Description

Did you ever feel like your town was a dead end full of mindless drones? Like you just had to get out of there at any cost? Well now you might be right! LocaliZED is a Zombie survival game set in your backyard. It is a 1-8 player co-op game that uses any map and your imagination to turn your neighbourhood in into Zombified blood fest.

LocaliZEd is an open-source print and play game that encourages players to customise their game within the parameters of the core rule set. LocaliZED has players use a map of their hometown, or anywhere else they would like to try and survive a Zombie apocalypse, as the board. On this board a few key locations, church, school, police station are set and then players are given missions at random that force them to interact with these locations while Zombies quickly accumulate on the board.

As the game progresses players draw cards from one common deck that sometimes cause more Zombies to flood the map, sometimes giving the players bonus items and sometimes changing the dynamic of the whole board.
The game is turn based and the turn sequence runs like this: clockwise players may all move once. Then running clock-wise again, from the same starting player, each player must fight the Zombies in their location once only.
The core mechanic that players use to combat Zombies is really simple. In a location that has Zombies players must roll a D6. If they roll a score greater than the number of Zombies they are fighting then they have won the combat. They may now remove Zombies equal to the difference between their score and the number of Zombies. If they roll a score equal to the number of Zombies this is a draw and nothing happens. If they roll less than the number of Zombies then they have lost the combat and they lose 1 life.
A roll of a 1 on any dice at any time means they lose the combat. A roll of a 6 on any dice at any time means they may roll an extra dice and count its result towards their score.
For instance, if there are 4 Zombies in a location and you roll a 5 then you may remove 1 Zombie, because 5 is one greater than 4. If you had rolled a 4 then you would have drawn the combat and nothing would happen. If you had rolled a 6 you may have re-rolled the dice and added the score of the second dice to the original 6 potentially rolling another 6 and gaining yet another re-roll. If you had rolled a 3, 2 or 1 then you would have lost and had to lose 1 life.

Players may team-up to fight Zombies, and this becomes very necessary. To do this they must be in the same Location. All players who are teaming-up must agree to the team-up before any dice are rolled. The player who’s fighting (because it is their turn) may now roll their dice once only using their weapons. Then they may roll an extra dice for each other player that teamed-up. The player adds the totals together and combats the Zombies with this score. Teaming-up allows players to achieve much higher scores. However, the down side of teaming up is that if they lose the combat everyone in the team-up loses 1 life.

LocaliZED also contains a rather unique mechanic for death. There is no player elimination, instead the dead player switches sides becoming a Zombie and gaining some control of the normally random Zombie deployment.

All of these missions and combat are driving the game towards the Final Mission. This one of 5 set endings for the game that can only be revealed once players have burned through all of the other missions. Final mission are always much harder than the individual missions that lead up to them but they generally involve all of the players working together to achieve them. Final missions range from hiding till the end of the apocalypse, curing the Zombies, killing the other players, or just out right killing all of the Zombies.
The tone of the game is quite tongue in cheek with a lot of the missions and cards having humorous elements. Every part of the game is designed to leave the door wide open for players really take ownership of the scenarios an in-game elements, with blank cards of every type being provided, the onus being on using your own map as a board.

The game was written in response to the Beasts of War websites 2014 Halloween game design challenge. Beasts of War then went on to distribute the game as free down load to all of their members.