All Wound Up Review

I'll be the first to admit that i'm not the biggest fan of Twilight Creations' Zombies!!! board game. Having lost interest in board games for well over a decade, I was instantly drawn to the B-Movie pacakging. Catching my eye in the corner of a comic book store, Zombies!!! was incredibly alluring. Brilliantly designed with a keen eye for its target market, the Zombies!!! board game does seem to do everything right.

Until you play it for the fourth time with five people and it drags on for three hours with nothing but dice rolls and painfully slow movement of both players and zombies to think about. Everything is random bar the choice of where to place the tiles, the choice of where to place the zombies and tokens on said tiles, and the actual movement of the players and zombies. It's a shame - there's a good, light game in there that would be perfect for short bursts of play - but as the playing time drags on it becomes ever more noticeable that no one is ever really that involved with the game. It could easily be played solitaire, with a few rules for zombie movement thrown in to keep theplayer on his/her toes - it always feels as though other players aren't needed. So, having lost interest in Zombies!!! and discovering weightier and less random fare, I'd totally lost interest in the Twilight Creations range. Seeing All Wound Up for the first time, I was intrigued but never interested enough to actually buy it. Four comical wind up zombies are one hell of a selling point, but more tile-and-card-drawing based mechanics, coupled with the slightly unpredictable nature of the self propelled zombies were a definite turn off. Christ2mas came and went, but a visit to a family member early in the New Year brought a surprising late Christmas gift. Don't worry - i'm not going to go all Twilight Zone on you and throw in a random twist involving gremlins on a plane or a door to an alternate reality. This story is heading exactly where you think it is heading. That gift was All Wound Up. And having played a few times now, I can safely say that I think my reservations were for the most part unfounded.

The aim of the game is to race from one end of the board to the other - either from one gate to the next, or from one side of the gate to the other if the four board are set up as a square with only one gate on (this would mean the zombies completing one 'lap' of the board. As is often the case with Twilight Creations games, All Wound Up features a modular tile system. This allows the map to be arranged according to player preference every time, and as they are double sided it does allow for quite a lot of variation in board set ups.

Certain objects on the board (these are pre-printed onto the tiles) affect your zombie if your pawn walks over them. Mausoleums, when touched, force the player to take their zombie one tile back and place it facing any direction in any place on that tile. Graves see the pawn taken off the board and replaced (facing any direction) the next time an action is performed on the relevant zombie by the owning player. Brains earn the player one brain tile (these act as 'power ups' - each brain has a different power, and brains are earned either by taking a black one, or trading a currently owned brain in for the next level brain from the five ranked colours/effects on offer).

The card play is more involved than you would at first think. Dealing ten cards to each player, there then follows a round of passing cards in which each player attempts to improve the quality of their hand by passing cards to the player on their left. The amount starts with N+1 (N being the number of players) and reducing the amount passed by 1 each turn until only one card is passed along.

The player to the dealer's left then initiates a bidding round. This involves choosing a card type (available types include cards to wind your zombie and let him go with differing amounts of winds allowed, turning your zombie on the spot up to 180 degrees in a specified direction, and a card which allows an opponent to be turned 180 degrees in any direction), then laying all cards of that type on the table. Each player must then lay all of their cards of that type on the table, with the player who laid the most of that type getting to perform that action. After that, the next player initiates bidding, and bidding ends until all players have used their cards. Wild cards spice up the bidding a bit - they can be added to a card type in order to increase the bid and therefore win a round when it would have otherwise been impossible. The problem with this, as you may have gathered from the long-winded description, is that the card play is just a little too complex for the type of game that All Wound Up is striving to be.

With regards to the zombies themselves, it’s lots of fun to wind one of them up and let it loose on the board, cursing and screaming at it for drifting off or getting entangled with another undead pawn. Sometimes frustrating, often satisfying, but pretty much fun as long as you're playing with people like me who find it hilarious to watch a partially decomposed plastic figure wander noisily around the table. Beer helps, and surprisingly isn't that much of a hindrance - there are fixed rules for winding, placement etc. and once you let your little undead dude go there is no need for further dexterity or co-ordination on the part of the player!

One problem we have encountered is that the board tiles seem incredibly thin and are prone to warping, which does affect the movement of the pawns. And the pawns themselves seem a little fragile, although Twilight Creations do offer a free service to replace any that have become unusable. All Wound Up is quite a lot of fun, but definitely won't be to everybody's taste. It's a decent enough party game that thankfully uses its gimmick pretty well, with lots of parameters to ensure that the physical and unpredictable nature of playing with wind up pieces is always handled fairly. The biggest problem comes with the card rounds – the bidding/swapping rounds just seem bolted on to give the game a little complexity, and could have been handled in a much simpler way in order to speed the pace of the game up. It does sometimes take some serious card wrangling to finally get to wind up your decomposing zombie guy!

Even with this problem, Twilight Creations have definitely produced a game that has a lot of fun factor this time - and All Wound Up, unlike Zombies!!!, doesn't seem to outstay its welcome ten minutes into the game.

Summary

Presentation: As usual for Twilight Creations, the gloriously OTT art is striking and appealing, perfectly matched to its subject matter. The plastic inlay isn’t quite right for the components included though, which means you need to provide your own bags if you don’t want to be sorting out cards and brain tokens every time you play. 7.8/10

Clarity of Rules: All Wound Up seems simple on the surface but has some incredibly hard-to-digest rules, explained in the usual hamfisted manner by Twilight Creations. How hard can it be to get the rulebook right? 5.5/10

Game Length: The card play does tend to make the game needlessly drag, but this is forgotten once players are egging on their little walking dead guys. 8.2/10

Value: The neat wind-up zombies (replaceable for free direct from Twilight Creations!) make an unpredictable and nicely replayable experience. 8.5/10

Overall: The usual problems that plague Twilight Creations games are all present and correct – but for once the game is strong enough to rise above them. A mostly straightforward party game that is recommended for players looking for something a little different to the usual fare. 8.1/10 (not an average)

Review by Jason M. Brown