Tiny Epic Zombies
I’ve played this twice and…it’s not awesome. Which is a shame because the Tiny Epic games have been instabuys for me until now.
TEZ has several modes of play: co-op vs zombie player, co-op versus a zombie “AI,” competitive versus zombie player or “AI” and so on. And the map and player objectives are super-variable. It’s got a lot of replayability baked in! And Almes’ games are typically very densely designed. You get a lot in a Tiny Epic box.
The TEZ rulebook is bad. It’s missing stuff, there are lots of vague rules, there are some completely unexplained bits, it’s just generally underbaked. A little more time with a developer or editor or someone I suspect would have patched this mostly up. But it feels lazy. And it’s not fun as a result.
He borrows quite a lot from other games, like always, and the bits and bobs work on their own. But it comes together in a not-fun way. The zombie player doesn’t really have enough to do, but the zombie “AI” isn’t really smart enough. The human players can get seriously boned by a strong early draw of cards by the zombie player. The whole thing feels really swingy, but the swing is between “the humans absolutely cannot win” and “the humans might barely scrape by.”
Dunno. I might also just be tired of zombies. Dead of Winter was the last game where I really liked the genre, the vibe, and the gameplay. Cute meeples with Uzis and chainsaws aside, this one just didn’t do it for me. :-/
Amen to lazy editing/writing/playtesting. After TED2E and TEZ i’m done with Tiny Epic :(. i love the format but hate the huge holes and bugs in the rules.
I have it, but haven’t even read the rules yet. I also have TEW, tried reading the rules, didn’t get very far and haven’t played it yet either. Not saying I’m 100% with Tiny Epic games, but I’m done for now. The Mech one didn’t sound interesting at all.
Aaaand I have time to back out of Tiny Epic Mechs, which I just did.
Mixed feels but it’s probably time to get off the Tiny Epic train now.