Zombie skirmish game The Walking Dead: All Out War puts real horror on your table

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I’ve always found something perversely appealing about the prospect of an undead apocalypse. From an early age, I stayed awake to catch Living Dead reruns on late-night TV and kept a mental map of escape routes around our neighborhood, just in case they were ever needed.

My other childhood obsession was the Warhammer line of miniature battle games. That’s why The Walking Dead: All Out War seems like it could have been custom-made for me. Set in the world of writer Robert Kirkman’s original horror comics, it’s a skirmish-scale miniatures game where rival bands of survivors clash in a world overrun by ravenous reanimated corpses.

All Out War is produced by UK publisher Mantic Games, whose previous releases include Kings of War and Warpath, which were positioned as affordable alternatives to Games Workshop’s iconic fantasy and science fiction games. But while the Mantic's output to date has focused largely on disaffected Warhammer players, All Out War seeks to tap into the wider pop-culture consciousness.

As a product aimed at a broader audience than seasoned battle gamers, All Out War gets a lot of things right. It comes with a set of two rulebooks—one teaching the basics of play through simple scenarios, the other a detailed guide to the more complex aspects of the game. You’ll learn largely by playing, and this approach bypasses the drudge work of absorbing a chunky, intimidating rules manual before the fun begins. There’s also the fact that while the zombie and survivor miniatures come unpainted, they are pre-assembled, meaning there’s no need to mess around with craft knives and no chance to accidentally glue your fingers together.

But while All Out War goes out of its way to be accessible, it’s not simplistic. If you’ve played skirmish games like Necromunda or Mordheim in the past, you’ll find the basic premise familiar. You and your opponent will assemble small groups of characters, each with their own skills, abilities, and weapons. You’ll take turns moving your survivors around the battlefield, ducking for cover behind makeshift barricades, picking off enemies with gunfire, and bludgeoning them in hand-to-hand combat.

Combat in this game is quick and intuitive. It uses a set of custom dice, meaning there’s no need to consult tables or perform on-the-fly arithmetic to work out the outcome of a fight. Simply check your character’s melee or shooting stat, add any bonuses for equipped weapons, and roll a pool of dice. The amount of damage done depends on the number of success symbols you get, with your target making a defense roll to mitigate the effects of your attack.

Shambling horrors

All of this makes for an engaging tactical battle game, but the big difference between All Out War and games like Malifaux, Frostgrave, and Infinity is the presence of shambling hordes of zombies on the battlefield.

Each game begins with a number of Walkers—the comic’s term for the risen dead—on the table. More will appear over the course of the game, and they present a constant threat to both players. Move one of your models too close to a Walker and it will immediately close in for the kill, forcing you into close combat. Make noise by moving too quickly or firing a gun and you’ll draw the attention of nearby ghouls, causing them to stagger in your direction en masse.

And it’s when Walkers attack in numbers that they’re deadliest. A single zombie isn’t much of a threat, contributing a single die to hand-to-hand combat. A second assailant adds two more, while all subsequent attacking Walkers add three. Finding yourself pinned down in an area of the battlefield with multiple ghouls quickly becomes a death trap. What starts out as a simple one-on-one fight can end with your character disappearing under a scrum of grasping hands and gnashing teeth.

Walkers aren’t just rudimentary AI enemies, either; they can be used tactically by both sides. Each turn sees players reveal a card from an event deck, with certain cards granting players the ability to move zombies around the battlefield. You’ll also be able to lure them to specific areas by deliberately generating noise, turning Walkers into something between an environmental hazard and a proxy army. You can lay traps for enemies, clear spaces for your own characters, and constantly adapt to threats that evolve and escalate throughout the game.

Here's what comes with the base game. (Note: minis come unpainted.) Credit: Mantic Games

Ramping up tension

That sense of mounting tension is at the heart of All Out War, and it’s represented in the game by the threat level tracker, which increases as the battle intensifies. Event cards have different effects depending on the current threat level, which means that turns become more dramatic and dangerous as the game progresses. New Walkers spawn in greater numbers. Ghouls you’ve already dispatched rise to kill again. Your focus shifts from completing scenario objectives to simply not dying.

It’s a compelling approach, one that encapsulates the sense of panic and desperation at the core of survival horror. But in one respect, the game pushes its disturbing theme beyond the limits of my comfort. Carl Grimes, the 12-year-old son of the comics’ protagonist, is a playable character, and he’s just as liable to be shot, stabbed, or eaten alive as any other. While The Walking Dead comics and TV series haven’t been shy about exposing Carl to physical and psychological trauma, it feels different when you’re in control of his fate. As the father of a 12-year-old boy, I’m sufficiently bothered by the idea of gunning Carl down that I’d prefer to play without him in my games.

That’s a personal sticking point, and if I’m genuinely disturbed by it then perhaps it’s an indication that All Out War is an effective piece of horror. More general criticisms include the fact that it’s difficult to distinguish between unpainted models at a glance, and it would have been nice to have had Walkers and survivors cast in different colors of plastic. There’s also the game’s included scenery—a paper battle map and two-dimensional cardboard tokens representing vehicles and barricades—which aren’t much to complain about at a $50/£35 price point but which more serious miniatures gamers will want to replace with proper battlefield terrain.

These points aside, there’s not much to find fault with in All Out War. It takes a solid skirmish battle system as its foundation, then layers on setting-specific elements that work brilliantly to capture the mood of its source material. With a series of episodic expansions set to introduce new characters and scenarios, I’m excited to see where the game goes from here.

Listing image: Mantic Games

Owen Duffy

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