Let’s take a moment to consider: You’ve been trapped in your workshop for days now. You can make some forays out during the daylight hours to try to get some food, but every night there’s a wall of moaning, shambling bodies shuffling across your back yard and trying to tear down the barriers you and your team have erected, thin slats of wood nailed in layers in an effort to keep you and your compatriots from becoming, shall we say, vitality challenged.
Now, after fending of the swarms night after night and desperately trying to assemble your defenses in those precious few hours you have after waking from fitful rest, you see the sun drop below the horizon and once more the guttural moans of the living dead drift through the yard, and… wait… what’s… Oh Gad! You gag and almost throw up a twinkie before you manage to strap a bandanna across your face to filter out the hideous aroma that has assailed you. The zombies smelt bad enough before, but this is a new level of aromatic hell.
It’s the Night of the Noxious Dead.
Yes, my friends, Privateer Press’ latest offering from their Bodgers line – Zombies Keep Out – has an expansion, and it’s a real stinker. By that I don’t mean that it’s bad, I mean that it’s themed around a new type of zombies that’s so aromatically challenged that even the other zombies won’t hang around with them. Naturally, they’re called Stinkers, and just to make it even more fun, the Stinker models glow in the dark.
Night of the Noxious Dead comes with a new contraptions for your Gobbers to build, new Parts cards to help you combat them, and new Terrible Things cards with which to add these revolting stench-emitting undead to your yard.
Of course, the only way to figure out what sort of impact the Stinkers will have on the game is to kick the tires and light the fires. To that end, Pal Anthony was recruited.
We quickly found that there was a new level of challenge to finding places to put Stinkers on the board that wouldn’t instantly result in a surge of other zombies trying to get away from them. Normally zombies shamble forward either due to a Terrible Things card or by being shoved by the advancing horde behind them. Add the Stinkers to the board and suddenly your Brutes, Creepers, Leapers and Runners get additional forward momentum as they try to get away from the foul stench of the newcomers.
This technique served us well for awhile, but then we were caught between a rock and a hard place – we had no option other than to trigger some shambling, and next thing you know we’ve got bodies crashing against out barricades as they surge forward two or three times – Back row zombies are shoved into the mobs in front of them and then even further and next thing you know our defenses are crumbling.
We did complete the Meganailer, but…
Too little too late. We were overrun.
Zombies Keep Out: Night of the Noxious Dead opens up your options with more gadgets and parts cards, and ramps up the shenanigans with a whole new category of zombies, intent on odiferous mayhem. If you’re all about fighting off swarms of the living dead in a lighthearted manner, check in with you FLGS and order a copy.
