Survivalist is a Zombie-type board game where each player plays as one of the four survivors who are currently hiding in their homes. Players must venture out into the cold city streets filled with zombies and make their way into the middle of the city, where a safe zone has been established by the military. Along the way, players will find items that will help them survive the long and terrifying journey. Players can go inside different types of building, allowing them to salvage and obtain better items such as medicines, clothing, and rations. Players can help other players and work together to get to the safe zone, or they can use the other survivors/players as bait for the hungry zombie horde.
Rules can be found here: rules
Prototype 1:
TL;DR – Change logs:
- Spent 15 mins coming up with an idea for a board game
- Decided it to be a Zombie-style board game
- Race to the finish, players start at the left side of the board and would end at the right side of the board
- In the middle of the board was 4 vehicles, with helicopter being too OP (overpowered for non-geeky readers)
- Scratched the whole idea, and decided it to be a circular/round board game
- 2 circles, one outer and one inner. Middle circle would be the Safe Zone
- Across the tiles would be zombies
- Game wasn’t challenging enough, decided to add “Building” tiles with supplies
- Decided to put players beside the bridge tile for easy access and decision making
- Decided to use Cards for supplies; 3 different card sets then changed to 5 sets
- Game was still NOT challenging enough. End of class session
Coming up with an idea for a board game was a lot tougher than I expected it to be. I’m not a fan of board games, and although I played a lot of Snakes and Ladders when I was a kid, I never went back to it. This made the process even harder. After 10-15 minutes, I thought about something. And that was to create a Zombie-style board game.
At first, I wanted the game to be a race to the finish game, with only 1 player winning the game (or surviving the game). The idea is that, there are at least 4 players and all of them would start at the left end of the board. In the middle of the board were 4 vehicles. At the far right of the board would be the destination. The 4 vehicles included a bike, a boat, a car, and a helicopter (mainly came from Left 4 Dead). These vehicles would help players reach their destination. Sadly, the way I thought about it is that, whoever gets the helicopter first would have a huge advantage. So right off the bat I had to scratch that idea.
After a few more minutes of brainstorming, Jason (my partner at the time) came up with the idea of making it a circular board game. The point of the game now was to get to the center, which was the military base. Across the board tiles were zombies where players have to fight in order to get to the military base. He also mentioned that after 5 turns, the zombies would get stronger or tougher, making it harder for players to go through them.
We decided that there would be 2 circles; one outer and one inner. In the middle of the 2 circles would be the Safe Zone. To connect the circles together, we simply put “bridges” that players can go through.
I’m a very competitive player, and after thinking about it for quite some time, I felt that the game wasn’t challenging enough. So I thought about how it would be in real life (or in the movies). In real life, there would be buildings such as hospitals, gun shops, supply stores, etc. I decided to include that into the circular board game. Across the board, there will be tiles that will be considered as Building tiles. These tiles can be a hospital, an armory, or a supply store. The player can stop at these tiles to get some supply.
At this point of development, we didn’t really think about where the players would start. Jason suggested putting the players on the tile right next to the bridge tile so that they have the option of either traversing the outer circle to get supplies, or to go straight to the inner circle and risk it. I agreed at the time since it sounded like a good idea.
The question I had at the time was how would the players get the supply and how would we include that into the game. Then suddenly, I came up with the idea of using different types of cards. At first I suggested to have 3 simple card sets: medicine/cure, zombie/infection, and supply. If a player lands on a hospital, then the player gets a medicine card, and so on and so forth. Later on, Jason suggested making it 5 card sets instead of 3: medicine, zombie/infection, supply, weapon, and vehicle. I liked the idea, and we decided to include that in our board game.
We played the game for a little bit, but couldn’t finish it because we still did not create the card sets. At this point, I still had the feeling that the game was not hard enough. It wasn’t complicated or challenging enough to me. But since we didn’t have any time left to think of other ideas, we stopped here for today.
TL;DR – Change logs:
- Changed/moved player start location
- Created rule on who goes first and player turns
- Created and implemented Card sets
- Created and implemented Building tiles and Infection tiles
- Implemented Zombies and how they will infect players
- Created “Immunity-turn” clock which helps keep track of turns left
Continuing where we left off, I decided to play the game by myself again. Right off the bat, I realized that making the player have the ability to across the bridge immediately was a bad idea. It made things so much easier. We basically gave the players free mobility. And so I decided to fix this by having the player start at each corner of the board instead.
Another issue that I realized was, “how would I know which player to go first?”. A fix to this was to have each player roll a dice after setup and whoever gets the highest, goes first, and whoever gets the lowest goes last. Second highest roll would be the second to go, and 2nd lowest/3rd highest would be the third to go.
This idea seems to work really well, but now I found another issue. How many Zombies should I put on the board game and how am I going to do this? I wanted the players to have the ability to put the Zombies by themselves randomly across the board at the beginning of the setup. This process involved some simple mathematical thinking. First, I counted how many steps I wanted the board to have (48 for each circle), and then I totaled both circles together along with all the 8 bridges. So each circle has 48 tiles, 4 outer bridges have 8 total tiles, and inner bridges have 20 tiles. The total is 128 tiles. Then, I thought about a reasonable number for distribution, and that number was 16 (around 12%-13% of the total tile). This solution allowed each player to distribute at least 4 Zombies on the board, assuming we have a total of 4 players. If there are only 3 players, then 2 players will be able to distribute 5 and the other will distribute 6. If there are only 2 players, then they distribute 8 each.
After fixing the player start state, player turn issue, and the implementation of Zombies, I decided to work on other mechanics and rules of the game. Since I did not create the card sets yet, I decided to work on that first. While creating the card sets, I realized that having 5 card sets would be quite annoying. I wanted to have the ability to shuffle the cards together, mixing the medicine, infection, and supply sets together. After shuffling them together, these cards will be put on top of the Building tiles. By doing so, this allowed the Building tiles to have a more diverse set of cards. So now Hospitals won’t just have medicine, it can have other supplies such as clothing and weapons. This also made the game a bit more challenging since mixing these card sets together would mean that an infection or a dangerous card would be included in a Building tile, potentially creating conflict and a risk to the players.
After some time, I decided to split the whole deck into 3 different sets: Zombie Infection Set, Action Set, and Scrap set. Zombie Infection Set would be the set that will be automatically drawn from at the end of each turn cycle. This represents zombies getting stronger (like what Jason suggested). Action Set would be the set of cards that will be shuffled and put on top of Building tiles. This set contained 5 different categories of cards: Medicine, Weapon, Supply, Vehicle, and Danger. Scrap Set would be the set that the players will draw from at the beginning of their turn.
Having these card sets made it feel like the game was actually real. You have the Zombie Infection set which enables zombies to grow and “evolve”. You have the Action Set which simulates how survivors would loot buildings to find useful items such as medicine, clothing, weapon, and vehicles. It also simulated how looting a building can be very dangerous through danger cards. And then you have the Scrap Set, a less useful action card that simulates how survivors loot while they’re moving or travelling from and to a different location (like crossing the freeway and looking inside empty cars to find a bottle of water).
After working on some of the cards, I decided to think about the Building tiles. This wasn’t as hard as the card sets. There would be 10 Building tiles in total. 4 of which would be a Supply tile, 3 would be a Hospital tile, and 3 would be an Armory tile. This didn’t really matter since the Action set will be shuffled anyway, but I wanted the game to have different variations of buildings. Along with this would be 10 Infection tiles. This can be thought of as an area filled with zombies, or an area that is contaminated. In short, this is a dangerous tile.
After the tile mechanics, I thought about how the players would get “bitten”. The obvious decision was to have the zombie land on the same tile of the player (or vice versa), and have them fight. The way the fight mechanic works is very simple. The player rolls a dice and if the player gets a 7 or above, they win the fight. If the player gets a 6 or below, they lose. If the player loses, then he/she will have 3 turns to cure the infection. Since I thought about making this a bit complicated later on, I decided to create a timer to keep track of the turns. I came up with the idea of an “Immunity turn” clock. This clock will have numbers ranging from 0 – 10, and these numbers represent how many turns the players have left before they turn into a zombie and lose the game. The arm of the clock will have to be manually moved around.
After implementing all these changes, I showed and described the game to my mom. She wasn’t really interested, and so I didn’t play the game with her. It was getting late and so it was time to end this prototype session.
Prototype 3:
TL;DR – Change Logs:
- Changed Zombie-Player infection interaction
- Changed Zombie Infection set effects
- Changed board size and card size
- Allowed players to stay in a Building tile for 2 consecutive turns
At this point of development, the only thing that I needed to do was to work on the mechanics and rules. There were still some aspects of the game that were quite unclear. For example, a problem that I thought of is, what if there are 2 Zombies on a single tile and a player lands on it? Does this double the infection that the user gets or not? I decided that having 2 Zombies on a single tile will NOT double the infection the user gets. Instead, the user must now try to get a roll of 8 or above, instead of a regular 7 or above. If another Zombie (total of 3) comes on to the same tile, then the dice roll needed to not get infected will be 9 instead. It’s basically +1 to each dice roll for every Zombie. Of course I had to limit it to 3 Zombies per tile since the total dice roll a player can get would be 12. It would be really unfair to not let the player have a chance.
Since I included a system where a Zombie Infection card is automatically drawn at the end of each turn cycle, I needed to figure out a way to make it so that if the card drawn was meant to be drawn by a single player, then it will affect all players instead. In order to do this, I added some extra effects to the Zombie Infection set. If a card is drawn by a player, then the player will get that effect. But if it’s automatically drawn through turn cycles, then there are certain different circumstances that will happen. This made things a bit more fair since it’s not only one player being affected by an infection.
After playing the game numerous times, I realized that the card sizes were a bit too big for the tiles. The board itself is 18×18, and the cards that I currently created were 3×3. The tiles were at least around 1.5×1.5 inches, and so whenever I put down cards on top of tiles, it lead to it covering 2-3 tiles instead of just one. The solution I came up with was obvious, make the card smaller (2×2) and the board bigger (22×22 or 24×24). This hasn’t been implemented yet, but I plan to do so in the future.
The last tweak that I thought of was the ability to stay in a Building tile for 2 total turns. Basically, if a player manages to land on a Building tile, he/she has the option of staying there again (not moving) next turn. This will give the player the ability to loot 2 useful Action cards, and it also simulates how one would stay in a safe place in a real Zombie apocalypse.
Creating this board game was surprisingly fun, albeit difficult. I’m not a big fan of board games, but I’m glad I managed to stick with it (even though it still needs some tweaks). The game as it is right now looks like it has a solid standing. I’ve managed to create at least 15 cards, and although it’s still not finished, the rules on how to play it are there already. Creating 50+ cards would be troublesome and will take a few more hours of development, which I sadly do not have. I wanted the game to be very competitive. I wanted it to simulate how people would act in real-life. Are you going to help others? Or are you going to save yourself and use others as bait for the Zombies? The choice is yours.
Current look of the game:
A New Player Has Arrived 