Undead Escape began as a concept for a card game where the players are racing against a timer. The biggest question was whether that timer was round-based or real-life time-based. We ultimately decided on a round-based game because we thought that it would allow more strategic play, with the cost of being a little bit less hectic overall. Pretty quickly, this concept of a race got mapped onto an apocalypse theme. Not only did this give us a good metaphor for the players to relate to, in knowing the genre and the tropes that come with it, but it also informed the next steps in our game.
After deciding on our zombie theme, now it was time to come up with the actual mechanics. As we discussed, we began to realize that the game we envisioned was meant to be played with a board and a die, as opposed to the card-only game we initially decided on. We found that having a board with physical tokens for each of the players allowed for a clearer visual of the genre, and we found that to be true in playtesting. Each time we playtested, everyone who had not played the game before had an audible reaction to the first time the zombie encroached on the players. Initially, we had a d6 pretty baked into most of the card functions. Players could loot by rolling a d6, and on a successful roll, they would find helpful items, player could try to push themselves in running away from the zombie, roll well to move forward extra spaces, roll badly to not move at all, etc etc. After discussing for a bit, we thought the random chance was a bit too prevalent to allow for the level of strategy we hoped to achieve, so we decided to tone it down. This is around when we made the decision to move from a single ambiguous action you could take on your turn, to giving the players the choice between three different distinct actions. Those three actions, which remained largely unchanged, were:
– Move: you move forward one space
– Loot: you pick up a card from the deck
– Activate: you play a card from your hand, activating its power
We found that this action choice system allowed for a lot of strategy and reaction to what was happening with the game. So, we had a basic turn of play, options for what players could do on their turn, and now we had to decide on some of the other logistics. The next thing we tackled was the setup.
Initially, we planned on players beginning with two cards. We thought that the limited options in the player’s hand would incentivize taking the Loot action rather than just moving every turn. We decided that players would start on the third space of the board, whereas the zombie would begin on the first space. We figured that this would give the players enough leeway at the beginning of the game to feel like they could meander rather than move away from the zombie. Next, we went to focus on the board size. This, we quickly noticed, would almost entirely determine the average length of our game. With the zombie moving one space every round, we estimated that the sweet spot would be somewhere around 12-15 rounds, so we put a rough estimate of 12-15 spaces that should be on the board in the final game. At this point, we had a good enough grasp of our game to determine that it would probably work best with 2-4 players, so we labeled that. With all of our base mechanics and our setup finished, we felt good to move on to more of the nitty-gritty details. The million-dollar question of every card-based game: what do the cards do?
The zombie theme made it easy to come up with the theming for the cards, and often that gave us an idea of where to look for mechanical concepts. The first couple of things we thought of were things that would change the speed of the players and the zombie. As we thought about movement, though, we realized we were kind of at a binary: playing a card to speed up meant that at minimum your movement speed was being doubled, and things that slowed opponents down would fully halt them. With this, we rethought the movement mechanic. After discussing a couple of options, we decided that it would be best to make the player have a base movement of 2 spaces per action. That way, speed could be increased by a minimum of 150% and lowered by a minimum of 50%. This made us feel a lot better about having many of the (ultimately 36) cards in our deck have to do with changing the movement speed of either the player or their opponents. With this change though, we needed to rethink both the zombie’s movement speed, where the players started, and the length of the board. All came easy: the zombie also moves 2 spaces every round, players start double the distance away from the zombie (5 instead of 3), and the board length increases to a range of 24-30. Later down the line, 30 felt too high, so we settled on 24.
With what we thought would be our last big change to movement, now we could focus on the cards that wouldn’t have to do with speed. We added the medkit, allowing players to heal themself from injuries inflicted on them that would reduce their movement. We also added the Cure card, which allows a player to turn themself back into a player if they have been infected. Later, we would add the Betrayal card, threatening players who made it to the safe house, and its counter card, Evidence. When writing the rules, I realized there was a big benefit to going first, and as a result the Bicycle card was born. Finally, during playtesting, we realized it could be fun to try and stop another player from activating one of their cards, so we added interrupt cards, which would interrupt the player’s Activate action. And now that we had all of our game components, we figured there was only one thing left to do: playtest.
Our first round of playtesting went better than we thought. Examining the game as a player rather than a designer made us both able to find problem spots and balance for cards we felt were too weak or too strong. The biggest revelation to come from our first playtest was that the card economy was not worth it. because the zombie moved two spaces every turn, we found that after spending a single action to loot for one card, we ended up with a hand of 3 cards to choose from and a zombie right behind us. Basically, if we didn’t get an Adrenaline card (to increase our movement speed), we just had to spend the rest of the game moving every single turn. Obviously, this was not fun, so we made this change: players now begin with a hand of 4 and draw 2 cards every time they take the Loot action. Thus, in theory, the player could start with a hand of 6 (by taking the Loot action on their first turn) and have a variety of options before beginning to move from the zombie. We found this to be a really good change. Both of us spent more time looking at our cards and considering them, as opposed to the singular obvious option of moving every turn. However, we still got to a point where I was stuck with no useful cards in my hand and the zombie right behind me. In short, I was still stuck just taking the Move action every turn.
What came next was our final large change to movement: Players now take a base movement of 1 space every single turn, no matter what they do. The move action now gives an additional space of movement. This, we found, was another fantastic change. Getting a free movement every turn gave us security in feeling like we could take actions on our turn by strategizing how close the zombie would be. This allowed us to loot more, and play more cards, which, in a card-based game, is ideal. After this playtest, we were pretty much set to go into playtest day, so we just made minor tweaks before playtesting a third time. We made a wording change to Adrenaline. Previously, Adrenaline added a +1 to your overall speed, meaning you could play cards and still move forward 2 spaces, which we felt was a bit overpowered. We toned this down by adding a caveat of “if you take the Move action on your turn” to the card’s description. That way, the player needs to commit to moving while they have the boosted speed, and other players could counterplay more effectively. After this game is also when we had the idea for counter cards. We decided that we were ready for playtest day.
Overall, we were pretty satisfied with our playtests. They went really well, and the players all said that they had fun! We also got some very valuable feedback. Some, we implemented between games, and others we intend to add for next week. From a helpful bit of feedback from Ash, we changed the zombie’s movement from 2 spaces/turn to 1d3 spaces/turn. This gives some variability to its movement and allows players to make riskier decisions with the hope that the zombie just rolls low. Additionally, we changed the safehouse to not have enough room for everyone, incentivizing players to go on the offensive with their fellow players, and making it truly a race to reach the safehouse. We edited Adrenaline yet again after a particularly impressive use of it from Bruno, where he ran away with the game, literally. He made it pretty far ahead, and essentially made it a race for second between the other players. We edited it to be effective for 2 turns rather than 3, and it seemed like that made it a little bit less powerful, especially in the sense that it made doing anything besides moving for those two rounds incredibly detrimental.
For next week, we have a few changes on the table. We thought that it might be fun to make the zombie into a playable character, adding a bit of asymmetrically to the game. This would mean, though that we would need to make the zombie more robust, probably making another deck solely for them. We also have thought about adding spaces on the map for the first player to reach them, incentivizing competing for first place from the get-go. Overall, though, we’re pretty satisfied with how Undead Escape has turned out! Hopefully, these last tweaks should bring it right to where we want it to be.
