This cleverly designed game caught my eye this morning: Zilight: Pax Romana pits ancient Romans against zombies in a survival card game. It’s York-based designer Stephen Hart’s sixth Zilight game, and uses more or less the same mechanics as the others. Like the others in the series, it’s a solo game, taking half to three quarters of an hour to play; oh, and also like the others, zombies abound. However, the Zilight games are all a little different to each other, so it’s definitely not a case of seen one, seen ’em all; additionally, Stephen says, ‘We have also streamlined this edition of Zilight which makes for faster combat and smoother game turns.’
At its most basic, when you buy this game, you get rule book and character sheet (for recording stats) PDF files, and that’s it (well, there are some optional extras—more on those in a just a tick); just add one standard deck of cards, a few d6 dice and a handful of counters to be able to play it. The engine that drives the game is drawing from the card deck, and a chunk of the rule book translates each card into specific game actions: for example, all club cards represent items you come across, diamonds are locations in the game, spades enemies, and hearts are people you encounter (good and bad).
Those extras that I mentioned: if looking up the card number and suit in the rule book is too much, you can get hold of custom cards, shown in the image above (note the suits and numbers in the top left of each card).
If you’d like themed dice (the Roman numerals are a nice touch) and counters, those are available as add-ons too. Other campaign extras are PDF or physical versions of all the Zilight games.
Game Play
You have twenty-eight days (hmm, where have I come across that number before in relation to zombies?) to defeat the zombie horde—or at least, your aim is to survive that long.
Each day consists of three phases:
- Morning—roll two dice to see how your day’s going to play out. E.g., roll 4 and an additional zombie will join every zombie you happen to come across; or 10 means all enemies have 1 deducted from strength and health.
- Daytime—draw the next card from the deck and encounter it…
- items you keep: these could be, for example, a weapon that adds to your strength, or a medical chest, restoring health points;
- enemies you fight using various permutations of dice rolls;
- locations you can choose to pass by (at a cost) or search, i.e., draw more cards and encounter them; and
- people you can take as followers (so that they can add to your strength in battle, or provide benefits when in certain locations), help (and get a reward for doing so), or ignore (typically at a cost), depending on who they are.
- Evening—here you decide if you’re going to bolster your own resources or work for the benefit of all Rome.
And, well, that’s it—repeat for twenty-eight days. Or for as long as your health is above zero!
Wrap Up
I like the ingenious way the game uses a standard pack of playing cards, though I do imagine the custom cards would be nicer to play with—for a start, no flicking through the rule book to look up the card’s meaning.
This is a very compact game, and well thought out. Quick, with plenty going on to stop it from becoming dull.
You can find out much more about the game on its Kickstarter page, including descriptions of and links to the previous games.
And finally, this line in the description made me smile: ‘All [Zilight games] are historically accurate to their periods and locations (apart from the zombies of course).’
Note: this is based on preview information, and the published game may differ.
About the Author:
When not playing boardgames or blogging about them, L.N. Hunter keeps himself occupied writing fiction: a comic fantasy novel, The Feather and the Lamp, sits alongside close to 100 short stories in various magazines and anthologies, and on websites and podcasts (see https://linktr.ee/L.N.Hunter for a full list). L.N. occasionally masquerades as a software developer or can be found unwinding in a disorganised home in Carlisle, UK, along with two cats and a soulmate.
