First the mansion, then the police station & city…they are everywhere! Not to mention in my hand with this card game! Zombies, spiders, and tyrants, oh my! What a perfect match, no?

Welcome to Raccoon City!

This Resident Evil: Deck Building Game was one of the original games that helped spur on my recent fascination with board games. Before I started the MeetUp group, I was trying to get this game to the table with anyone who wanted. I love video games and enjoyed the Resident Evil series so it just made sense for me and this game. And I have to admit, it did the trick.

This game is also why I completely trash talk Dominion. While Dominion came first, I’d never heard of it before. I threw myself at this game and played it a ton. Every card had a purpose, special action cards, creatures to fight, what could be better? I did finally play Dominion but it was a pitiful comparison. There was no theme and I had a bunch of cards that just wasted space. That would be like killing a monster in this game and having to put the corpse in your hand. What is that garbage? So I never looked back and never will.

So yeah, this is a deck builder. As I said before, every card does something. There are money cards to buy other cards but they also serve as ammo you need to supply your weapons so they can kill monsters in the mansion deck. There is literally no card wasted, it is great. You don’t feel like you have a worthless hand (unless you have 5 ammo’s and no weapons).

Another neat feature is character selection. You can select from a variety of characters from the games and each comes with a different starting hand, different health, different special ability, and a different upgrade. Basically, everyone is unique which will foster new play styles. One might good at using a certain type of weapon and another could be good at different type of actions. It just adds more replayability.

There’s a lot of different ways to build your game in the box. Add in the numerous expansion (maybe four?) and you can play for awhile and get a lot of options. You can even play vs where you attack each other. This is one of my favorite deck building games.

Resident Evil: Deck Building Game
Bandai
2-4 players
30-45 minutes