Get your adrenaline pumping as you work together to escape zombies in a Venetian carnival. Check out this preview of Carnival Zombie!
Designed by Matteo Santus and features artwork by Jocularis they are the co-founders of Albe Pavo. Carnival Zombie is a cooperative game for 1-6 players. A typical game can be played in 120 minutes. Definitely not a quick game. Originally released in 2013 the game sold out within three months! This has definitely become one of my grail games due to how hard it is to obtain. But, no matter because the revised second edition is now live on Kickstarter.
Editor’s Note: As of this posting the Kickstarter has successfully funded. Check the project to see if late pledges are currently available still.
In Carnival Zombie the story takes place in Venice, Italy during Carnival. The ancient manuscripts speak of a huge leviathan sleeping on the silt bed beneath Venice. They say that the Leviathan will awaken one day and break free of the stilts upon its back and sink the city. What isn’t known is that the leviathan the city rests on is a corpse. And it is waking up and the dead are rising from the watery depths. You must work together to escape the city or else die.
The gameplay is broken up into several day and night cycles. During the day you are free to roam about searching for weapons and survivors, healing your wounds, and building barricades. During the night you face the endless horde of zombies with various boss characters that change the rules of how zombies behave.
The game will conclude in one of four different finales. You can use the holy bomb to destroy the leviathan’s heart in fiery sacrifice. Or perhaps the airship is the way to escape the city. You can try to escape Venice via ship but the dead are underwater trying to drag you down. Or you can cross the bridge which is guarded by the army during the day requiring you to travel by night.
The Kickstarter edition will also add various modules of gameplay such as a traitor mechanism to spice things up. There is even a Milan map for even more gameplay options.
The good thing about combat in Carnival Zombie is when you shoot a zombie it dies. The catch is the dexterity mechanism involved in resolving kills. Each zombie is represented by cubes and when killed you have to drop the cube on a cardboard cutout of a tombstone. If the cube lands safely on the tombstone everything is fine. Any cubes that fall or get knocked off the tombstone immediately respawn and join back in the charge against your team. This makes for a stressful situation, the more you kill the more may rise again.
This Kickstarter is knocking out stretch goals left and right which are adding more bosses, playable characters as well as awesome miniatures for the above. The base pledge can be had for about $73 and the deluxe edition for about $110. If you are lucky enough to own the first edition a pledge of $16 will get you all the materials needed to upgrade your copy to the second edition.
I am excited about this project as I’ve searched far and wide for a copy of this game to no avail. Now everyone can get a chance to play this game. I definitely can’t wait for fulfillment in November this year (rough estimate). I’m looking forward to playing with my gaming group and I hope you check this project out yourself.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/62517270/carnival-zombie-second-edition
