

Zombie Princess and the Enchanted Maze is a light game with straightforward design elements. Also: that knight can’t even fit through that door. This central castle looks pretty neat but is completely impractical during play. Otherwise, the first player to get their key to the castle at the center of the gameboard is the winner. That means that everyone loses, so everyone wins. They also can’t really win the game anymore unless all the other players become zombified. Basically, they no longer care about their key and move slower. If this happens, the Knight in question joins the legion of the undead-“is turned into a Zombie Knight,” according to the game description-and now have a different set of rules.
Zombie quest game free#
I can see the difference-the squares are smaller than the tiles, of course-but since moving along the squares is essentially always free on a turn, I struggled to understand why this distinction mattered.)Īs the game progresses, the Zombie Princess might bump into Knights on their journey, whether by tactical positioning of the board by other players or because of their own poor planning. As far as I can tell, this is a distinction without much of a difference. (The rulebook really stresses that the Zombie Princess can move a certain number of tiles, not squares on the tiles, but the Knights can move any number of squares. The ones in the center are part of the advanced variant. These actions are mandatory unless they’re impossible and can be done in any order. The player will add one of their tiles adjacent to their Knight, rotate an unoccupied tile or the castle, and move their Knight any number of spaces that aren’t obstructed. This is fairly like the Zombie Princess Phase except there’s no dice rolling. These actions can be done in any order.Īfter this phase-whether the player activated the Zombie Princess or not-the active player will go through the Knight Phase. (Unrelated Note: Zombie Princess Phase is a great name for a band.) This phase entails adding a tile adjacent to the Zombie Princess, rotating any unoccupied tile or the central castle, and then moving the Zombie Princess a certain number of tiles depending on which number they rolled. If they roll anything besides an “X,” they will move onto the Zombie Princess Phase. Moving her around the board is fun at first, but quickly starts to feel like a chore.Īt the start of each player’s turn, the active player will roll the Zombie Princess die. To achieve victory (and cheat death, as it were), players will collectively build and rearrange the titular maze, turn-by-turn, to either aid themselves or hinder their opponents. So basically, it’s the same end game conditions as most other games. The goal of Zombie Princess and the Enchanted Maze is for players to get their Knight to the opposite end of the board, retrieve a key, and then make it back to the central castle before the other players do. Where were my beige character pieces and nondescript wooden victory point marker? What about my supply of uniform, faceless meeples? Instead, the box was filled with oversized maze tiles inside and nifty-looking character standees. I opened it up and was horrified by what I saw.

Needless to say, it was a shock to my system when Andrew Beardsley’s Zombie Princess and the Enchanted Maze landed at my desk. One time I was asked to review a game about trading herbs and spices at a vaguely medieval market, but I turned it down. Sometimes it’s harvesting materials, but that kind of feels just like a type of farming so I’m not really sure it’s a separate thing. Or tracking market prices along shipping routes. As one of Board Game Quest’s resident Euro aficionados, I’m always being offered games with the best and most interesting themes.
