One of the finest solitaire games of all time is Dawn of the Zeds, Hermann Luttmann’s masterful riff on the States of Siege model. Not that it should be taken lightly. It presents a vicious struggle for survival that might end in calamity faster than the game can actually be set up. It doesn’t help that further editions and expansions cluttered the table with so many optional modules that even veterans of the zed wars might pause before breaking it out. At least this veteran has.

So it was with no small measure of excitement that I approached The Plum Island Horror, a spiritual successor to Dawn of the Zeds, and a perfectly schlocky reimagining of the small town under siege by reanimated horrors.

Little town. It’s a quiet village.

Here’s the good news: The Plum Island Horror is decidedly easier to set up than Dawn of the Zeds, although that’s a relative statement if ever there was one. It quickly establishes its intended tone. Plum Island is divided into two halves: a sleepy community on one side of the island, a top-secret government research installation on the other. Unfortunately, those worlds have been placed on a collision course thanks to a tropical storm thrashing the power grid. Now monsters are crawling out of the woodwork and washing up on the beaches. Lock and load, baby. I’m all out of bubblegum.

Each player controls a faction. These are one of the ways Luttmann hastens the setup. Rather than selecting a team of individual heroes from an intimidating roster, each player grabs a complete set of five characters. There are six factions in all, each with their own quirks and talents.

They’re also incredibly campy. The Neighborhood Watch, for example, is a near-even spread of gun nut survivalists and ordinary civilians, neither of whom any right-headed person would vote into a position of authority. Bill Rogers fought in the war — he brings it up every time you see him — and is aided by the local VFW chapter president. These bozos prefer to fight from a distance. But there’s also the local camp director, a doofus better suited to avoiding monsters than confronting them, an inveterate tailgater who knows where all the booze is stashed, and a soccer mom whose ability hints that she spends her free time peeking over fences. In terms of getting around the island and gathering supplies, they’re unparalleled. At actually shooting zombies, not so much.

That sense of humor extends to the other factions as well. The toughest hero on the Constabulary is Chase, the K9 Unit, who excels at shepherding gormless civilians from one location to the next. The Islanders Athletic Club is incredibly fit, but also wages war with tennis balls and lawnmowers. Even the more serious factions, such as the P.I.R.L. Security Services, are closer to slapstick than hardboiled. That last faction includes Dr. Roy Wenkman, whose prototype anti-mutant foam cannon got us chanting “Wenk Wenk Wenk!” every time he made an attack. They’re lovable goofballs, all.

The game’s factions are a clear standout.

There are other necessary steps to the setup, such as determining which portions of the island have been wrecked by the storm, but they’re relatively fast undertakings. Unlike Dawn of the Zeds, there’s no need to seed a deck with increasing challenges. There’s no chance that a session will conclude so fast that you resent the time you spent arranging its components.

And in some ways, Luttmann shows his mastery over the States of Siege model. The biggest transformation is found on the map itself. Plum Island is divided into six lanes; these are the battle fronts in your conflict against the horrors crawling out of the government base. Initiative is determined by pulling discs from a bag, a method we also saw recently in Unmatched Adventures: Tales to Amaze. When the horrors take a turn, they spawn new stacks at the top of those lanes and then march downward, gobbling up civilians and clawing at the players’ heroes in their efforts to reach the shoreside town.

But where Dawn of the Zeds and other States of Siege titles spread their lanes far and wide, visually evoking the spokes of a wheel, The Plum Island Horror gathers those disparate strands and lays them side by side. The advantages are profound. In Dawn of the Zeds, it was common for heroes to become wholly isolated from one another, spread out to the farthest spokes of the map and unable to meaningfully interact. This tended to portray each session more like three or four sub-games, each fought on an isolated lane. The battle for Plum Island is more interwoven. Heroes still can’t cross between lanes willy-nilly; there are specific crossroads and bridges for such things, some of which may have been damaged in the storm and require repair before they can be utilized. But thanks to these passages between lanes, players are incentivized to position their units where they’ll perform best, not to mention shifting vehicles such as boats and helicopters to crucial vantage points.

In terms of the game’s setting, this tells a very different story. Dawn of the Zeds thrived on isolation. It was about a small town with only a handful of defenders. But where Dawn of the Zeds was a portrait, The Plum Island Horror switches its view to landscape. There are more characters in any given session, not only thanks to the heroes in those player factions, but also in terms of the civilians on the board. There are heaps of helpless civvies on the board, and although plenty of them will soon succumb to infection and join the ranks of the enemy, others must be safeguarded and evacuated.

In fact, evacuation is the secret sauce that makes Plum Island such an interesting destination. If you don’t move enough civilians off the island — or build special compounds to keep them safe — then the game ends in failure. This ramps up the pressure, forcing players to establish and then safeguard escape routes, repair docks and landing pads and bridges, and then shepherd as many people off the island as possible. There’s a real need to coordinate your positions and action economy.

This increased focus on maneuverability also suits the game’s action format. I already mentioned the initiative bag, but that’s only half of it. After each player’s turn, everyone else at the table gets the option to follow with a single action, including one crucial ability that can only be taken when following. But this isn’t a decision taken lightly. After every single follow, you’re forced to draw a fate card. If you’re lucky, nothing happens. The flipside is that an event might be drawn, adding special mutants, sudden incursions, or inflicting other terrible twists on your beleaguered heroes. Following too often might result in a streak of event cards overwhelming the players.

Three decks.

I say “might,” but that’s an outside chance. That goes for everything else in The Plum Island Horror, too. Those big stacks of zombies? After a while, their bulk slows them to a crawl, making it trivial to bottleneck them in urban centers where they pose less of a threat. The special mutants? Freaky, and high priorities when they appear, but few and far between. The biohazard track? So easily managed that we often forgot about it entirely. Civilians? There are so many on the map that evacuating the necessary amount is a breeze. After a while, maintaining your evacuation routes becomes unnecessary, leading to an anticlimactic third act in which civvies are abandoned to become speed bumps for encroaching zeds. It’s the world’s least effective Redeker Plan, born not out of necessity but because there’s simply no need to save any additional stranded families to meet your strategic objectives.

This isn’t to say the game is entirely devoid of challenge. Managing your waning supplies is often tricky, especially if you’re playing as a faction that chews through ammunition like the National Guard or the Constabulary. Fielding fewer factions is also harder than playing with three or four, leaving gaps in your defensive line. Sometimes this even allows surprise attacks to overrun a lane and threaten to end the game prematurely. To some degree, I’m also speaking as someone who adores Dawn of the Zeds. When it comes to a zombie invasion, I want to be punished, beaten, thrown into a ditch. I want to crawl out again, sure, but I need to earn the right to stand on my own two feet again.

On the whole, the threats in The Plum Island Horror don’t rear their heads often enough to pose any real danger. A full session is divided into three days, each separated into morning, afternoon, and night. Your goal is to survive those three days while preventing too many hero deaths and securing the necessary civilians. The first day is tense, all those factions slowly kicking into gear and preparing their defenses against an overwhelming enemy. The second day sees the tide turning, with bombastic clashes and a few nail-biting evacuations. By the third day, however, the game switches over to autopilot. That arbitrary threshold of civilians has been rescued. The requisite lanes have been gummed up. Emergency services have been restored, allowing everyone to pack ice onto their bruises. What’s left? Well, these thumbs ain’t gonna twiddle themselves.

Look over there! Away from the zombies!

The whole thing is a shame, giving The Plum Island Horror the air of a missed opportunity. Because it’s such a great setting, full of colorful characters and effortless story beats. Some of my favorites revolve around special named civilians who appear in little vignettes, like the wealthy VIPs who crawled out of a crashed private jet only moments before a second card dumped a bunch of horrors into the same area, or the grandmas who bequeathed all their food storage to us because we’d saved their grandchildren, or the guy who wakes up in the county clinic and fends off zeds in a hospital gown. The game is full of little touches like that.

But it’s all camp, scarcely any horror. Cooperative and solitaire games need to be challenging to keep me coming back. There’s already an expansion in the works, titled More of a Bad Thing, which promises to amp up the difficulty. Maybe that will make the game worth revisiting. For now, I’m one of the lucky few to evacuate the island before the National Guard decided they’d rescued enough of us.

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A complimentary copy was provided.