1195: City of Horror

It’s my birthday on Monday, so we decided that today would be a good day to celebrate it while people were around. As has been the tradition among the more geeky portion of my circle of friends, we decided to mark the occasion with a day of board and computer games, including Surgeon Simulator 2013, a failed attempt at getting Artemis to run due to the iOS versions not matching the PC versions, some NintendoLand (still a firm hit with everyone, and a good reason by itself to own a Wii U and four controllers) and, on the board game front, Descent and City of Horror.

It’s the latter that I’d like to talk about today, as it’s a very interesting game indeed, and quite unlike anything I’ve really played before.

For the uninitiated, City of Horror is a semi-cooperative survival horror game themed around a zombie apocalypse. Each player takes control of several survivors and then, over the course of four turns, moves them around, fends off zombies, makes deals with the other players and tries to end the game with as many points as possible. In order to acquire points, your characters have to be alive, and in order to ensure they are alive at the end of the game, they must have an antidote on hand and not have been devoured by zombies. To gain more points, you can grab food supplies or additional antidotes. Each character is worth a particular number of points at the end of the game, but loses value if they use their special ability, which can only be used once per game unless they “recharge” themselves using special cards or locations.

The gameplay is surprisingly free-for-all once it gets started, and reading the rules doesn’t really make it entirely clear how things are going to unfold until you start playing. Essentially what happens is this: everyone secretly makes a decision as to which of the game’s locations they are going to move one of their characters to this turn, then reveals this plan simultaneously. Then, zombies appear and move, and sometimes supplies in the form of action cards and antidotes are dropped in. Then, characters move in a set order; if there isn’t a space in the location they’re trying to move to, they end up in the streets in the centre of the board.

After this comes the tricky bit. Each location is “resolved” in order. Firstly, each player gets an opportunity to use the location’s special ability, which usually involves discarding a card to get some sort of benefit. This happens in turn order. Next, all players — even those who don’t have a character present in that location — can play action cards, negotiate, lie, cheat and backstab their way into an advantageous position. Action cards allow for the manipulation of stuff that is on the board — some allow you to move or add zombies to particular locations; others let survivors kill zombies; others still have special abilities such as guaranteeing safety from a zombie attack.

Each location has its own criterion for triggering a zombie attack — usually an upper limit of zombies milling around the outside of the building. If this criterion is met, then one of the characters present in the location will die after everyone has finished playing their actions — exactly which one is determined by a simultaneous vote among everyone present. Consequently, there’s a lot of scope for making deals with other players and then stabbing them in the back by siding against them when it comes to the time when someone has to be thrown out through the window into the slobbering hordes.

In many ways, it’s a nasty, horrible little game that is best played among a group of friends who won’t take it personally. If you’re not willing to be a complete asshole to the people you’re playing with, you will not succeed — it’s as simple as that. In many ways it’s rather refreshing — rather than being directly competitive based on skill, random elements or accumulated resources, it’s all about interacting with other people and determining where everyone’s weak points are. There’s a lot of bluffing, a lot of lying and a lot of outright cheating (within the confines of the rules) and I seriously doubt it’s possible to finish a game with everyone still standing.

It’s great fun, in short — just be sure not to play it with anyone who might get upset when you promise not to let them get killed and then promptly let them get killed!