THE WALKING DEAD: SURROUNDED review

Before I get to the game on tap today, here are a few caveats. I’m not a fan of the show, having only watched a grand total of one particularly gruesome episode. I don’t typically play a lot of solo games, but I have a soft spot for puzzly solo card games. And I enjoying seeing what the designers who work with Button Shy Games do with just a few cards.

With that out of the way, it’s been tough getting together with my regular game group recently with work, end of the school year commitments, and just generally busyness, so it was nice to set aside some table time for a solo game. THE WALKING DEAD: SURROUNDED, a new 18 card game release from Button Shy Games designed by Jason Tagmire, has a familiar premise, but has two twists on the game that I really enjoy. The game can be played by multiple players, but my experience and this review covers only the solo aspect.

It’s helpful to talk about the gameplay first. Players will create a checkerboard-style tableau of locations and occupant cards from an 18 card deck, playing the cards either one or two at a time. Once the deck runs out, or a player cannot make a legal play, we’ll score the tableau we’ve created and compare it to the handy dandy tracker to see how well we did.

The cards are double sided. One side is the location, showing the part of town where battles happen at the end of the game as well as any survivors or walkers that are already there and any special bonuses we can earn or powers that affect the game play.

The other side of the card is the occupant side, which reveals artwork of a person in each of the four quadrants of the card. The occupants can be the good guys: survivors and leaders, each of which scores you points at the end of the game if they have not been eaten by the bad guys. They can also be the bad guys: the “walkers” otherwise known as post-apocalyptic zombies.

On your turn, you’ll either take the top card in the deck as a ‘location’ and explore and then place one more card next to it as an occupant, or you will just flip over a card to use its inhabitants as occupants.

Let’s go over the exploring mechanic really quickly so we can understand the flow. Exploring means you place that location next to any occupant card. The only real rule is that you have to create a checkerboard pattern of locations and occupant cards, like this:

You can see that the location is now adjacent to at least one inhabitant, either a walker denoted by the red X or a survivor / leader. I will make it pretty simple. Walkers are bad for your score, survivors are good. You want humans around. You don’t want walkers anywhere near you. That’s probably as close to the thematic elements of the show that I will get.

I must admit here that I did not notice the significance of the white lines dividing up the cards at first — yes, I realize now that this obviously creates an “area” where all of the humans / walkers reside for the scoring part at the end of the game. For some reason, it just did not stand out to me and I thought at first that everything on the cards touching the location counts. About halfway through my first play, I stopped and ventured on to BGG for some scoring recaps and corrected myself.

But back to the explore action. Each time you choose this action (and you have do this if you don’t have any other legal play or the location has a walker on it), you also have to place an occupant card next to the location (if available; if not, you can place the occupant anywhere in the tableau). Oh that can hurt sometimes. I’ll place a location, thinking I have the perfect set up, and then turn over the next occupant card and unfortunately, it can be a particularly nasty card with lots of walkers. Whether I want to or not, I still have to play it.

The other option for your turn is the occupy action, and that’s simply turning over the next top card and placing that card in the tableau, adding more humans and/or walkers to the tableau.

Once all the cards are laid out and the deck is finished, it’s time to score. Check each location to see if there are more survivors than walkers. If so, score a point for each surviving occupant and even more if they are a leader. (Just remember that two leaders cancel each other out, too much fighting occurs when two Type A personalities are in the same area). Also score points for closing out locations that have bonus items or points on them.

The scoring part of the game is really pretty simple, once you grasp (like I did) that the location encompasses not just the card but the quadrants that are connected to it demarcated by the white lines on the other cars.

This is all pretty basic stuff, in fact, in some ways similar to other games we have seen from Button Shy Games. But what elevates The Walking Dead into a better game is the inclusion of the scenarios in the game. I highly recommend skipping the base game, which is honestly a bit blasé, and instead looking at the chart in the instructions matching up the number of the location that you first turned over at the start of the game with the available scenario.

I’ve played through a half-dozen of them, and each is different. The ones that I have played either make the game a bit harder, by taking away some of the benefits and bonuses in the game, or give you different sets of objectives to win the game. For instance, in one of the scenarios, on its newbie level, I had to explore at least six times (higher if I played a tougher skill level). That meant that I couldn’t just put out two or three locations and then spend the rest of the game peeking and playing the best survivor cards through the occupy action.

The scenarios change up the strategy of each of the games I played, and I liked the little flavor text that came with each one. After I read the changes, I tried to envision why the designer chose that location for this particular scenario. There are already some expansion scenarios and cards for the game if you are so interested.

My only quibble, and this might be just for me, is that the game forces me to keep an eye on the numbers of humans / walkers while playing. I found myself constantly scanning the landscape, counting off the humans versus the red x’s, especially in those locations where it mattered most. In a way it heightened the tension as I had to make the decision between exploring and occupying, but doing math during my turn is my least favorite way to play a game. After a few plays, I relaxed a bit — each play only takes a couple of minutes, right? I found out that the experience is just as fun if I just surveyed causally each location before the play, using the same rough counting we used to use when totaling up the patrons before a gig. It might have cost me a game or two, but it flowed much better and kept me in the thematic setting.

Verdict? The base game is not interesting enough to play by itself, but based on what I’ve read from the designer, that’s not the intention of this game. What sets the game apart are the scenarios. They are bite-sized yet still deliver enough puzzle to keep me interested. It’s the kind of small experience that I can set up and play two or three scenarios in under a half-hour, an enjoyable diversion while my wife and I are chatting as we prepare dinner. This one is a keeper, and I can see keeping it around to play all of the 25 or so scenarios that we have been provided so far.

Until next time, laissez les bon temps rouler!

— BJ from Board Game Gumbo

** A copy of the game was provided by the publisher. **