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Zombie Bus box art
2018 Ranked #13,201

Zombie Bus

Semi-cooperative dice game has survivors defend a school bus, kill zombies, and rescue every cheerleader. Players can abandon the group for an individual win, but too many zombies at the bus defeat everyone.

Dice Horror Push Your Luck Variable Player Powers

Players

2-5

Play time

20-30 min

Age

10+

Complexity

2/5

Rating

6.42

Harder to teach Highly interactive Deep strategy

Overview

At a glance

Is this game right for my group?

ABG editorial scores on a 1–5 scale.

Teachability 2.3/5

Harder to teach

Replay value 3.9/5

High replayability

Interaction 3.7/5

Highly interactive

Player scaling 4.0/5

Scales well

Strategic depth 4.5/5

Deep strategy

See all 5 specifications

How it plays

How does it play?

A dice game with Yahtzee like rerolls, where players aim at cooperately defending a school bus against Zombies while helping cheerleaders to escape.

Core mechanisms

Key systems that shape the decisions players make.

Read the full game description

A dice game with Yahtzee like rerolls, where players aim at cooperately defending a school bus against Zombies while helping cheerleaders to escape. In addition, players may flee from the scene, betraying the others to win the game on their own or be turned into zombies themselves. Zombies have different abilities, like stealing a die from the players when in play. They all require different die values and numbers to be rolled to be discarded. Some will be attracted by players, who attack them, others ignore them and stay focused on the bus. Each zombie attacking a player reduces their capability to reroll by one. If this is decreased to zero, the player is turned into a Zombie him- or herself and will stay in front of the bus for the rest of the game, eliminated unless another player finds a cure. Whenever there are four or more zombies next to the bus at the end of a turn (including players turned into zombies), the players lose. So distracting zombies from the bus, is sometimes a necessity. In addition, player gain loot tokens, whenever a zombie is killed in front of them. However, the winning condition is not killing the zombies, but rescuing all cheerleaders from the bus. For this, rolling star symbols is required. Cheerleaders are tokens, placed in two stacks on the bus, each showing two to four stars. Only cheerleaders on top of a stack can be rescued any given time, rolling the corresponding numbers of stars. Some zombies make use of stars impossible, while they are in play. In addition to the stars and different symbols, required to kill the zombies, there is also a die phase with half a bullseye. One die rolled on that side is worthless, but two could be used as a wild for any symbol to kill a zombie. Players also have a special character ability, e.g. one gets two loot tokens instead of one for a zombie killed in front of them, one can ignore the "no star" restriction of particular zombies, etc.

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Editions

Language and publisher variants currently recorded in the catalog.

Edition Year Language Publisher / Region
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Player resources

Rulebooks, player aids, FAQs, and solo resources.

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Game and edition data

All specifications (5)

Play and group

Players
2–5
Best with
2–5
Play time
20–30 min
Age
10+
Complexity
2.0/5
Credits and catalog connections

Credits

Designers

1
Christophe Lauras

Artists

1
Mary Pumpkins

Publishers

1
Sweet Games

Linked items

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