City of the Dead
City of the Dead, Rising Phoenix Games, 2016
There must be like 15 games named City of the Dead. This is the one that kickstarted for release in 2015, which it didn't quite make but honestly an extra year or even two is pretty standard for a novice designer's first kickstarter. It's a zombie survival horror game where you try to keep your community alive in whatever big city you choose as the setting.
Dice rolls are a standard 2d6+stat+skill vs. target number, with margin of success being an important factor. Attributes and skills are more or less the standard set that you'd expect for a modern-day game. The 1-10 range for both of those means that stats are fairly powerful in this game, and the gap in capabilities can overwhelm the dice roll. That goes double for attributes where the zombies excel - you're never going to win a contest of Stamina against the undead unless you have a really, really high score. They're never going to be able to out-think you unless you're really, really dumb or you're playing with the optional "clever girl" rule.
The rules for CotD are a lot broader than the usual zombie survival things, which focus mostly on physical prowess and terror/sanity. There are mechanics for social cohesion and building communities, as well as guerilla scientific research and investigation. A key piece of the system is finding and creating resources. The game abstracts resources into physical (ammo, scavenged tech), community (food, good cheer, defenses), and investigative (clues, research notes), each of which has sub-categories. You burn those to create practical effects: specific devices, reductions in the community's Chaos level, refreshing your character's Willpower, or skipping your ammo check. I would have liked to see some kind of fear/sanity mechanics, but I guess your characters have seen an awful lot of zombie already by the time the game starts - the term they use for the PCs is "Survivors".
A lot of zombie games basically have one monster in their manual. This one goes the direction of All Flesh Must Be Eaten instead, providing a bunch of different potential ways their zombies could work - everything from slow-moving rotting shamblers up to Frankensteinian retro-science constructs. They give suggestions for using vampires or werewolves instead, but I feel like we think of those as more intelligent and most of the book assumes the zombies are not. The game tries to avoid tying itself to any one scenario. The rules have some range to them, but they aren't quite flexible enough to drop into any modern-day setting that doesn't involve survival horror.
The art is a few mid-range illustrations at the start of each chapter, and a number of touched-up 3d renders of locations. I kind of suspect they're based on free 3d assets. It doesn't stick out as notably bad (unlike some old games with Poser art), but I'd probably give it a C-, especially compared with most modern games. The layout and organization could use a bit of polish as well.
The game is on DriveThru. You can usually get it discounted in October for the site's horror game sales. Eventually they're hoping to create a psychic supplement for the game, but that's been a long time coming.
