Blood In the Forest

[gavindowning]

My copy of Blood In the Forest arrived this afternoon. I've only had a brief moment to look over it, but I had a few impressions I wished to share:

There are two new heroes: Agent Carter and Sister Ophelia. Agent Carter is cool, with an interesting backstory, but I especially love Sister Ophelia. Her backstory and her abilities are really really badass.

The new scenarios: Escape in the Plane, which is similar to Escape In the Truck, only instead of needing keys, you need a flight plan, which has its own mechanic involving counters marked 1-6 in different buildings. In addition, two heroes are considered pilots, and at least one of them must make it to the plane to successfully escape.

Lost In the Woods, in which the heroes must find a radio transponder (like the flight plans, involving counters 1-6 in different buildings), then get it to the opposite side of the board to the tower relay.

Salvage Mission, in which 16 salvage tokens are on the board, and the heroes have one of three different salvage missions, while the zombies get a pool of feral dead which continually replenishes. The missions might involve getting supplies, finding survivors, or locating a suped up version of a zombie behemoth and killing it.

There are new upgrades and cards, as you'd expect. They all seem pretty fun.

Zombies get two types of champions, each with a special character sheet: Feral zombies, and zombie behemoths. Feral zombies are fast and bloodthirsty, while the behemoth is ALSO fast, tough, durable, and wields a chainsaw. You either get a pool of 3 feral and 1 behemoth, or 6 feral and 2 behemoths, but these pools do not refill; when they're gone, they're gone. For every 3 feral and 1 behemoth in a zombie pool, the heroes get +1 hero card at the start of the game; spawning one costs some of your spawn, and some experience as well.

Everyone in a forest space rolls an extra fight die, which means zombies are more likely to win the fight, but a hero who does win is more likely to wound the zombie. One can see into or out of an adjacent forest space, but not through a forest space.

There are extra tiles that allow for a larger board size. Zombies also get optional spawn pits (in yellow instead of red); you may choose to spawn a zombie there if you want, but you may also double up on zombie on red spawning pits before adding any to the yellow spawn pits. (You can't double up on the yellow pits until all red and yellow pits are spawned on.)

Overall, some nice new features which easily fold into the game, and I don't feel it adds too much to the complexity. I'm looking forward to giving all these elements a shot soon!