Zombie board game series is dredged back up after its publisher sank, now with a pirate theme

Popular zombie board game series Zombicide is rising from the grave, and it's shuffling back onto our tables with a swashbuckling pirate spinoff set on the high seas.

Zombicide: Dead Men Tales is the franchise's comeback after its previous publisher, CMON, hit rough financial waters last year (if you missed the news, industry giant Asmodee then swept in to rescue Zombicide from an uncertain future). This piratical version of the game shakes things up with fresh traversal options, cannons, grog, buried treasure, and foes that come at you from everywhere – even under the waves.

While it's still early days, those selling points seem to be doing the trick for fans of the original (which is often viewed as one of the best board games for co-op players); the project just started a crowdfunding campaign on Gamefound, and it's more than 490% funded already as I write this. Zombicide: Dead Men Tales being handled by veteran studio Fantasy Flight won't be hurting those prospects either, as that factor certainly piqued my interest.

In terms of how it works, this is still a combat-heavy team game for one to six players that sees you face off against a horde of undead… but the twist comes from nautically-themed mechanics that have washed ashore. Characters can swing from ship to ship via rigging on what appears to be a modular board, fire cannons to take out larger enemies, seek out buried treasure, or consume copious amounts of grog (here called "Grom") for buffs mixed with drawbacks. Your foes also seem capable of walking the ocean floor to erupt from the beneath the waves, making it harder to predict where they might come from next. Good luck planning for that.

We enjoyed the core Zombicide game enough to give it four and a half stars out of five in our Zombicide 2nd Edition review, so Dead Men Tales has a lot to live up to. However, the pirate theme gives it one hell of a headstart. I think there's only so much you can do with the core, modern-day zombie experience without retreading old ground (short of adding Marvel superheroes, I guess), so finding quirky ways into that genre makes it feel suitably fresh. Well, fresher than the corpses you'll be fighting, anyway. The franchise has previous with this tactic, of course; it visited the Wild West a few years back with Zombicide: Undead or Alive in 2023.

Speaking of unique approaches, this campaign appears to bundle a few extra goodies in for good measure. Pledges include the core Dead Men Tales game, yes, but you can also pick up Zombicide's upcoming tabletop RPG (Plaguebearer) and graphic novels. That's enough to keep any self-respecting fan of Zombicide busy, in other words.

It's unclear when Zombicide: Dead Men Tales will be available at retail, so for now, your best bet is to pledge on Gamefound if you want to guarantee all that booty for yourself.

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