Designer Diary: Zombie 15': Left Alone

Zombie 15' is a game that we — Nicolas Schlewitz and I — designed as a strong co-op for four players. And by "strong", I mean a game in which the players always have to watch for each other or it will be the end of them all.

During the Kickstarter campaign in early 2014, backers asked us to add a solo variant. It sounded a little weird to me since a co-op game is initially designed to be played with several players and not alone. Otherwise, the word "co-op" loses its sense, in my opinion. Anyway, Nicolas was enthusiastic about it, so we just said "Okay, let's give it a try!"

Of course, we could have gone the easy way: Control all four Heroes by yourself and...good luck to you! But that would not have been really interesting, so Nicolas had this excellent idea to write down fifteen new scenarios that each feature one Hero at a time, which would collectively serve as a prequel to the game. It was brilliant because it gave further background to the story of the game.

At this time, I had no spare time to work on it, so poor Nicolas wrote all fifteen scenarios by himself...

A few weeks later, we finally found some time to play the scenarios together, but we quickly found out that we had a problem as we were able to finish the scenarios in less than 2'30"! Here was the trick: Each time I performed one action, I said "Your turn", so I was getting a new turn with four new actions. That way, if I drew some zombies during a search or because of a zombie, it became much easier to fight them with three actions left. That's why we came up with this new Solo rule: When you have only one Hero, you must perform at least three actions before the end of your turn — but you can still have the fourth action if you need it.

We played the scenarios again with this new rule, but they were still too easy to complete. It was okay for the first one as it's meant to help the player find his bearings again, but we had to find a way to make the next scenarios harder. We tried starting with four zombies in the street of every tile at the start of the game. This time, it became too hard because the Hero spent his ammo too quickly. So we decided to mix tiles with three zombies and tiles with four zombies, and it worked pretty well!

We also had to pay attention to Hordes. As only one Hero is on the board, Hordes have to be smaller. First, we put only one zombie into the Horde box. Then, we raised the probability of drawing a Horde card in the Zombie pile by keeping eight Horde cards while removing almost half the other Zombie cards. By doing this, the odds of getting a Horde card increase to one out of three, ensuring that you'll meet lots of tiny Hordes (8-10 zombies) during a game. You always have to be prepared!

And that's one of the difficult parts of the Solo game — always being ready to fight a Horde. I'm sure it will give you some challenges during the first scenarios...

Once the difficulty issue had been solved, we "simply" had to go through the scenarios Nicolas had written. Some were too easy, so we added more Zombies (alternating threes and fours) or more Terrain tiles. Others were too difficult, so we had to remove some tiles. We tested every scenario many times, playing side-by-side, then sharing our feelings.

Nicolas Schlewitz (l) and Guillaume Lémery testing the solo game

Another interesting aspect of this expansion is the fact that you'll play each Hero. Maybe when you played with your friends, you didn't notice how crippling their downside was. Well now, you'll clearly feel it!

In particular, we had a problem with Sai Fon's disadvantage (no careful search) as it is a real pain and it makes Searches too random. We tried lots of things (such as making Searches easier by adding more tiles with Search areas, or searching every time we could), but finally, we had to add another Hero to counterbalance this. In this way, if Sai Fon hits a really unlucky Search, she can be helped by another Hero (if that Hero isn't too far away, of course).

Other Heroes were meant to be together to make the game harder, such as Vance and Trevor, so we couldn't help creating scenarios in which you'll have to play both of them on your own! You'll have to make good decisions on who to play and when, in addition to managing the Search pile so that each Hero has a chance to loot.

Everything else you need to know is that we really wanted to use all the components from the box, so there is an Alpha Zombie to beat and heavy machine guns to help you in certain tricky situations. The finale had to be epic, so it takes all the tiles, and poor little Snow will have a lot on her hands to save her friends. There's no other scenario in the expansion when time is so crucial...

That's all folks!

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I hope this diary made you curious about this expansion and has you wondering whether you'd be up to the challenge. To be completely honest with you, I don't play solo games (when I'm alone I play video games), and I wasn't enthusiastic about this expansion because I had the feeling we would break the game (as I felt cooperation was its heart and soul). But developing it was a great time and gave me a brand new experience of Zombie 15', with many new interesting challenges you have to face on your own — most of the time even harder than in the co-op game!

If you liked this diary, you can also read the one I wrote about designing the base game on the official Zombie 15' website.