Game Trade Magazine - GTM #177 - The Walking Dead "Don't Look Back" Dice Game

GTM #177 - The Walking Dead "Don't Look Back" Dice Game

Reviewed by Jane Trudeau-Smith and Philip Smith

During all of our reviews, we use the same five criteria with a scale of 1-5 (5 being best) – with a maximum score of 25 for all.

This is the second game we have reviewed for GTM that has to do with The Walking Dead TV show, and we do not even watch it. But, I think we are going to go back and watch it after playing two games with its theme! Zombie games are becoming more and more popular lately – we have played quite a few of them this year – but we just can't get enough of them! So… On to the review!

This game can be played with 1-4 players! So if you are home alone one night… Hmmm… Zombies... Never mind... Maybe invite a friend! We, of course, played with two to review it.

The rulebook was small in size, but had sixteen pages of rules and examples to go through. We did have to refer back to it a couple of times during play to clarify certain things, especially during our first few turns of combat. However, once you do combat a few times it is easy from there. We gave it a 4 for Easy To Learn!

The game components are crafted well. During the game you are tracking the health of your character and also points earned; we liked that they actually gave you a score pad to track it. Many games nowadays don’t – they just tell you to grab a piece of paper – so the pad was nice. There are also 10 tiny-sized dice in the game, which we liked because when you have to roll most or all of them, it is easier to grab vs. regular size dice. That was well thought out so we gave manufacturing a 5!

When it comes to having fun, we did – and we actually laughed quite a bit – not because the game was funny, but because almost every time we re-rolled dice, we failed! It became comical! (I know many of us out there have had that type of day where dice just don’t “work” for you.) The only thing we did not like is that we could not get past one specific location, and we would have liked to play longer. We gave our fun score a 4!

The object of the game is to score the most points. You earn them by killing walkers (1 point each), and if you are the first to escape the current location, you get points (two points). Game setup is easy! There is a small board broken into six sectors that surround a location. There are four location tiles – The Farm, The Store, The Prison, and The Camp. You randomly choose which location to start, and place in the middle of the board. Each player chooses a character to play and places their token on the center location. On the score pad, you write down the character name and their starting health points. Health points can be different depending on how many locations you agree to play. At the beginning, you decide how many of the four locations you want to play (the directions say it can take about 15 min per location to play). Since we were new at this game, we decided to play only two locations, which started us off with 10 health points each. You then roll a die for each sector to see how many walkers start in each sector, and put that many walker tokens in those sectors. Last, you shuffle the “search” card deck and you are ready to play.

On each turn you do the following:

Draw a search card – some cards are weapons that you can use, other cards may give you something to do, like regain health points. Others put more walkers on the board – yikes!
Choose to move to another adjacent location (maybe getting away from walkers), combat (fighting the walkers), or pass and do nothing. If you choose to combat, you use one of your weapons. Based on the type of weapon, you roll the amount of dice shown on the card. For the sectors, you are trying to match the sector number and get as many of that number die as you can. if you are fighting in the middle location you are trying to go for a straight. Example: I decide to use my baseball bat melee weapon. I am in sector 6 on the board. I roll 3 combat dice per the cards direction. If I roll one or more of a number that I can use I can put them aside. So let’s say I roll a 5, 3, 2 – sector 5 is adjacent so I can put that die aside and move my character to sector 5 and kill one walker, OR I can take a chance and re-roll the 3 & 2. If I do not get another 5 – nothing dies and the whole roll is no good! Therefore, it is definitely taking a risk to re-roll. If you do manage to kill walkers, you take them off the board and score 1 point per walker killed. There are different rules for different weapons too so make sure you read the card and understand how to play it.
At the end of your turn if there are any walkers in a sector that are more than the location’s overload number they must be moved into the center location. Each location has a specific overload number. So, if the overload number is 4 – and sector 6 has 7 walkers after the turn is over, three of those walkers must be moved to the center location. If you still have any walkers in the sector you are in you lose one health – BUT if you are in the center location you lose one health PER walker – scary!
Then the next player does the same.

If either player draws the Escape search card they roll for a sector and put the escape token in that location, AND add more walkers to that sector. Once the walkers are cleared then the first person to escape receives two extra points. Once everyone is out then you can move to the next location.

We never made it past the first location because one of us died (lost all their health points). Even though the game continues with the other person playing (most points still win), the second player already had the most points so the dead person would never be able to win, hence game over. Even if you move to a new location the dead person stays dead. So for two players it could be hard to go through four locations we are thinking. But we may still try!

For timing we gave this game a 5 because it took us less than half-an-hour to play a location – now if we made it past that it may have taken longer, but still it is not a really long, drawn out game – which is what we like!

We are going to have to play this game again because we want to see if we can get past the first location! We gave it a 4 for the fact that we would absolutely play this game again!

The Walking Dead “Don’t Look Back” Dice Game receives 22/25! For more board game reviews, watch our show at www.tablefortwoshow.com!