Resident Evil 2: The Board Game (2018) - First Impressions

Way back in 2017 I contributed towards the Kickstarter for a board game adaptation of Resident Evil 2, with it shipping to me in late 2018. In the five years that have followed I've been painting the miniatures for it painfully slowly, but earlier this year, I finally painted enough to be able to have enough pieces for the tutorial and first mission. I always hoped I would get to play it with friends at some point, and last night (at the time of typing), I finally got a chance to do just that. I was a little unsure if it would be any good, as I have heard people saying over the years about issues they have had with it. I think my experience was a very positive one, had intended just to do the shortish tutorial mission, but six hours later and we had also completed the first mission also.

The tutorial, while in the instruction manual rather than the scenario booklet, is a valid mission as it is still part of the Resident Evil 2 storyline. This introduces the core mechanics of the game with a smaller gameboard, less enemies and less tension deck cards. I was concerned that none of the four of us playing would know what we were doing and end up frustrated. One of our group, Ron Waffle, served as the rulebook master, happily taken on the role of flicking through the rules whenever one of us had a question, sometimes to the frustration of others. Without him doing that however, things would have gone a lot less smoothly. Each of the four players gets four actions per turn. Moving a square on the board, using a weapon, picking up an item, opening or closing a door, and swapping or using items all take up one action. After a player has used their actions it is then the turn of the enemies, for the tutorial these were all zombies. This reaction phase has any viable enemies either attacking or moving towards the player characters. Finally, the player has to take a card from the tension deck, the majority of these cards in the tutorial were 'all clear' which basically means nothing extra occurs. To spice things up we also came up with a house rule of 'friendly fire', meaning if someone shot at an enemy on the same tile or past a tile a character was standing on, then there was a chance they would get hit instead of the enemy should the person using the weapon miss. This occurred just once, with Ron Waffle putting a round into the back of my sister towards the end of the first mission proper.
What I found interesting for both this and the first mission (and it appears all missions), is that rather than all be together, the players start in one of two different areas, with much of the mission having the players separated, until near the end when their paths eventually meet up. This almost gave a feel of two different games taking place on the same board, with me (Claire Redfield) and Andrew (Leon Kennedy) secretly hoping that my sister (Robert Kendo) and Ron Waffle (Ada Wong) would have the misfortune to pick the nastier tension deck cards.

We had originally intended to do just the tutorial, but we had so much fun that we all agreed that we would also do the first proper mission. This one took place in the Raccoon City Police Department, with the aim to get to the S.T.A.R.S office, having to first find the key to unlock it. Things began disastrous with both duos immediately getting set upon by zombies, zombie dogs, and in mine and Andrew's case, also a licker. It was quite funny, especially with poor Ron Waffle who throughout the mission repeatedly kept picking out the 'Prehensile Grasp' card, which makes him unable to move due to a zombie hand clasping around his ankle, and which he could only escape by rolling an evade at the start of his turn less it be forfeit. We all found it hilarious that around forty minutes into the game he had only managed to advance one square on the board due to repeatedly pulling this card and constantly rolling bad dice.
We realised that the game is all about teamwork, but that didn't stop my sister shutting Ron in a corridor full of undead as a punishment for him constantly missing his shots. Later, after I made a beeline for the exit to the level, I found myself beset upon by two zombie dogs with help far behind on a different floor of the police station, that was my realisation that it isn't good to try and lone wolf things.

I had hoped Resident Evil 2: The Board Game would be fun, but I wasn't prepared for how much fun it was. I had beyond a good time, and it was heartening to see that all four of us stated how much more fun it was than originally had been thought. Ron liked how much like the video game it felt, while my sister said it reminded her of one of her favourite board games, HeroQuest.
The game isn't perfect, the board in particular is awful, bad printing has made most the board pieces look pitch black, thankfully this was partially remedied by the inclusion of much brighter tiles released as part of Resident Evil 3: The Board Game. At times it was difficult for some of us to tell where one tile ended and another began, well difficult for Ron Waffle at least. That was partly due to the dim lighting in the room we played it in. One essential dice had a misprint of extra dots being present on it, something that briefly confused us all. A common complaint also is how long it takes to set up the game, I had pre-made the tutorial, but setting up the board for the first mission took over half an hour to do. Apparently later board games have streamlined this a bit.
When I have played through this in its entirety, I will put up an actual review, as for now, it sure looks like there is going to be a lot of fun evenings playing this to come!