Dead Exit is a zombie card game in where you must stockpile enough resources to escape the city or outlast your foes. Just randomly hoarding a single necessity won’t cut it, you will need all three to create a set. These are fuel, survivors, and food. If you lack any one of those, everything else will essentially be useless. Another necessary thing will be a vehicle, though you only need one of those and no longer count towards your set after that. There are three game modes to try out, with the need to stockpile being the one thing they all share in common.
Starting up the title, you’ll be prompted to play the tutorial which I strongly encourage you to do, even if it is quite lacking. It will teach you how to get new cards by randomly selecting one from the deck in the middle of the table that represents the city and once you do, a zombie will follow you back to your base. Your base consists of two lanes, the outer and inner areas, with both having three slots for cards/undead. The key aspect here is that you have only three actions each turn and you must take them. This means that you can’t just hunker down once you find what you want, you need to stay active. You will have to take risks every turn, from playing cards you otherwise wouldn’t to drawing more from the city, and in turn drawing more undead into your base.
The moments when you are forced to play your hand are rather rare, however, there is nearly always something to be done. Adding something to your stockpile, drawing a card, or playing one will all take an action. With only three each turn you’ll likely be facing the opposite issue of not having enough to carry through your plans. Your survivors are the lifeblood of your operations and will change how you set about things. Some can steal resources or vehicles from rivals, others can scour the city without drawing back the undead, and some are plain murderers that will kill opposing humans. There is quite a wide selection of unique classes to discover, with each carrying out different effects depending on which lane you place them on your base. You can even sacrifice them on a certain slot for a powerful third effect that just may save your skin in a tight spot.
Vehicles are odd but incredibly useful cards to have. They are not driven by any human and function exactly like them, with the added perk that zombies can’t kill them, making them invaluable when you are knee deep in the dead. Then again, like survivors, not all vehicles can kill zombies. It is important to read each card to learn how to use them properly and avoid wasting an action. This brings me to the combat. It is an unavoidable risky affair you’ll have to engage in. You will need to play a card that can kill zombies be it a vehicle or survivor. Once you set him down he can perform his action, but afterward, he provides no benefits when left out in the field and is a sitting duck. To use him once more, you need to pick him back up into your hand and play him again which is two of your valuable actions right there.
It is a risk/reward type of ordeal from leaving them out in the open and simply playing other cards to carry through further tasks. As you can imagine, picking them all back up of things go south will be cost a ton of actions and when things do start going badly, you’ll rarely have the ability to save them from their fate. It is all too easy for a random zombie unit to be thrown your way and if you have all three outer slots filled up, someone will die. You can’t pick them up the same turn you use them either, so there is always the chance that this will be their last outage. Having a plan b is a must, it is a near-impossible task to avoid suffering deaths throughout. We can always outsmart the zombies, but the enemy human factions on the other hand, not so much. You rarely know what they are capable of and they are all too happy to show you if unprepared.
From running over your doctor to bribing a valued survivor to both join their side & steal some of your supplies while he’s at it. This is a rather cutthroat world and they will throw many a wrench in whatever plans you may have. The thing is however, whatever they can do you can do as well, granted you have the cards. It opens up unique ways to play the game. You can play regularly or you can be far more ruthless than any raider group to make your fortune by stealing & killing from their bases before they try to do the same to you. There is no way to destroy them outright other than getting the undead to overrun their base through a variety of means. Or accidentally even, as there are event cards hidden in the city that can trigger a wide array of less than pleasant effects such as zombies breaching into your inner lane or having a horde show up to every faction’s base.
Event cards can either affect the individual or everyone, and are always less than welcome occurrences. It makes it that much more important to never let the zombies gather in too great a number. If the worst comes to pass, you can sacrifice a fuel card to obliterate an entire lane of our hungry, brain gnawing friends. Which brings me to the faction AI. As vicious as they are, they are not all that bright I’m afraid. They have a great tendency to mindlessly draw cards from the city and fill up a good portion of their base. Never to the point where they flatout seem to be trying to murder themselves, but it does make them easy pickings. Add to that they are terrible at stockpiling an entire set of resources and you’ll find yourself typically winning in all aside from the worst of runs. There are no difficulty settings so at best you need to set it at three foes against yourself for some challenge.
Your biggest challenge will be when you start playing and trying to learn how it functions. It does an abysmal job of conveying what is going on in the enemy turn, you will learn nothing from watching them as it happens far too quickly and without much visual aid to help one understand. There will be a small bit of very vague text for their every move, which doesn’t explain much, and there isn’t a log to read back on other actions. An example of this is “Raider 1 played Runner outside their base”. What does that do? Well, color coding the word runner so you know who it belongs to and wording it in a more useful matter would help a ton, as well as avoiding having to click on each card to see what it does. Change it to “Runner lead zombie to your base”. Easier to read and far more informative. Having played this game for half a dozen hours so far and recognizing all of the decently wide array of cards, I still get blind-sighted to what just occurred if I do not pay close attention.
This sadly carries over to the cards themselves on some occasions. To give an example once more, both the Pyro and Ranger cards say they can kill zombies in your base if played in the inner lanes. Well, the Pyro can attack zombies on the outer lane while the Ranger is limited to just the inner one with no explanation as to why. This can easily lead to an unwarranted lost action, and with only three for each turn, you don’t have that room for experimentation. Furthermore, I really dislike how you can harm yourself with your own actions. Such as a Thief defaulting to stealing from your own supplies first. There are situations where that can be useful, don’t get me wrong. It is just that the UI is too unintuitive and poorly worded all throughout to be easy get into. The multiplayer is completely dead so you are stuck with the AI unless you manage to get a group of friends together.
As mentioned before, you have three modes to try out. The first and least worthy of your time is City Escape. It has no enemy AI, you just need to scavenge the city and stock up on supplies. It’s by far the most carefree, but it also makes quite a lot of the cards useless since you have no one to use them against, and in turn is not a great way to learn. Then you have Survival, the most demanding and unique way to play. It has you face off against a single Raider, but fighting him is not the point. You need to get a complete set of resources, including vehicles, every single week. Each day we will see 3-5 cards set out, depending on how you modified it before the match, and the raider can take some cards too. So you have three cards between you, sometimes not even getting the chance to get one and you have seven days to come up with all the necessary resources. It is really fun and surviving however many weeks you chose is satisfying, though victory is far too reliant on RNG.
Finally, you have a mode simply known as War. This plays exactly like city escape but with the addition of AI foes and is the way the game is meant to be played. Your modifiers for this mode include extra dead which adds another zombie to your base every turn and is also a feature for the other modes, number of foes, and your bases. You can have more than one base though it feels like added busy work and there is no option for friendly AI. Given how often the enemy AI take shots at one another, it is understandable they wouldn’t add this feature and frustrate the player. The humor in this game is slightly macabre and fits the ‘mannequins playing some card game in the middle of a ruin down empty city’ theme really well. Many cards have witty one-liners and the art drawn on them is pretty well done.
There is a lot to like about Dead Exit, despite its flaws. Once it clicks, it becomes quite an enjoyable title and is great for a quick match. If you are in the market for new card games, it may be worth a look.
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