Zombies have taken over the school and have a plan to end the world! It’s up to the kids to stop them, using a device that jumps into memories.
What Is Flashback: Zombie Kidz?
Flashback: Zombie Kidz is a mystery-solving game for 1 to 4 players, ages 7 and up, and takes about 30 minutes to play each of 6 sessions. It retails for $24.99 and is available in game stores or online from Hachette Games in the US. Although the game involves zombies, they are generally more goofy than scary, and rather than eating brains they have a more absurd goal in mind, so it’s still kid-friendly. I think the 7 and up age is fine and you might even be able to play with even younger kids, though there is some reading required. Most of the puzzle-solving is about close observations and piecing together information from different cards; it works well as as game that you can play alongside your kids.
Flashback: Zombie Kidz was designed by Baptiste Derrez and Marc-Antoine Doyon and published by Scorpion Masqué, with illustrations by Laure de Châteaubourg, Jennifer Mati, and Michel Verdu. It is distributed in the US by Hachette Games, who provided the review copy.
Flashback: Zombie Kidz Components
Here’s what comes in the box:
- 80 Large Story cards (divided into 3 memories and special cards)
- 30 Small Special cards
- 3 Devices
Flashback: Zombie Kidz is about exploring a “memory”—basically a moment frozen in time—and searching for the answers to several questions, and is intended to be played through once (which consists of two plays of each memory). You can play it again after that, but you’ll know the answers and what to look for. As such, I will avoid showing too many details so that you don’t get too many spoilers but will try to show things that don’t give away too much.
Most of the game consists of the large story cards: they’re labeled on the back with a number or letter, and the card backs help distinguish between the three memories that you’ll be exploring. There’s also a deck of special cards that will come into play later, and this deck has cards for all three memories as well.
The story cards are all illustrations—all of the cards from a memory depict the same scene, but from many different perspectives, with kids and zombies in and around a school. There are lots of details throughout, and if you’ve played Zombie Kidz Evolution and Zombie Teenz Evolution then you’ll recognize some of the kids and zombies. Almost every character visible in a scene has a small number next to them, indicating that if you find that card, it will show their point of view. Occasionally, there are small boxes indicating that it’s time to draw a small card with the matching number—these will give you the questions you need to answer to solve that chapter of the game.
One of the things that makes Flashback: Zombie Kidz so impressive is the way the story cards work together to show you the whole picture. The illustrations have to capture things consistently from so many different points of view, often revealing details that one character can see that were hidden from another character. There are also lots of fun surprises in whose perspectives you get to jump into and how they see the scene.
The devices are secret—two of them are in envelopes and one is in a small box, and you get to open them when you get to the right point in the game. What I can tell you is that the first gizmo is something that is unique to Flashback: Zombie Kidz and so it feels more clever and specific to the game and the story, and the other two are pre-existing items that have been incorporated into the game. They’re all simple things, used in some fun ways, but my favorite is the first one that you get to unlock.
The packaging for Flashback: Zombie Kidz used minimal plastic—the devices are in paper packaging, and the large story cards have simple paper bands around them, with the small cards coming in a plastic wrapper. The box insert is kind of an egg carton cardboard and is designed to hold the four decks of large cards arranged in overlapping layers, though in practice if the box gets turned over or held upright they tend to just all slide together. So, good effort but not perfect.
How to Play Flashback: Zombie Kidz
You can download a copy of the rulebook here. There is also a free prologue that you can play online, which is the best way to see how the game works for yourself!
The Goal
The goal of the game is to find and then answer all of the questions for each memory.
Setup
To begin, simply take the first card for the memory—it has a “play” icon next to the number—and reveal it. Place the rest of that deck, along with the small and large special cards, nearby.
Gameplay
Any time you see a small numbered rectangle, look for the small card with the same number and icon and reveal it. Question cards will give you a question to answer, and tool cards allow you to open one of the devices and give you instructions on how to use it.
Most of the game involves jumping from one perspective to another. Choose a number that you can see (on any of your face-up large story cards) and then find the corresponding story card to reveal. Study the scene, look for answers to questions, and then go to another card.
Game End
When you have flipped over all of the large story cards, you should have everything you need to solve all of the mysteries. Discuss and choose an answer for each mystery, and then compare them to the solutions at the back of the rulebook. If you got them all right, you win! Otherwise, you can go back and play again to figure out the rest.
There are 3 memories to explore, each with its own mysteries to solve. After playing through all of them, there is a section of the rulebook that you can unseal, which has some new rules and things to look for so you can play through all three memories again.
Why You Should Play Flashback: Zombie Kidz
I really enjoyed playing both Zombie Kidz Evolution and Zombie Teenz Evolution with my youngest—they’re both kid-friendly legacy games, where you cooperate against zombies invading the school. While you don’t have to play those to understand Flashback: Zombie Kidz, it’s fun to get a little bit more of the story and see how the games tie together. (The kidz—and zombies—also show up in Turbo Kidz, another title from Scorpion Masqué, so it seems like they’re really building out this shared universe between very different types of games.)
For the most part, figuring out the mysteries isn’t that hard, but it does require a combination of observation and some inference and deduction. My kid is pretty good at the observation part, and her eyesight is keener than mine so she often is first to spot something we’re looking for. On the other hand, there are also details that she saw but didn’t really grasp the implications of, where I was able to piece together some pieces of a puzzle and then give her some hints to solve it on her own. What’s interesting here is that you have to rely on the game’s internal logic of what the zombies and the kids are doing, because it’s pretty bonkers once you figure it out. You can’t just say to yourself, “Oh, I know how zombies work” and expect that to lead you to the correct solution.
As I mentioned earlier, I really liked the first gizmo—you unlock it on the very first card, and you get to use it for all three memories. Each memory adds another gizmo to the mix, so by the time you’re working on the third memory you’ll have all of them in your toolbox. However, I was slightly disappointed by the others, particularly the second—it felt more like a gimmick but you didn’t actually need to use it to solve anything, so it didn’t feel as integrated into the puzzles as the other two devices.
Following the story is a lot of fun, and once you get through all three memories, there’s some additional story that is unlocked, and you get to play through all three memories again, but this time with all three devices in play, and an additional set of questions to answer that eventually contribute to solving one big meta-puzzle. So, while this is a game that you will most likely just play through once in its entirety, you get about 3 hours worth of fun (depending on how much time you spend just enjoying the illustrations).
I really enjoyed the system of jumping around from one point of view to another, and I’m still blown away by the amount of planning it took to build the scene so that everything fits together. After my daughter and I played it together, I’ve also taught it to some other folks—my teenager and an adult friend—and even though I wasn’t actively participating this time around, it was still fun to go through it again and watch them figure it out. If you enjoy solving mysteries, with a touch of Where’s Waldo? searches and silly zombies, I highly recommend giving Flashback: Zombie Kidz a try!
There’s another title in this series, Flashback: Lucy, coming later this year (though I don’t know if it also takes place in the zombie universe), and I’m excited to see what else they throw in this time. For more information about Flashback: Zombie Kidz, visit the Scorpion Masqué website!
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Disclosure: GeekDad received a copy of this game for review purposes.
