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Nearly half a century has passed since director George A. Romero popularized the concept of the zombie apocalypse with Night of the Living Dead. Over the decades, the genre’s ravenous ghouls have lurched relentlessly from the big screen to comics, novels, and television.

But gaming may be where the undead have taken their strongest hold. Video games like Resident Evil and Dead Rising have long pitted players against hordes of reanimated corpses, while tabletop games are stuffed with more zombies than you could realistically hope to kill in one lifetime. So it’s easy to assume that there's no life left in these shambling old cadavers. But the genre still has the power to surprise, and recent tabletop release Hit Z Road is a case in point.

The first thing that strikes you about the game is its kitschy 1950s aesthetic. The box art shows a grinning couple tearing along a stretch of open road in a red convertible without a walking corpse in sight. It seems incongruous until you open the box and find that it’s part of an intriguing central conceit: Hit Z Road, it turns out, is a game cobbled together by a young survivor of the zombie uprising. Having fled the overrun city of New York with his parents, he has modified his copy of an older board game to recreate his perilous journey along Route 66 to the comparative safety of California.

Game details Designer: Martin Wallace

Publisher: Asmodee

Players: 1-4

Age: 12+

Playing time: 30-60 minutes

Price: $40 ( Martin WallaceAsmodee1-412+30-60 minutes: $40 ( Amazon

Hit Z Road goes to impressive lengths to convey its improvised feel. Components are designed to look like bottle caps, poker chips, and old credit cards—the kinds of things an aspiring designer might be able to scrounge up in post-apocalyptic America. Much of the artwork looks like it has been hand-drawn using a whiteboard marker, and the back of the box even includes rules for the fictional travel game that was re-worked to create Hit Z Road.

But while the game’s physical design may be deliberately rough around the edges, the game itself is mechanically smooth and straightforward. Each player begins with a group of survivors and a set of resources: fuel, ammunition, and adrenaline. The goal is to make it across the United States through eight rounds of play with at least one survivor remaining. Along the way, you’ll scavenge supplies, add new members to your party, and confront hordes of the walking dead.

Each round begins with players drawing cards from a communal event deck, which is arranged in pairs to represent the different routes available on your travels. Each card comes with its own set of effects, usually granting you resources and forcing you to confront a pack of zombies. The random distribution of the cards means that some routes can be far more attractive than others, and on each round, you bid using your resource pile for the right to claim a route before your opponents.

Bidding is a precarious business, though, because your resources will help you to deal with emerging threats over the course of the game. Ammunition is useful in the simple dice-based combat system, letting you pick off ghouls from a distance while avoiding the threat of their grasping hands and gnashing teeth. Fuel allows you to flee a fight if the odds aren’t in your favor. Adrenaline lets you kill zombies more effectively or heal wounded members of your party. You therefore need to hoard these resources—but if you’re too conservative with your bids, you’ll be stuck taking the most dangerous routes to California. Spend too freely, however, and you’ll run out of gas or bullets just when you need them most.

This tricky balancing act, combined with an event deck that’s stacked into three stages of difficulty, makes for some genuinely tense moments. Hit Z Road ramps up the anxiety with each passing round; eventually you’ll be forced to decide whether preserving your dwindling supplies or the lives of your survivors is more important. It’s powerfully effective, and the fact that more difficult routes grant you more victory points to use in the event of a tie adds another layer of nuance to the decision-making process.

Hit Z Road is markedly more accessible than the heavier, more complex titles designer Martin Wallace best known for (like Brass and Age of Steam). The game is not flawless, though. The strong possibility of player elimination feels like the kind of thing designers have been moving away from for years, and while it’s thematically appropriate that your party should face the constant threat of annihilation, some cards kill off members of your group without giving you much say in the matter. Find yourself stuck with one of these when you’re down to your last survivor and you’ll be knocked out of the game in a way that feels arbitrary and unfair. (Guess how I lost on my group’s first play?)

There’s also a light story element in which choosing a particular early route can have beneficial or disastrous effects in later rounds. On your first couple of plays, this feels dramatic and unpredictable, and the deck does contain multiple ways for these mini-plotlines to play out. But once you’ve come to expect them, they lose some of their thematic punch.

Imperfections aside, though, there’s plenty to like about Hit Z Road. It’s straightforward and fast-playing enough to appeal to folks who aren’t hardcore game geeks, but it manages to squeeze genuine tension and some challenging decisions out of its lightweight rules. Its gameplay, atmosphere, and especially its outstanding physical design make Hit Z Road a fun and fresh take on what might be the most overused trope in geekdom.