How to play Marvel Zombies: A Zombicide Game & Review

Marvel Zombies is a scenario-driven, miniatures game.

Title: Marvel Zombies

Year Published: 2023

Designer: Fabio Cury, Michael Shinall

Publisher: CMON

Players: 1-6

Game Time: ~60 minutes

Set-up Time: ~10 minutes

Ages: 14+

Theme: Marvel Zombies (The Comics)

Mechanisms: Co-op, Dice Rolling, Scenario Based.

How to win: Complete the scenario objective

Game Description

In Marvel Zombies: A Zombicide Game, the hunger takes hold after many superheroes in the Marvel Universe have been turned into zombies. You play as these infected heroes and will be eating people to satisfy your hunger…and objectives within the game.

How to play Marvel Zombies

Learn how to play Marvel Zombies! I start with how to play the Zombie mode, then go through the main differences when playing in Hero mode.

Main Mechanisms

The main part of the game is its co-op nature. There aren’t any mechanisms as such, not gameplay ones. Technically action point allowance?

USP

Having a Marvel-themed Zombicide is the USP here. I haven’t kept up to date with the series of games but is this the first one where you can play as the Zombies?

Theme

I’m not up on the Marvel Zombies world either, other than that one episode of What If…? on Disney+.

But having Zombie versions of Marvel characters, be they on your side or against you is a lot of fun.

Setup & Rulebook

Setup is always annoying for scenario-based games. At least here you keep the same components around the boards and just switch up the tiles, which doesn’t take long. But you may wish to switch up the playable characters which adds a lot of time between games.

The rulebook is fine… It is a typical CMON rulebook and is very visual with clear blocks of text that are mostly shown in a sensible order.

I do feel they haven’t clarified some things enough, especially around gaining XP, opening doors, turning ravenous and other bits.

Components & Artwork

The cards and tokens etc are all nice and the art is of course very good.

The minis are high quality as they always are from CMON

Ease of Teaching

It’s an open information co-op so of course it’s easy to teach. There are only 5 actions and each one is very easy to explain.

The hard part is the enemy’s turn, but you can just run that yourself for the table and explain what’s happening as you go with a brief overview of how they move and attack before the game starts.

Similar Games

Well, Zombicide obviously! I believe there are 12 other base game versions of Zombicide including space, western, and medieval so there is something for everyone. There is also a DC version coming if you would rather have the Flash than Quicksilver, Aquaman to Namor or Batman to Captain America.

Is Marvel Zombies board game worth it?

Yes, Marvel Zombies is a very fun game that plays well at 1 to 6 players. Stomping around the board smashing SHIELD Agents as a Zombie Hero is a lot of fun.

Of course, you may also enjoy playing as a living Superhero defeating hordes of Zombies… I do! Although not as much as playing as a Zombie!

Marvel Zombies Summary

Positives

A fun and simple system which makes playing solo easy to manage.

Having Marvel characters make up the game means more to me than generic people or pop culture ‘rip-offs’ as seen in some of the other versions of the game.

It looks really nice on the table, especially as the board starts to fill up.

Being able to play as Zombies as well as the living is good fun.

Negatives

You do have some missions that live and die on lucky spawn card draws and die rolls.

I would prefer an official story/campaign to play multiple games with consequences for failure, rather than just a bunch of one-off games.

As always with CMON Kickstarter projects, the amount of content is overwhelming and I have no idea how to make the most out of it, or where to store it. There are 138 (I think) playable characters and I’ll only use 4 per game as I’m almost exclusively playing this solo. While it’s good to have options, I have no idea how I’ll get through all that.

Marvel Zombies Round-Up

A very fun game that I enjoy playing solo.

Rating

I give it 7/10