Recent reviews by PuddingSenator

Devs seem to have completely abandoned this other than adding new games (and ads for the new games). Controller support has been "coming in the next few days" for two entire years. Just sad at this point.

Please for the love of god fix the wallrunning. Please. I want to love this game so much but it's so incredibly frustrating and annoying to play right now when it constantly drops me to the ground because I didn't get the angle precisely 100% perfect for the game to figure out I'm trying to wall run, so I just bounce of the wall plummeting to my death, then get reset and have to run on flat ground for 45 seconds to get back to the same wall, where the game again decides not to let me wall run. Either have wallrunning be manually activated or make it much more forgiving in the automatic activation. As-is the game is so frustrating and arbitrary in what it decides you're trying to do that it's nigh-unplayable.

I don't mind difficulty but I have absolutely no clue what criteria the game is using to decide whether to let me wallrun or not. It gives no feedback or instruction, just drops me to my death over and over.

The game itself

If you aren't familiar with Dawn of the Zeds, it's one of the best solo games ever designed (also works well coop). It's much in the vein of a tower defense video game, where you are trying to defend a small town from a relentless encroachment of zombies. The goal of the game is simply to survive a certain number of turns without losing the town to the zeds. The game provides a very cinematic experience and it's very easy to find yourself getting caught up in the story that plays out on the board. For maximum enjoyment you should really hope to get caught up in that story rather than in the relentless pursuit of victory, because while good play will certainly improve your odds, you will often lose even when playing well. If you can accept that and enjoy the ride, you will have a blast.

The board game itself is also quite expensive (around $70 at time of writing), so this is an excellent way to try it out at a much reduced price.

Also if you're confused about how the rulebooks are structured, the intention is that the game has 6 "levels" of play--basic game, and levels I-V, of escalating rules complexity. It's best to play at least once at each level so that you have the rules down pat before trying to add on more. You don't need to win at a level before moving on--the levels are more about rules complexity than difficulty--just understand the rules.

• The Basic Game rulebook is the place to start and will teach the first level of play
  
• The Level Up! rulebook guides you through each of the other levels I-V and gives you the new rules you need to add at each level
  
• The Setup & Epilogue book tells you how to set up each level of play (not needed as much here as the setup is scripted, but you might want to know how the decks are built for planning purposes), and provides some thematic epilogue paragraphs explaining what happened to Farmingdale depending on the circumstances of your loss (or, rarely, win). They're not particularly well-written or exciting and pale in comparison to the stories told through gameplay, in my opinion.
  
• The A to Zeds rulebook is a comprehensive list of every rule in the game, with an index at the back that you will likely refer to often to find the answer to a question
  
• The Farmingdale Dossier provides more detail on specific units (heroes, super zeds, etc.) and counters. Not needed until you encounter them.
  
• The No Brains! rulebook provides an even more basic version of the game than the Basic Game. As opposed to the Basic Game-Level V progression where all rules from previous levels are kept and the extra rules simply add on to what you already know, the No Brains version of the game has completely different rules that don't bear much resemblance to the real game. I wouldn't bother playing this version of the game as you'll have to forget all of its rules anyway. It seems the publisher agrees as more recent printings omit this book.

This DLC

The DLC is very well done for the most part and the problems I do have are nitpicks.

The Good

• Atmosphere/background is excellent
  Zeds at the window, a 3d model of the superweapon token from the game, lots of nice touches here.
  
  
• Scripted setup works perfectly (and this game is a bear to set up manually)
  Does a great job of walking you through setup including the different options you have to make the game easier/harder during setup.
  
  
• Extra components needed during gameplay are easily accessible, as are the various rulebooks
  
• The zeds cups are coffee cups

The Bad

• Snap points
  The spaces on the board each have one single snap point directly in their center. This is horribly unhelpful as spaces often have 4-6 counters on them, and they need to be spread out so you can see all of them, and often a counter will directly relate to another counter, so keeping them together is important. It is tremendously frustrating to try to place multiple counters in a space. Even more frustrating is moving multiple counters from one space to another, something you do constantly. You might pick up 2 zed units, a modifier token for the first zed unit, a damage token for the first zed unit, and a damage token for the 2nd zed unit all at once, try to move them to the next space only to have them snap together into a giant stack in the middle of the space, after which you have to try and sort everything back out again and remember which token went with which. Just get rid of the snap points as there's no way to make them work in this game.
  
  
• Mod was made using outdated files
  The game was reprinted in 2018 with some minor wording updates to some cards and rulebooks, mostly clarifications but in a couple of cases rules were corrected that were actually wrong. This mod uses the pre-2018 printing. Not sure why, maybe the publisher gave them the wrong files to work from, or maybe they only had a physical copy of the old edition? Not a huge deal, most of the changes are minor and if you want to make sure you aren't getting anything wrong you can look up the changes in this thread[boardgamegeek.com]
  
  
• No expansions
  The physical game has had 3 small expansions. One of them adds 2 entirely new mechanisms so that might be a bit more work to add to this, but the other two just add new cards to shuffle into a few decks, so I'm surprised they weren't included here. Hopefully some enterprising individual (maybe me, I own the physical expansions but have never made a mod before) will add the expansion content as a workshop mod that adds on to this DLC, as it really adds some nice variety with the extra events and heroes.

Bottom line
If you are interested in tower defense/siege style games, this is an excellent game. If you love zombie movies and want a game that will make you feel the way you do when you watch one, this is an excellent game--put on the 28 Days Later soundtrack and have a blast. There are some improvements to the DLC that could be made, and maybe they will be, but it's still well worth the price as is.

An incredibly complete product. If you want to learn guitar, this is for you. If you already know but want to get better at specific techniques, or improve your reportoire, this is also for you. Pretty much perfect