Worth noting that it’s not a cooperative game in that one or more players play the zombies. Strictly speaking, Zombies!!! is not a co-op game either. Maybe I will just invest in some ink and good coated paper stock to print out the Army of Darkness board game, when I want to combine the all-important zombie and cooperative game genres.

Though I’m sure either Josh or myself could write up an entire post on the topic of appeasing (or bending?) the will of the group when choosing games to play.

Still, my meager economics knowledge notwithstanding, it seems like a game which gets it right the first time out would receive greater praise and attention and go on to cultivate a larger fan base, based on a successful foundation. From there selling expansions would seem easier.

Not knowing whether the expansions do “fix” the game, I might attribute Zombies!!! apparent popularity more to clever packaging and its release around the resurgence of zombie movies a few years back.

Zombies!!! ended up being a kill fest most of the time, while Kill Dr. Lucky just seemed too random and drawn out. I’ll play them if I have to, but neither are games I’d ever clamour for.

Those games which do not contain fun in the initial release of the game are somewhat akin to computer games which get released while still full of bugs. They’re not ready yet! Kind of reminds me to steer clear of Zombies!!! expansions, for example, as any fixing that was going to happen should really have come during playtesting, design, and development of the main game, nevermind expansions (think: paid patches to make a computer game work? Eww.)

Joe- Zombies!!! does have a similar problem, but fares a bit better. When we played with the optional rule of shuffling the helipad randomly into the stack, instead of the lower half, that seemed to bring the end sooner. Plus for all I know they’ve made some moves to address the flaws with the expansions? There certainly are a lot (though not quite as many as for Munchkin, there’s a game that could really be called expanded).

It does seem that althought I enjoy ZOMBIES!!!, it can degenerate into a game where I hope someone, anyone will win and put us (the players) out of our misery.
It really takes some house rules to make some of these type of games playable beyond one game.

I have seen this pretty new version at the local game shop and been tempted to pick it up but I think my gameing dollars will be better spent elsewhere.