That TCG Blogger

One of the greatest fears in today’s society is Coulrophobia or more commonly known as, the fear of clowns. The masters of horror over at Twilight Creations noticed this and moved to create a seventh expansion to their hit “Zombies!!!” game based on this fear. It was a big risk, there have been no Zombie Clown movies in popular media to my knowledge (yes I do know about It and the Killer Klowns from Outer Space) and Zombieland hadn’t been made at that point so they were creating something new rather than bring an old movie to a table. With that in mind, the final product was good as a board game; but it could not meet its expectations as a “Zombies!!! “ expansion set that the fan base wanted.

Send in the Clowns was a great design to be a stand alone table top game. It introduced some great new game-play, but its potential was held back by the fact that it was an expansion and had to follow the rules of the previous game. It tried to make itself more chaotic with the funhouse addition and clown car, but as chaotic as “Zombies!!!” is, it would not allow for the chaos of a zombie infested carnival. Besides, TC had already taken the idea of staying at home and trying to survive the zombie apocalypse and made it a stand alone in ZombieTown, which was really good. They could’ve used the same concept, made a full board with zombies, three-dimensional props for buildings, and different weapons to choose from for more customization.

“Zombies!!!: Set 7 Send in the Clowns” was disappointing to say the least. The basis of the whole game was that any new player could easily pick it up and love it without any learning curve to it, much like the original Parker Brothers games. Then we throw in the seventh expansion into this happy family and chaos breaks loose: the rules for the funhouse become extremely confusing and are kind of vague in the rulebook, the “grab a car and run” objective is kind of boring once all of the zombie clowns are gone and there’s no PVP options, and not to mention that the zombie clowns themselves are confusing just for the fact that they don’t do anything. Yeah, they just take regular damage; the first time I read the rulebook for set seven I had to reread it in order to make sure I wasn’t missing that part. Every additional zombie figure has done something up until now: the radioactive ones were hard to kill, the dogs moved fast and did less damage, and I’m willing to bet money that the new zombie kids in set 9 will do something important. It just makes me want to ask the designer ‘What’s the point?’ sure you can’t have a carnival without clowns and sure it adds a lot of flavor, but if you’re putting the money into making them why not make them do something?

Now okay, I may have been a little rough in this review, but all in all this was a decent expansion. Not the best one in the series by far, but still worth your money to pick up. The clown figures (even though they are useless) look really cool and the art is mind blowing in this set with special references to the Simpsons. Besides, if you are as die hard a fan of Zombies as I am I’m sure it will have a place in your heart.

FINAL REVIEW SCORE: 7.5 / 10

-That TCG Blogger-

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