genre too often felt like a 4 person game of solitaire. Our aim is to evolve the genre and create a game where you might be scratching your opponent's back...just to stab it later.

The objective of the game is to accumulate the most victory points in both your deck and your fort by the end of the game. Cards will have varying number of victory points and weapon cards are worth no victory points since you use them to earn higher victory point cards called cure cards. The game ends when either the wound or cure cards are exhausted.

At the end of each turn an increasing number of zombies will be added to a player's walls. Creatures stay behind your walls until they are either shot or if they overcome the strength of your wall. When creatures come over you walls you can end up taking wound cards which are worth a negative one victory point and they will hinder your deck a bit. There are ways to remove wound cards and there are not that many in a game so your deck will not be adversely affected by them.

There is a resource in the game that you can collect called scrap. It can be used in one of two ways. One you can use it to reinforce your walls, therefore preventing zombies from coming over and giving you wounds. You can also use it to construct buildings. Buildings are essentially abilities that you can use at least once per turn since they don't have to drawn from your deck, they are also worth a good amount of victory points. An example of one building is the zombie catapult which you can use to fling zombies on your walls towards other players.

If you help other players you can earn two different types of cards. One type is called consumables and they are one time burn cards that can either help you or mess with the other players. The other card you can earn are cure cards which are worth a decent number of victory points and provide the ability to easily kill creatures on your walls, therefore allowing you to continue to "help" other players.

The game is a "take that" game so players who prefer coop games might not enjoy the mechanics of messing with the other players. I spent a significant amount of time in making the cards that affect other players in a mild and fun way versus king maker or knocking somebody out. The game was intended to be very interactive so most abilities are centered on that. Alliances will be formed and broken throughout the game which makes it very dynamic each time.

There really is no trashing in this game so you only start with 5 cards. This allows a player to get to making fun card combos much sooner in the game. This also allows you to focus more on the type of strategy that you are going for in the game.

The cards for purchase in the tableau area are fairly unique with a maximum of 2 copies versus 10 of the same card that normal deck builders have. This gives each player a unique feel/identity each game. It also makes the replay value fun and fresh each time you play the game.