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Base price: $12.
1 – 4 players.
Play time: ~20 minutes.
BGG Link
Buy directly!
Logged plays: 3
Full disclosure: A review copy of The Walking Dead: Surrounded was provided by Button Shy.
Welp, my friend convinced me to get a Letterboxd account, and now I can track all the random movies I’ve seen over my lifetime. Good luck to me trying to remember if I actually watched Chinatown or if I just remember a dude saying “Forget it, Jake; it’s Chinatown” and figured that basically counted for the entire movie. I literally have no idea. I know I saw that part of Chinatown, and I know the plot, but did I watch the entire movie? No clue. I’m getting ahead of myself, but The Walking Dead is a property of some media, so let’s talk about a game in that universe!
In The Walking Dead: Surrounded, your goal is pretty simple. Don’t get turned, and survive. Easier said than done with all these zombies walking around, being dead, and being … the? I’m genuinely not sure what this show is about. I know zombies, Jeffery Dean Morgan, and maybe Clementine? Who can say. I’m mostly here for the spatial puzzle of it all, and there’s a lot to say about that! Will you be able to survive the oncoming horde of the undead?
Contents
Setup
Not a ton here! You’ll just shuffle the cards, placing them into a stack, Location-side up:
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Place the first one into the center, and then take the second card from the top of the deck and flip it to its Occupant Side:
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Place it so the side with the zombie (the Walker) is adjacent to the previously-placed Location. You should be good to start!
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Gameplay
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Not too much here: your goal is to survive.
Each turn, you can either Explore or Occupy, with potential bonus actions. Exploring works just like setup: take the top Location Card and place it adjacent to any Occupant Card (people cards), and then flip the next Location Card over and place it such that a Walker is adjacent to the newly-placed Location. If you can’t, place the Occupant Card at any valid adjacent location. If you can’t place it at all, the game ends. If the top Location Card has a Walker on it or you can’t place an Occupant Card anywhere on the board currently, you must Explore.
To Occupy, flip the top Location Card over and place it adjacent to any face-up Location Card on the board. If there’s only one card left in the deck, you must Occupy, no matter what’s on it.
After doing that, you can use an ability of one human that became adjacent to a Location this turn from the cards you played. Move lets you move any Occupant card to any other edge of its current Location (without disconnecting the map), Look lets you peek at both sides of the top or bottom card of the deck and then return it, and Burn lets you return any played card to the top or bottom of the deck (without disconnecting the map). Use these to your advantage.
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Once the deck is empty, the game ends. Then, Battles occur:
- Humans vs. Walkers: Every Walker cancels out a Human (Leader or Survivor) at the location. If there are still Walkers remaining after the Humans are all eliminated, the location is overrun.
- Leader vs. Leader: If any location has multiple leaders, they eliminate each other. High drama.
Then, score the remaining Survivors, Leaders, and Walkers:
- Survivors: 1 point each
- Leaders: 1 point + 1 point for each remaining Survivor at their location
- Walkers: -1 point each
If a location is Surrounded (a card on each side, even if the icons are eliminated), it may get a bonus from the icon (usually 1 / 2 / 3 points, and then other effects depending on your Scenario, if you play with one). Total up your points and see how you did!
- 0 – 10 points: Bad ending!
- 11 – 15 points: Mediocre ending!
- 16 – 20 points: Okay ending!
- 21+ points: Good ending!
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For additional challenges, you can try using the Scenario Booklet. Based on the first Location Card’s number, you’re assigned a scenario with new challenges and you can play on Easy, Standard, or Hard. Good luck!
Player Count Differences
None, effectively; you always play by committee. There’s always one player whose “turn” it is, but beyond that it plays the same.
Strategy
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- Don’t get overrun? Pretty solid advice, but keep the zombies out by any means possible, or if you can’t, at least have more people that they can eat so you can score something on every location.
- You can get forced into situations sometimes based on the Explore Action; try to keep that in mind before you play certain cards. You might draw a card where a big zombie problem perfectly slots next to this location you just played and now you’re stuck with it. That might mean that instead of Exploring now, you Occupy and then Explore next turn.
- Exploring a few times gives you more space to Occupy, but it also means you’re usually up against more Walkers unless you get lucky. Exploring burns through cards much faster than Occupy (almost twice as fast, according to our top scientists). That usually means there are more Walkers on the table as well, and especially on those Locations.
- Don’t have multiple Leaders on a Location unless you’re specifically allowed to do so. They’ll kill each other! Leaders are particularly high-scoring if you have a lot of Survivors on a Location, so try to get them to their own Locations in isolation. I’m assuming that Leader-on-Leader violence is part of the show.
- Location abilities matter a lot! Some are good, and some are you should specifically avoid this Location Location abilities. Mostly the ones that score bonus negative points if they’re overrun. Try to avoid those when possible.
- There are double-Walker icons on certain cards; ideally, you’d place nothing near those. You really want those to form the edges of your play area so that they’re never adjacent to a location, otherwise they’re going to get overrun.
- Burn truly nasty cards so that you can play them again as better Locations or Occupants! Or at least place them in better spots. Especially if you get stuck with a nasty Walker or something, you can Burn cards and try playing them again later with better configurations. Just remember what you were planning to do with them! (Or, you can use the Look action to fill in the gaps in your memory; this is where more players are sometimes helpful).
Pros, Mehs, and Cons
Pros
- It’s got a bit of the Sprawlopolis vibe to it! I’m into it. I really love placement games or games with a fun spatial element to them. My favorite remains Sprawlopolis, but this is certainly also fun in a different way!
- Plays pretty quickly. Most of the Button Shy games do! This one is punchy, though; I like it.
- I like the one-two punch of Exploring forcing you to place a Walker nearby; it makes the times that a Walker can’t be placed validly a fun benefit, and otherwise provides a fun challenge for players to overcome. It’s a nice almost-press-your-luck element, but also a complication that emerges. It becomes a puzzle to solve that’s fairly self-sustaining within the larger puzzle, and I like that. It’s a nice twist.
- Love how portable the games are. Button Shy wallets remain the gold standard, though Allplay’s tiny boxes are also high up on my list these days.
- I really like the Scenario book! Adds a few challenges, especially fun ones like the Betrayer, where you want to score as negatively as possible. That one is a wild ride, but the other ones are fun too! I love when games provide more runway if you want to try out new things or new features beyond just “get a high score!”.
- The muted color palette really lets the bright red stand out in a way that pops. Love that. It lets the red be red in a way that’s alarming and immediately draws your attention to that’s a problem; we need to fix it. Great use of graphic design and art direction for a game. Big fan.
Mehs
- For a “The Walking Dead” game, I never felt like The Walking Dead as a property mattered much to it. That might be a Pro for you or a Con for you! I was just somewhere in the range of “oh, this is just a very fun zombie game”. That’s actually fine for me, since I never saw any of The Walking Dead or its relevant spin-off properties Fear the Walking Dead or World Beyond or I think there must have been a third one. I don’t know anything about this game and just enjoyed the zombie threat without all the normal gore of a zombie game.
Cons
- Any game where you pick up and put down the cards a lot is going to make you regret not having a playmat if you don’t have one. I can feel in my mind’s eye players scratching at the edges of the cards with their nails and it bothers me.
- The 1 – 4 player count here is especially eye-raising, given that there’s no real difference (you’re just taking an action on your turn with perfect information about everyone else’s turns). This is just a solo game you can play with other people giving you advice and getting to touch the cards themselves, but whatever. I played it with multiple people and we still had fun; sometimes everyone just needs to be able to touch the deck.
Overall: 8 / 10
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Overall, I think The Walking Dead: Surrounded is great! I was pleasantly surprised that, as someone who knows actually nothing about the game, you can really just … play it like a pretty straightforward zombie game, but there are plenty of good challenges and puzzles to it as well! Unlike some of my favorite card games in this space, you do need to be careful since you’re usually picking up the cards more than other games. Protect those edges! Use a playmat! I’m also a bit suspicious of the whole 1 – 4 player count thing, but I imagine with licenses there’s some urgency from the partners to make it work for more players. And it does! It just works in the same way that Pandemic with open hands works. Everyone can make decisions together, but the player whose turn it is should lead, I suppose. That works for me. There are plenty of fun challenges and surprises in this little card game, so I’m glad to see that Button Shy has been keeping up its rigor across the various games in their portfolio. Plus, there are 18 additional scenarios if you want to mess with the rules a bit and see where that gets you. If you’re a fan of zombie games, you want a puzzle for your Walking Dead fanbase, or you just like spatial card games, you’ll probably enjoy The Walking Dead: Surrounded! I quite liked it.
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