Risk: Walking Dead Survival Edition

First thing’s first… This is the meanest board game I have ever played. Do not play this if you have anger problems as there are Non-playable characters that will ruin your day. Ruin it! Yes, you read that right. There are NPCs in this board game. Evil, brooding NPCs will turn your sure victory into an un-fun slaughter. Secondly, this game takes hardly any time in comparison to the original Risk: maybe 2-1/2 hours. Third, I’ve only played this game twice, and the first time, after it was over, we realized we had been playing it incorrectly in a way that screwed me over. Day ruined. Ruined!

Risk: Walking Dead starts like a standard game of Risk, only the NPCs (Walkers) get placed first. Cards are drawn randomly to show where their pieces get placed, and everyone else posts up in the open territories on the board. Simple enough. Then, more Walkers spawn, and sometimes they spawn in territory you possess. When this happens, you have to fight them off, Risk style. Sometimes you win. When this happens you get to keep the territory you call yours, minus whatever pieces you lost in battle. Sometimes you lose, costing you the territory. Ruined it!

At the beginning, if you have any Risk background, the board looks easily conquerable. That is, until the end of the first round comes and you realize you’re missing half of your original pieces yet you haven’t even attacked one of your actual opponents. This is the point where you cuss the board out for deceiving you. Then, for the next few rounds, more Walkers spawn at even more locations, making it nearly impossible to move on. It’s extremely hard to fight forward when you have to keep turning around to fight backwards. This game plays nothing like the original. It shouldn’t take you very many turns to realize your “opponents” aren’t your actual opponents. Your little brother sitting across the table, who swore to destroy in under five turns, now hangs his head solemnly. Out of the four of you playing, only one of you is not unhappy. And don’t worry, the game will change that for him too. Ruin it!

The game also ends semi-randomly. It doesn’t conclude with the total annihilation of your enemies. That’s seriously impossible in this game. There’s an Event Card that gets drawn somewhere between the 5th and the 10th turn. When that card gets drawn, whatever turn you are on is your last one. Now, instead of slapping your way through the hoards of zombies, you quickly realize the only way to score enough points is to destroy your neighbor. The same neighbor that helped you defend your territories when Walkers were walking over you will now look at you like a backstabbing traitor as you slowly roll over his one piece territories as if he was nothing. Even victory doesn’t feel like victory. Because it’s not. To win this game you have to be the least losing player.

Other than the inevitable lack of trust you’ll earn by playing this game, and the probable PTSD, it’s a great game. It’s coming on every camping trip I take for the rest of my life, strictly because it takes so much less time than it’s Original or Star Wars counterparts. I’ll give this game Four out of Five stars for gameplay, Five out of Five stars for making my little brother cry.