Zombie Bus

Players: 2–5 players
Play time: 20–30 min
BGG rating: 6.5

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 face 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.