See also: Travel Zombicide review, Rulings from Guillotine
This page contains a review (of sorts) and analysis of Zombicide 2nd Edition, written specifically from the viewpoint of a relatively hard-core fan of first edition (a.k.a. 1E), targeted at other 1E players. This page assumes familiarity with 1E and won't make all that much sense to those unfamiliar with it.
Pics or it didn't happen, of course: the ongoing 2E photo album
"Streamlining," in the context of board games, carries with it a bit of mixed connotation. In some contexts it's positive and in others it means "we ruined the game." 2E does a great deal of streamlining, much of it positive and some of it less so.
Fatty zombies no longer spawn with an escort of 2 Walker zombies. Apparently this change was made in the Black Plague and Invaders variants of the franchise, but i wasn't aware of it until 2E. It's definitely a change for the better. The game accounts for this by spawning far more fatties than 1E, though.
No more sewer spawns. Spawning from sewers added some welcomed chaos to the game but was always fidgety. Even as as long-time player with at least a couple hundred hours of game time under my belt, i never really felt that i had really internalized the sewer spawning placement, and constantly second-guessed myself when doing it. i'm glad to see that this was removed. The chaos lost via this change was largely made up for via the addition of "rush" cards.
Combining items is no longer a thing. Combining items, such as a scope and rifle or a gas can and bottle, is no longer a thing. Items are found pre-constructed. This definitely helps move the game along and is a welcomed addition.
Wounds no longer cost inventory slots. Why exactly this change was made is a mystery to me. i liked 1E's handling of this. It fits thematically, it forces some interesting decisions, and it provides a great incentive to avoid getting wounded. Taking wounds in 2E feels shallow by comparison, as characters can take more of them (3 instead of 2) and there's no immediate penalty for taking one. (Also, the Medic skill was adjusted to be way, way over-powered, healing everyone in the Medic's space and giving the game a fantasy RPG feel in that regard.) That said, this change improves the coop flavor of the game because it reduces grounds for disagreement about which characters will take wounds when a group is attacked. FWIW, house-ruling Wound cards back into the game seems like it would be trivial to do.
Objective spaces and doors are hard-coded. The designers decided that hard-coding the location of all doors, objectives, and "pimpweapon crates" (the latter two having one of each on every tile) is of benefit to players. It seems like a boon for casual players but a kick in the testicles for hard-core players who create their own missions, as their freedom to manipulate the map without causing undue cognitive dissonance has now been castrated by someone else's idea of how doors, objectives, and weapons crates are to be placed around a board. (That said, the hard-coded placement of doors has not bothered me.)
Plastic character dashboards. i don't like these at all. It takes me longer to separate and plug in 40-odd plastic pegs in the dashboards than it does ot set up doors and objectives on 1E maps. The XP/AP sliders on the dashboards are exceedingly difficult to slide (this will presumably improve with usage) and are a piece which can break, without a trivial fix, long-term. The arrangement of cards on these, with the rear card slots holding the cards in a standing position, block the view to other characters. Many of the included missions use 9-tile maps, which take up literally my whole gaming table and force me to lay the characters out in a column. These dashboards ensure that i cannot clearly see or reach any character except the first one in the column. This is a serious usability fail, as far as i'm concerned. The smaller character cards are a nice change but the dashboards, in particular the sliders and the stand-up slots for inventory cards, are most certainly not. They don't even save any tabletop space over the older format, which is a disappointment.
More, faster carnage. 2E definitely moves faster than 1E in terms of damage-dealing capabilities and zombie spawn and activation rates. Though 1E is not boringly slow in that regard, it can take several turns to ramp up, whereas 2E kind of hits the ground running and does not let up. The addition of pimpweapon crates on every map tile (sometimes in the party's starting location) and the increase in power of pimpweapons compared to 1E helps ensure that the characters are well-equipped to deal with the quick uptake in zombie activity.
Map tile identifiers are now on every corner of each tile. On the surface this seems like a nice usability improvement over having the tile identifier hidden away in one particular corner. In practice, however, it means that we no longer have a way of referring to map tile placement without a picture of that placement. Since there is no unambiguous "top" to a tile, we cannot say "tile X3 rotated 90 degrees." This will complicate communication about custom mission setups, as those now require graphical assets for the maps because textual descriptions are now insufficient. e.g. this site's maps page relies on the 1E behaviour at a technical level, and is incapable of modeling maps created with 2E's "orientationless" map tiles. This change is an overall , as far as i'm concerned, apparently made by someone who has never needed to convey mission setup details to another player.
All for One and One for All. If one character dies on a mission, the mission immediately ends in failure. This change mechanically goes hand in hand with the changing of the oft-maligned (unduly so!) 1E targeting priority rules (a topic beaten to death elsewhere). Specifically, the loss of one character meaning loss of a mission requires the ability to shoot into a trapped character's space as a last-ditch method of trying to save them. This new mission-loss aspect keeps other players from gambling on unnecessary shots into such spaces. Speaking of targeting priorities...
Greatly simplified targeting priority. As each new type of zombie was added to 1E, the targeting priority chart got more complex. 2E reduces it to 3 priorities and moves Fatties to the front, so shooting Walkers is now normally impossible unless the Fatties can be removed. Overall this simplification is a welcomed improvement, but the placement of Fatties at the front, instead of keeping Walkers at the front, is debateable. Specifically, the new priority will become problematic for those who use the 1E/2E upgrade kit to introduce 1E's Berserker zombies into the 2E rules, as the combination of 2E targeting priority and Berserker Fatties make ranged weapons largely useless. The change in targeting Survivors, such that Survivors are now only hit on missed shots, initially upset me because it turns a formerly 100% coop game into a semi-coop by allowing (in effect) gambling on whether or not shots will hit another player's character. Other "coop-strengthening" aspects were added which balance that out, though, and essentially prohibit such gambling at the risk of losing the game.
Fixed (errr... broke) character count! 1E started out, in Season 1, with a flexible character count. As the franchise grew, that count evolved to a minimum of 6 characters with more being an option. 2E streamlines that for the worse, pegging the character count at 6. No more than 6, no less than 6. This certainly simplifies creation and balance of new missions, but also makes the game's expansion kit for 7-12 characters a bit of a kick in the teeth, as it cannot be used as-is with any of the as-published core game materials. The designers "kinda" account for higher character counts via the new "companion" rules, but, let's face it: lame. This inflexibility is a shortcoming i hope to see them eliminate in future missions and/or expansions.
Cars are more usable. i've been playing Zombicide since late 2015 and have never once used cars in my games because, frankly, they're a silly addition. The rules for them are outright insane. 2E improves the rules significantly, allowing for "careful" vs. "fast" driving in order to provide a way to avoid running over every other character, but they're still a silly addition to the game and i won't be using them. (Related: do an internet search for "shelf life of gasoline.")
No more outright useless cards. In 1E, the various food and water cards have no inherent use, serving only to waste deck space, waste search effort, or occasionally provide mission-specific objectives. 2E gives such cards a use - discard them to gain AP (formerly XP). With that change, none of the cards in the equipment deck are outright useless.
Zombie movement simplifications. The game's zombie movement rules have always been a source of fascination for me: they're simple enough that they're easily memorized and quickly resolved. They stay out of the way, allowing the player(s) to focus on the action. There is zero brain-burn or complex ananlysis involved in moving zombies around. 2E tweaks those rules slightly to make them even simpler. Most notably is that zombies which cannot trace an opened path to their preferred target will not move, as opposed to moving them (in 1E) towards a locked door and endlessly accumulating more zombies there.
In-building zombie spawning simplified. In 2E, zombies in buildings only spawn in "dark zones" which are clearly marked on each tile. This means less fiddling around when opening a building, but the lower spawn count does not reduce the difficulty because 2E spawns, as a rule, more zombies per card than 1E does. It also, however, makes the 1E tiles incompatible with 2E, requiring that players select and mark dark zones on their own.
Improved determination of the first character. This change is subtle but interesting and effective. The character who goes first is the one who's dealt the fireaxe card at the start of the game. i cannot count how many times i have had to, in 1E, expend my session's first action trading for a piece of door-opening equipment so that the next 3 characters in the queue are not stuck with nothing to do except wait for a character with such equipment to take their turn and open a path. This trivial change eliminates that bottleneck, guaranteeing that the party can immediately get moving.
Improved handling of ammunition. 2E both simplifies and improves the handling of the two common styles of ammunition (small-caliber "bullets" and larger-caliber "shells") and clearly marks each gun card with a symbol denoting which type of ammunition is may use. Ammo is, as before, unlimited, but the "Plenty of Ammo" resp. "Plenty of Shells" cards can be used with any weapons which have a matching ammo symbol. Whereas 1E hard-coded the list of weapons which could benefit each type of extra ammo card, this change ensures that weapons added in the future can benefit (or not, as the designers prefer) from those cards. They really should have introduced similar iconography for "may be used from backpack" cards to eliminate that verbose verbiage from them and simplify translation of the cards into the game's numerous target languages.
Improved plastics. 2E minis use a different plastic than 1E does. Not only is it firmer and "crisper" (for lack of a better word), but the Fatties and Runners are notably darker than Walkers, so unpainted Runner minis are easily distinguishable from Walkers. That distinction has always been a problem for me when Walkers and Runners are in the same space, so this is a nice improvement.
2E is largely simplified/streamlined compared to 1E. Sometimes, however, a bit of added complexity is called for. Namely...
Make Abominations Great Again. 2E adds more variety for Abomination zombies and adds very simple and configurable rules for giving them extra activations, thereby making them unpredictable and therefore more dangerous. This is a welcomed improvement over 1E, where all Abominations except for the Season 3 A-Bomb-ination are little more than a nuisance and mostly serve only to slow the party down as they must expend actions to move around or through the Abominations.
Going all-out on the shooter zombies. The new "shooter" zombie type introduced in the Fort Hendrix 2E expansion replace much of the removed complexity multiple times over, and are, by leaps and bounds, the single-most fiddly and complex rules in the game's entire history. They're like a combination of Seeker zombies (from the 1E Angry Neighbors expansion) combined with sewer spawns, but using semi-random spawn spaces instead of sewers. The rulebook has a full two pages of examples of how to play them (noting that Zombicide's examples have always been outstanding, covering nearly every conceivable related case which can crop up), and that speaks volumes of their relative complexity. Not only are they a tremendous challenge for the in-game characters, but a huge headache for the players.
This game has a couple significant graphic- and material-design fails:
Side views of the core game's spawn and equipment decks:
It may not be obvious if one is not familiar with the cards, but a player who has seen the cards before can easily distinguish their types from this angle. For the spawn deck, those with a black top are normal spawn cards, those with red are Extra Activations, and yellow tops are Rush cards. All of the Aaahh!! are in the top 6 or 7 cards of the Equipment deck and the following 6 or 8 cards alternate between weapons and non-weapons/non-ranged weapons. The bottom half of that deck is entirely non-weapon or non-ranged weapon cards. (We can distinguish between many non-weapon and non-ranged weapons by looking at the opposite edges, as many melee weapons have a white box near the top edge.)
That much information really should not be visible from the side of the deck.
Disclaimer: i have never had any desire whatsoever to play Zombicide in a campaign fashion, where characters carry over from one mission to the next. Part of Zombicide's charm is the fast and furious frenzy from blue to red threat levels within a single session, and then being done with it. Campaigns inherently introduce out-of-game bookkeeping, which is something i severely dislike. That said: campaign play has historically been an oft-requested feature by players who apparently enjoy such bookkeeping. Based on the 2E forum traffic, it seems that many players have skipped playing the core game altogether and jumped right into the campaign-based expansions. Shrug.
Because of ↑↑↑ that ↑↑↑, i'm largely unimpressed with the existence of the campaign sets. i started the Washington Z.C. campaign and quit after 4 missions for reasons covered in blog post #118044 on BGG (summary: boringly easy and too bookkeepy).
The campaign sets have admittedly gotten off on the wrong foot with me, in any case...
Incompatible cards! The single biggest in the creation of the game's two (as of this writing) campaign sets is that each uses its own custom card backs for the equipment cards. i.e. it "is not possible" (for a given value of "possible") to mix the items from the core set and either of the expansions because the designers have decided that, "he may have ze chicken." That's a stark, thoroughly unwelcomed departure from 1E's long and glorious history in this regard, and the designers get a huge from me on this point. Sigh.
After more than a dozen sessions of 2E, i have yet to experience a single excitingly tense one for a simple reason: 2E scales the Survivors, their equipment, and their skills up to demigod level. Within just a few rounds of play, the team will be so well-equipped that the only threat they possibly face is a poorly-timed extra activation. (With the Zombie Link skill, even those can be mitigated or even outright used against the zombies.) My Survivors regularly end their turn without a single zombie left to activate. The ancient wisdom of Never Split the Party is irrelevant here because the characters are so capable on their own. i regularly have the party scattered across 6 different tiles, none of them at any risk because they're all drastically over-capable compared to their 1E counterparts.
Some examples of skills which have been drastically altered in 2E: Medic now works like a Mass Heal spell in a fantasy RPG, healing a wound from all characters in the Medic's zone. Tough now applies once per attack instead once per Zombie Phase, meaning that the Tough character can brush off, without injury, a single Runner in their space, no matter how often it activates. It also protects against one point of Friendly Fire per Attack action. i.e. Tough is now TOUGH.
In short, 2E is to 1E what 5E D&D is to 1E AD&D: all tension has been removed in favor of giving the players the feeling of playing demigods. Yawn.
More about this topic, including pictures of decimated playing fields, can be found in blog post #118434 on BGG.
All in all, i'm mostly satisfied with 2E's changes. The more heroic/cinematic flavor of 2E is, frankly, brokenly boring because it overpowers the characters so much that they have no real threats, so 90% of the tension and tactical excitement simply disappears. Mechanically i like most of 2E's changes. Thematically, however, they rather ruined it by turning up the Overpower It All knob way too high.
It is my hope that Guillotine Games will continue to develop the 2E product line in a matter similar to how 1E was developed. That is, as a set of interoperable standalone titles (analog to Seasons 1, 2, and 3) and/or expansion content for the base game (analog to Toxic City Mall and Angry Neighbors), as opposed to only developing incompatible sister products within the same overall franchise (e.g. Zombicide Undead or Alive). i hope that they do not continue to design campaign sets which cannot be mixed in with the core game, and it's highly unlikely that i would buy into more of those.