Welcome back to Cooperative Adventure Month! This month, we take on the role of the X-Men exploring the world to take out the Zombies!

You might remember we discussed Marvel Zombies: Heroes’ Resistance about a year ago: see our review here. In that discussion, we mentioned how we weren’t interested in Marvel Zombies (where the players assume the roles of Zombified Heroes), but we were interested in Marvel Zombies: Heroes’ Resistance (where the players assume the role of Marvel Superheroes fighting the zombies)!

In fact, the Marvel Zombies: X-Men Resistance was part of the original Marvel Zombies kickstarter, but that kickstarter required you to get stuff you might not want: like $240 to get all this stuff unrelated to Resistance mode! See above!

In the end, I was able to get just the Marvel Zombies: X-Men Resistance from GameNerdz.com for about $103 (with free shipping, since it’s over $79: I have also seen it on Amazon for the same price). So, now I have the two Resistance titles in the Marvel Zombies line and didn’t have to get anything else from Marvel Zombies that I didn’t want!

Unboxing

This is a bigger box than the original Marvel Zombies: Heroes’ Resistance! See the Coke can and number 2 pencil for scale.

It turns out that most of the box is miniatures.

Underneath the rulebook and a few cardboard cutout sheets are a large box chock full of zombies, heroes, and bystanders!

Also in the box are some deluxe character card holders (we’ll see more of them later).

Just lots of zombies.

Below the zombie box  (see above) are the rest of the components: cards, and a bunch of large cardboard rooms, some dice, some colored plastic blocks, and plastic stands.

Everything from the box looks really cool!

Components: Mostly The Miniatures

Admit it: you just want to see the miniatures!  The bottom side of the miniature box does a good job of labeling how everything fits back into the box. Thank goodness the minis are labelled!  We struggled with Tamashii’s miniatures when they weren’t well-labelled!  

The walkers (5 varieties, see above) are the most basic zombie (and easiest to kill). See above.

The Runners and Brutes (2 shown each, left-to-right) are slightly more buff zombies. See above.

The hardest zombies to kill are the zombified heroes (that you may or may not fight against) in puke green (except for Ice-Man who is clear blue)! You have Abomination, Dark Phoenix, Ice-Man, Sabretooth, Cyclops, and Psylocke (resp., left to right). See above.

The Superheroes that the players play are some X-Men in grey: Wolverine, Mystique, Magneto, Storm, Colossus, or Rogue! See above.

Part of the Marvel Zombies game is about rescuing Bystanders: there are 12 Bystanders (brown minis) in the game (6 shown above).

The total number of zombies is pretty daunting….

Each hero will have an ID Card with powers and tracking health and power level.

This game is also compatible with Marvel Zombies, so there are also “hero” cards for the 6 zombified heroes. We won’t see these again this review: we are only reviewing the Resistance version of the game (where players play the real Superheroes, not zombified heroes).

There are also two versions of the Hero/Zombie Hero/Zombie Bystander, depending on which mode you are playing.

The spawn cards bring out the zombies: see above.

The Heroic Traits are one-time powers you can get as an action.

The cardboard tiles are quite nice, as set scenes from the X-Men world!

One of the coolest features of this box is the plastic tray for holding all the hero information!  The tray has a space for 1 bystander (because you can have at most 1 bystander) and 2 Heroic Traits (because you can have at most 2 Heroic Traits) and a little plastic indicator for your power (very bottom) as well as plastic cube spots.

Overall, everything looks really nice in the components.

Rulebook

This rulebook is better than the one for Marvel Zombies: Heroes’ Resistance! That makes sense, since they’ve had a whole year to clean it up and make it better.

It gets about a B+ or A- on the Chair test: it flops around a little, but the fonts and big and the pictures well labelled. It also starts with a decent Table of Contents.

The Components pages are well-presented and well-labelled.

The Set-Up pages are next. It’s unfortunate that they span a page boundary: I wish the two Set-Up pages were on opposite pages. Nonetheless, it still worked pretty well.

And everything is very well-labelled and notated. There are tons of examples of play/combat that are all well-described! This is a very good rulebook!

It’s still a little daunting as a rulebook, as it has 48 pages, but the last half of the rulebook is Hero Mode and Zombie Mode Scenarios, so only about half of the rulebook (24 pages) is “rules”; the last half is just scenarios. 

The rulebook even has an index!

And the rulebook ends with a very nice summary.

This is a very good rulebook. It’s better than the previous version … even the paper is nicer! And that all makes sense: they’ve had plenty of time to fix it up. But it is very satisfying to have such a good rulebook: Table of Contents, well-labelled Components, Good Set-Up pictures, good rules explanations with example, index, and finally a nice summary at the end.

Good job guys: very good rulebook.

Gameplay

This essentially plays like Marvel Zombies: Heroes’ Resistance. 

There are some rules additions (rules for stairs and 3D structures mostly: see above), but it seems very very much like Heroes’ Resistance. Take a look at our review of Marvel Zombies: Heroes’ Resistance if you want more details on gameplay of this system.

Solo Play

Marvel Zombies: X-Men Resistance has a solo mode just like the solo mode of Marvel Zombies: Heroes’ Resistance (thank you for following Saunders’ Law). As with the previous solo mode, the solo player plays four Heroes, alternating between them. 

Basically, everything we said before (about Marvel Zombies: Heroes’ Resistance) applies here: the solo mode is a little daunting, as the solo player has to run four heroes! It works fine in the beginning, as the hero powers are simple. But, as each hero levels up and gets more powers, it becomes harder and harder to run everything well: it takes increasingly more time to context switch between characters! 

The game is still quite fun as a solo game. Just be aware of potential for heavy context switching (as the heroes get more powers) as the heroes advance levels.

In the end, despite the context switching issue, it’s still fun. You just have to be aware that context switching between four characters may be a problem for some people.  I think since the component quality is slightly nicer and I like the X-Men a little better, I think I had just a little more fun than Marvel Zombies: Heroes’ Resistance. I will play this solo again!

Cooperative Play

Cooperative play is great!  I adore that Marvel Zombies: X-Men Resistance has Player Selected Turn Order (PTSO) (See description here)!   This means that players decide the order in which their Heroes activate! Do we want to have Storm go last so she can wind-sweep the room (moving the unkilled zombies into the next room), or do we want her to go first to do a ranged Lightning Attack to make it so Wolverine doesn’t have to waste turns moving?  The choice is yours!  You choose the order!  (Technical note: this is coarse-grained PSTO, as you must wait until players use all their actions before deciding who the next player is.  Fine-grained PSTO, like The Reckoners allows order to change after every single single action).

Much like we saw in Marvel Zombies: Heroes’ Resistance, a little bit of role-play seems to emerge as you play: 

“SNIKT!  I gotcha darling.  That zombie won’t bother you anymore!”
“Logan, don’t call me darlin!  (Whoosh!) And you’re welcome for me swishing all 12 zombies into the next room!”

Everywhere we said about Marvel Zombies: Heroes’ Resistance is true here: PTSO is great, a little role-play seems to emerge as you play, and there is a nice amount of discussion.  This is a good cooperative game.

Differences Between Heroes’ Resistance and X-Men Resistance

What are the main differences between these two Resistance games? Price springs to mind first: $34.99 on Amazon for Heroes’ Resistance and $103.99 on Amazon/GameNerdz for X-Men Resistance. If you are unsure whether you might like this game and just want to try it out first, I would absolutely recommend buying the cheaper (3x cheaper) version of the game. It is still very good, the components just aren’t as nice.

The real major difference in price is because the X-Men version has tons of plastic zombie and bystander miniatures (right) whereas the Heroes’ Resistance has only cardboard standees (left). 

Luckily, both versions still have all the heroes (zombies and unzombified) as miniatures, so they still look good.

The X-Men rulebook is much better, both in content and quality of rules. But the original rulebook was still pretty good.

Of course, the X-Men version has nice plastic trays, and the original doesn’t.

And the X-Men version doesn’t have the dials for level, it has the little track at the bottom of the little trays. 

Probably the worst thing about the original Heroes’ Resistance is the little plastic “paperclips” that attach to the Hero card for Health and Power Level: these paperclips are a pain to move, and I am always worried I’ll tear the card. See above.

The X-Men version has little cubes instead in the tray: it’s much easier to notate. See above and below.

I have the read the rules of both, but I haven’t really found any major differences: they both still have Target Priority, Coarse-Grained Player Selected Turn Order, Power, Dice for Combat, Line of Sight … and they all feel about the same. The only major addition seems to be rules for when you are on stairs and/or moving between levels.

Basically, if no hero is on a level, those zombies won’t activate.

So, which one do you want? Once you note the price and component difference, it’s sorta up to you: do you want X-Men and lots of minis and amazing components? Or do you want mainstream Marvel heroes with a few nice minis (mostly cardboard standees) but for a very good price?

Why not both? You can play them both together you know … was that not clear? You can combine them! Play Storm, Wolverine, Spider-Man, and Hulk on a secret mission!!

Target Priority and Directed Assault

I still don’t like the Target Priority rule (see above from p23 of the rulebook): it takes away choice, and it doesn’t feel particularly thematic. I may have stumbled on a good compromise: Per combat, you can decide for yourself if you want to use Target Priority or Directed Assault. What’s Directed Assault? ONLY target any one bad guy! See, with Target Priority, your “hits” spill over to other zombies on the same space, so you can kill multiple zombies with one dice roll! That’s cool! But what if you choose to ignore Target Priority and focus on one bad guy? Then you can choose to NOT have your damage spill over at the cost of choosing just one bad guy! I like this so much better! I feel that’s much more thematic!!!

“Storm chooses wild lightning this turn, trying to take out as many zombies as she can on one space (use Target Priority and have hits spill over).”
“Storm now needs to stop a runner from overtaking a Bystander, so she uses directed lightning to target exactly one runner Zombie (ignore Target Priority using Directed Assault, but no hits spill over).” 

Look, this might just be me with this problem;  I just hate it when games take away my choice.  I feel like this could be a good compromise to the issue: it actually adds choice to the Hero and makes him feel that much more powerful!  I want to feel like a Hero and feel like my choices matter!  I hate it when I have to do “what the dice say”.

Caveat Emptor.  This game system has been out for a long time with 1000s of hours of playtesting, so the reasons for Target Priority are almost certainlly for balance of some kind.  I am not trying to undercut that: I get it.  I am personally trying to come to terms with a rule I don’t like and don’t find thematic: feel free to ignore the Directed Assault, but it’s a good compromise for me.

Conclusion

If you liked Marvel Zombies: Heroes’ Resistance, you will like Marvel Zombie: X-Men Resistance: they are essentially the same gameplay but in a different Marvel universe. Of course, you can always buy both and combine them! The nice thing about having both of these available is that you can choose whichever one speaks to you (“Avengers or X-Men?”) or which one speaks to your wallet (“$34 for Spidey or $103 for Wolverine?”). The choice is yours.

Having never really liked Zombie games, I am surprised how much I liked this. This is a good cooperative game system. I think I am overcoming my dislike of Target Priority by having a Directed Assault rule: this may just be a me thing, but maybe it’s something that will help you get into the game.