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Night falls. The remnants of humanity scavenge for necessities amid the abandoned landscape of their former lives, their eyes always watching for the shambling hordes that are never far away. In the pockets where people still survive, hard choices must be made: where to go, what to do, and who to trust.
The Walking Dead: Surrounded is a co-operative game for 1-4 players. Each turn, the players reveal a new card and add it to the ever-growing map. One side of the card features a new location, introducing a special rule or an opportunity to score as well as a location bonus to indicate valuable resources that survivors can gather there if they work together.
The flip side features four characters, with each character next to one edge of the card. Some are survivors, who earn points and help scavenge, while others are powerful leaders who can make a big difference on the field...if they're not struggling against each other for power. And of course there are the walkers, capable of spreading across the map in the blink of an eye.
Place locations and characters carefully to keep the walkers in check and the leaders in balance, all while maximizing the team's limited resources and trying to fulfill your scenario's goals. The survival of the human race depends on it.
—description from the publisher
- Engaging solo puzzle with tight spatial placement
- Rich scoring opportunities and high replayability through scenarios
- Clear sense of progression towards meeting the expert end condition
- Strong narrative through step-by-step playthrough
- Scoring system is complex and has many interacting rules
- Board state management can be tricky and requires careful planning
- Certain rules require memory of corner cases (e.g., leadership interactions)
- leadership under pressure, survival, and scoring through location control
- A zombie-infested suburban map where players place location and occupant cards and manage walkers, survivors, and leaders.
- instructional solo playthrough with tutorial-style narration
Mechanics (from transcript analysis)
- burn and deck manipulation — Certain cards can burn (return to the top or bottom of the deck) to control future draws.
- card placement (location vs occupant) — Each turn you place a new card either as a location on the board or as an occupant adjacent to an existing location.
- Deck Manipulation — Certain cards can burn (return to the top or bottom of the deck) to control future draws.
- end condition by difficulty — Expert difficulty requires at least six locations with a surviving leader by the end of the game.
- movement of occupants — Some survivor abilities allow moving an occupant card between locations while preserving grid adjacency.
- occupy vs explore actions — Placed cards can be used either as a location (explore) or as an occupant (occupy), influencing how you interact with the map.
- scoring and end-game — End-game scoring uses leaders and survivors at each location; surrounding a card can grant bonus points; overrun penalties apply if walkers outnumber survivors.
- survivor abilities and leader promotion — Survivors adjacent to a location can trigger abilities, including moving occupants and promoting a survivor to a leader.
- walker spawning — Whenever a new location/occupant is placed, a walker is spawned adjacent to that location, creating risk and adjacency dynamics.
Video topics + discussion points
Quotes (from this video)
- Born leader
- That's easily the best game of this that I've played to date
- Final score is 21 points and 7 leaders
- This is another 18c card wallet game from Button Shy Games
- We're going to be attempting this on Expert difficulty
- The trick is you have to decide which one you want to do before you flip that card
- The survivor camp has a special ability that can promote a survivor to a leader
- I think I'll go ahead and I'll place this right here