That is until I learned of Zombicide: Black Plague, which takes the standard Zombicide template and sticks it into a fantasy world full of swords and magic, which is much, much more up my metaphorical alley.
So here we are with my review of Black Plague, a standalone entry to the series. Taking off the beautiful lid reveals a secondary box containing a wealth of loot, including the main star of the zombie invasion, the zombies themselves.
There are rows and rows of miniatures here, and they all look wonderfully detailed. Of those minis six of them are the survivors who somehow look even more awesome than their foes, packing plenty of detail and a reasonable weight. Moving on the board itself is actually made up of a series of modular tiles that can be put together to form different maps. But the truly impressive additions are the player dashboards, plastic trays designed to house everything you need to play.
On the right and left are spaces for equipped weapons, with another zone next to the character card for armor. A row of slots is used to store the five cards you can fit in your backpack, while pegs let you keep track of wounds and earned skills. Finally an experience slider makes keeping track of XP a breeze. Quite simply I adore these little dashboards and firmly wish that more games included something like them, although I suppose that would ramp up production costs.
The survivors that you play as have no background, but they imbue them with a surprisingly strong sense of personality purely through visual design. The first page of the rulebook gives you a vague explanation as to the backstory, explaining that one day zombies simply emerged from the misty forests, led by dread Necromancers who had raised them from the dead.
