Zombie Boardgames: When the Dead Die Hard
From Counterculture to Supermarket Shelves: What Do Board Game Zombies Tell Us?
For those who read French, you can find the the original article here.
“For all I know the brains are already dead. It’s still the idiots that are still alive.” — Dawn of the Dead (Romero, 1978)
The zombie is a superstar. Within just a few decades, this aberration of nature has become — against its own will — the ultimate gimmick of horror culture. Since its emergence in cinema during the 1960s (Repulsion, 1965; Night of the Living Dead, 1968), the contemporary zombie has taken many forms, rising from its B-movie origins to mainstream production.
The “Z” apocalypse has since spread across every cultural sector, from comics to video games, without sparing the world of board games. There is nothing surprising about this: the dead have always been more famous than the living.
Although Romero’s Dawn of the Dead / Zombie (1978) was adapted into a board game under the same title the very year it was released — perhaps the very first board game to feature this theme — the true wave of zombie games emerged in the early 2000s (the classic Zombies!!! dates from 2001), with annual production seemingly doubling during the following decade (BGG, 2023).
The zombie has become a genuine public-domain franchise, as bankable as vampires, pirates, or the planet Mars.
Disjointed Puppet
Before being consumed in turn by consumerism, the zombie first emerged in cinema as a metaphor — a pretext for thinking about the world.
In Romero’s films, true matrices of the genre, the zombie becomes the occasion for a subtle dialectic surrounding what society represses: that which we refuse to see, yet which resurfaces on our lawns and knocks at our windows. The zombie thus serves as a yardstick for our own humanity: if I can define what the monster is, I can, by contrast, define myself — and all the more so in extreme situations.
For while catastrophe can sometimes artificially reunite a “community threatened with implosion” (Daney, 1976), here it becomes a revealing basin for our dysfunctional behaviours.
Yet despite this capacity to speak about society, the zombie itself says nothing: it is merely a walking corpse, a trepanned figure emerging from hell. Like a monolith, it is a surface. Meaning arises instead from the treatment it receives at the hands of its “puppeteers” — whether filmmakers or game designers.
And while cinema has long asked the question, “what vision of the world are the living dead the custodians of?” (Thoret, 2007), board games seem largely uninterested in the political dimension of the zombie figure. They borrow its codes and symbols, but only rarely mobilise its legacy as a signifier. The rallying cry of the board game zombie appears to be: “Move along, there’s nothing to see here.”
An Unwelcome Neighbour
The zombie is everywhere. Even in the streets of Paris, whether during a Zombie Walk or on the set of a spin-off from a popular television series. The first consequence of this saturation is clear: the zombie figure has been hollowed out.
It has become nothing more than torn flesh, blood, and the simulation of horror. On the surface, nothing now distinguishes the political zombie from the carnival zombie. The zombie has become a caricature of itself, reduced to the function of an entertainment puppet. In doing so, it has fulfilled its destiny: to become a zombie “for real” — an empty, brainless creature whose sole purpose is to occupy space.
This geographical function is particularly evident in zombie board games, which very often revolve around territories to explore or defend, whether represented by a board, modular tiles to reveal, or cards depicting different locations.
Zombies are always the assailants laying siege to some kind of stronghold. They are the wandering monsters players must weave between to survive, the vermin infesting an overrun home.
In Zombicide and City of Horror, the game’s stage is the city block and its surrounding streets. In Zombie Kidz Evolution, it is a school divided into several areas. In Dawn of Zeds and Dead of Winter, it is a colony of survivors. In Hit Road Z, it is a series of “location” cards, each offering its own effects and items.
Most zombie games therefore revolve around territorial control. Humans and zombies are, above all else, fighting for the exclusive right to exist: coexistence is never an option.
Blasting Undead
There is undoubtedly a certain pleasure in gunning down zombies — indeed, it is one of the genre’s defining expectations.
Much like the faceless henchmen of action films (the moment an enemy puts on a mask, they lose their status as a fellow human being), zombies provide an opportunity to kill without guilt. The eradication of these non-humans takes the form of a legitimate hunt against a parasite, and board games fully embrace this cathartic function of lawful violence.
The zombie has become a convenient way of representing a global, depersonalised threat, embodying the perfect antagonist: it never has to justify its actions, there is no ambiguity regarding its intentions, and negotiation is impossible. The zombie is hungry and wants to devour any biped within reach. Extermination is the only possible outcome.
By consistently treating the zombie as an external threat to be eliminated, board games reinstate the notion of a simple dualism: there are good guys and bad guys, and both are immediately identifiable. This state of affairs likely reflects a broader shared anxiety, one in which it becomes increasingly difficult to disentangle the complex web of actors involved in real-world conflicts.
The terrors imagined by Romero, Polanski (Rosemary’s Baby, 1968), or Don Siegel (Invasion of the Body Snatchers, 1956) were subversive in their time because, unlike the classical cinema of the frontier — with its clearly defined boundaries between good and evil — they came from within. Hence the difficulty of pulling the trigger.
What would you do if the monster had been your child or your lover only hours before? Before becoming the living dead, zombies were human beings. Are they still — and to what extent? This recognition of the Other (and therefore of oneself) within the monster is one of the great absentees of zombie board games.
The Gestures of Survival
Let us remember: the zombie is, above all else, synonymous with the end of the known world. Its very existence amounts to an apocalyptic scenario from which there is no escape. The origin of this catastrophe ultimately matters little — an inexplicable force, a contagious virus, spores from outer space, a pangolin… Only the present matters — to survive — and everything that came before has ceased to exist.
In a doomed world, “the gestures of survival are the only ones left available” (Thoret, 2017): this is the great motif of the zombie universe. The world “before” has collapsed, and now one must find weapons, food, and supplies. Scavenging and discovering useful items are recurring mechanics in zombie games.
They are, in fact, the leitmotif of the genre: scarcity of resources, the inexorable pressure of the horde, and the anxiety-inducing hostility of the environment. In this respect, Dead of Winter distinguishes itself from other productions within the genre through its depiction of the meticulous organisation of a colony of survivors. Beyond its dilemmas and semi-cooperative structure, the game is, at its core, a story about exhaustion — a struggle against fatigue. To play is to resist the relentless tide that overwhelms and devours us.
To embody survival, zombie games draw upon two major families of meta-mechanics: chance and optimisation. Here, a die roll determines the outcome of combat; there, the coordinated planning of one’s actions dictates the efficiency of a turn. These mechanics simultaneously convey the constant uncertainty and the everyday micromanagement inherent to a world overrun by the living dead. In doing so, they allow players to endlessly replay the dawn of humanity itself: the survival of the tribe in a hostile environment. This may well be one of the reasons for the genre’s enduring popularity.
The zombie is a profoundly pessimistic fiction: we are condemned to inhabit a perpetual nightmare. Yet while this perspective is readily accepted as one of the genre’s fundamental premises, it is, once again, only rarely explored in board games.
Games tend instead to sustain the illusion of a possible “victory” over the zombies (Zombies!!!, for instance, can be won either by reaching the helicopter or by killing twenty-five zombies). In reality, while individual battles may be won, the war itself never can: a world of zombies is a world without end. The only question that remains — and one that board games have thus far shown little interest in asking — is this: how does one live without hope?
The Zombie Joke
It has been a long time since zombies were synonymous with terror. The very word horror seems to have lost its meaning. Our overexposure to the violence of the world — inseparable from the total invasion of our lives by digital channels — has undoubtedly contributed to this desensitisation. Board games, moreover, borrow very little from the register of fear: they lack the conditions of sensory and bodily captivity found in cinema, the atmosphere and ambience cultivated by role-playing games, or the environmental immersion offered by escape rooms.
As a result, the zombie of board games has naturally drifted toward a particular subgenre: the burlesque zombie. The marriage of horror and humour, both sharing the same cathartic function, has long demonstrated its commercial appeal. Tongue-in-cheek gore and macabre comedy have become established and popular cinematic genres, from Braindead to Shaun of the Dead and Zombieland.
Board games have enthusiastically embraced this humorous dimension. Escape: Zombie City, Zombie Kidz Evolution, Flashback: Zombie Kidz, Eat Z’em All, and the entirely unnecessary Oh My Brain offer perfect illustrations of this tendency. The zombie has now crossed fully into the realm of cartoons, completing its transformation into a parlour clown. Under such conditions, it becomes difficult to make it signify anything other than its own emptiness.
The Reassuring World of Games
The zombie tears bodies apart and devours flesh: at its core, it is a nightmarish creature. Yet board games have managed to invent a “civilised” version of the zombie, frozen in a single pantomime — arms dangling or stretched out in front of it, jaw hanging open, body awkwardly contorted.
It has been cast into a plastic miniature that can be touched, moved, and “managed.” The zombie no longer frightens us: it has become an empty shell under our control. Yet the living dead were terrifying precisely because they were uncontrollable. Excess, overflow, the collapse of boundaries — these are the defining characteristics of the zombie.
But the domestication of the zombie within board games reflects more than the transition of a countercultural figure into an icon of consumerism. It also reveals board gaming’s characteristic abandonment — whether through lack of context or lack of intention — of the political question. Of the zombie, games have retained only the form. They have turned it into a tamed beast: a generic enemy that is familiar, consensual, and harmless — the ideal form of alterity, precisely because it no longer disturbs anyone.
In this respect, board games merely follow a broader tendency within mainstream culture: the representation of a world sustained by the fantasy of total control. A world in which the living dead — those who should unsettle us because they challenge our understanding of reality and the rules that govern it — have become nothing more than variables to be managed, reintegrated into the ordinary order of things. By invoking the zombie without allowing it to disturb, trouble, or unsettle us, board games continue to contribute to our collective slumber.
Make no mistake: the zombie apocalypse is already here. Outside lies a hostile wasteland, and huddled within our small communities, all that remains is to lull ourselves with the spectacle of harmless death. Let the feast of brains begin.
References
- BGG, BoardGameGeek. The largest online database dedicated to board games.
- Daney, Serge (1976). “Matière grise”, Les Cahiers du cinéma, no. 265.
- Malausa, Vincent (2017). “George Romero, Horror as a Strategy Game and Combat Sport.” Lecture delivered as part of the George A. Romero retrospective at the French Cinematheque. Available online: https://www.cinematheque.fr/video/1164.html
- Rauger, Jean-François (2017). Introductory text to the George A. Romero retrospective. French Cinematheque. Available online: https://www.cinematheque.fr/cycle/george-a-romero-429.html
- Thoret, Jean-Baptiste (2007). Politique des Zombies [The Politics of Zombies]. Ellipses.
- Thoret, Jean-Baptiste (2013). Les Monstres Américains [American Monsters]. Online lecture: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0SKIcPp-0Nw
Games Mentioned
- City of Horror (Nicolas Normandon, Repos Production, 2012)
- Dawn of the Dead (John H. Butterfield, SPI, 1978)
- Dawn of Zeds (Hermann Luttmann, Victory Point Games, 2011)
- Dead of Winter (Jonathan Gilmour & Isaac Vega, Plaid Hat Games, 2014)
- Eat Z’em All (Loïc Lamy, Origames, 2024)
- Escape: Zombie City (Kristian A. Østby, Queen Games, 2014)
- Flashback: Zombie Kidz (Baptiste Derrez & Marc-Antoine Doyon, Le Scorpion Masqué, 2022)
- Hit Road Z (Martin Wallace, Asmodee, 2016)
- Oh My Brain (Bruno Cathala & Théo Rivière, Lumberjacks Studio, 2021)
- Zombie Kidz Evolution (Annick Lobet, Le Scorpion Masqué, 2018)
- Zombicide (Raphaël Guiton, Jean-Baptiste Lullien & Nicolas Raoult, CMON, 2012)
- Zombies!!! (Todd Breitenstein & Kerry Breitenstein, Twilight Creations Inc., 2001)
Films Mentioned
- Braindead (Peter Jackson, 1992)
- Dawn of the Dead / Zombie (George A. Romero, 1978)
- Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Don Siegel, 1956)
- Night of the Living Dead (George A. Romero, 1968)
- Repulsion (Roman Polanski, 1965)
- Rosemary’s Baby (Roman Polanski, 1968)
- Shaun of the Dead (Edgar Wright, 2004)
- Zombieland (Ruben Fleischer, 2009)
