The Walking Dead: Surrounded

The Walking Dead: Surrounded is a co-operative grid placement game for 1–4 players in under 20 minutes. Jason Tagmire designed the game and Button Shy Games is the publisher. Art taken right from the comics makes this game best for ages 12 and up.

In The Walking Dead: Surrounded, you’ll lay out an expanding checkerboard map, place cards to surround resources, and group Survivors and Leaders to keep Walkers in check. These placements aren’t just tactical, they’re how you score. At the end of the game, you’ll tally up points from surviving humans, special containers, and location bonuses. Every move counts, and where you place your cards matters. Lay out your map with brains and guts to manage the chaos and outmaneuver the undead.

Setup

To get started, shuffle the 18 double-sided cards into a single deck with the location side facing up. Take the top card and place it face-up in the center of the table as the starting location. Next, flip the second card to its occupant side and place it adjacent to the first, sharing an edge with the starting location so that at least one Walker (red triangle) touches it. The player who last saw a Walker in real life takes the first turn.

Gameplay

The Walking Dead: Surrounded plays out over several turns. On each turn, the active player may choose to either Explore or Occupy using the next card.

Explore

To Explore, start by taking the top card of the deck and placing it edge-to-edge next to one or more occupant cards. Follow a checkerboard pattern—locations can only touch occupants. After placing the location, flip the next card to its occupant side and try to place it adjacent to the new location to spawn a Walker (touch the new location with a red triangle). If you can’t place the occupant there, try placing it legally next to a different location. If that’s still not possible, discard the occupant along with any remaining cards in the deck and move directly to final scoring (that bites!).

At the start of your turn, if the next card in the deck is a location with a Walker already printed on it, or if there’s no legal spot to place an occupant, you must Explore instead of Occupy.

Occupy

To Occupy, flip the top card of the deck to its occupant side and place it next to one or more locations, following the checkerboard pattern. If only one card remains in the deck, you must Occupy. If you can’t place that last occupant anywhere on the map, discard it and go directly to scoring.

Abilities

Once per turn, you may use an ability from a human adjacent to the most recently-placed location. There are three possibilities:

• Look: Peek at both sides of the top or bottom card of the deck (return it afterwards).
• Burn: Return any card from the map to the top or bottom of the deck location side up.
• Move: Move one occupant card to another valid space at a location it is currently adjacent to.

You use card abilities before Exploring or after Occupying but the map must remain connected and follow the checkerboard layout at all times. 

Players take turns, choosing either Explore or Occupy, until the deck runs out of cards triggering the endgame.

Game End and Final Scoring

Once the deck is empty, resolve each location on the map to score it. First settle any Battles. Walkers eliminate humans, and rival Leaders eliminate each other. Then score each location based on the location’s final state:

• Survivors are worth one point each.
• Leaders earn one point plus one extra point for each Survivor at their location.
• Walkers subtract one point each.
• Some locations have special printed bonuses.
• Surround a location on all four sides to open its container and earn a bonus, usually between one and three points.

Add up the points from all locations to get your final score and see how you rank:

• 0–10: This is the beginning of the end.
• 11–15: You’re just scraping by.
• 16–20: You might just do this after all.
• 21+: You’re a born leader. Congratulations!

Impressions

I’m a huge The Walking Dead fan. I’ve consumed every show, read the comics, and enjoy everything in the universe. So, when a game with this theme comes along, I’m always willing to try it. Going into The Walking Dead: Surrounded, I wasn’t sure what to expect. Button Shy is known for 18 card games, so I was curious how much game and how much theme they’d deliver. And I was pleasantly surprised. 

First off, the artwork feels like it’s pulled straight from the pages of the comics. I immediately recognized characters and the distinct art style—it’s totally on brand. This was something I loved about The Walking Dead: The Dice Game, too. There’s minimal iconography to learn, everything is easy to read, and visually it all gels together well.

Table Talk Saves Lives

Mechanically speaking, The Walking Dead: Surrounded does a great job of capturing the tension of scavenging and survival. My group felt that tension in every card flip, every collective decision. Surviving a zombie apocalypse takes teamwork, and in a co-op game, table talk is essential.

Even though players take turns, we actively collaborated, talking through our options and placements to squeeze out every possible point. Co-op works especially well with my group and family. We rarely deal with quarterbacking, and everyone stays engaged in the decisions, which made for a smooth and collaborative experience.

No Gore, Just Strategy and Score / Tactical Terrors and Tough Choices

At the table, grouping Survivors and Leaders is essential for scoring and clearing zombies from locations. Positioning containers to trigger bonus points adds another layer of challenge.

Sometimes, a location gets overrun and ends up costing you points. Strategic card placement is the brains and guts of the game; the real sustenance for surviving the undead.

Card abilities also help in a pinch—especially Move, which can reposition a key survivor or complete a container surround at just the right moment. Don’t be surprised by low scores; co-op games like this are built to push back. Our best score was a 19, just one rank shy of the top, while other plays barely scraped past 10.

The Walking Dead: Surrounded also offers a good amount of variety through its included scenarios. Each one introduces a unique goal or gameplay restriction, and comes with three difficulty levels. I enjoyed these twists and think they’ll keep me coming back for more.

Despite the engaging gameplay, I found the rulebook lacking in detail and examples. To better understand the game flow and how to handle edge cases, I turned to a combination of AI and gameplay videos.

Family Fun That Won’t Get You Lucilled

For fans of The Walking Dead Universe, The Walking Dead: Surrounded is a solid addition to any collection. The gameplay is challenging, and the included scenarios offer plenty of meat on the bone for even the hungriest zombies… er, players.

Once I got past the overly-compact rulebook, the game clicked and played fairly quickly. The age rating feels appropriate given the art, mechanics, and scoring. While the table footprint can be a bit larger than expected, it’s also a great fit for a solo lunch hour session.

Think you’ve got what it takes to survive the undead? Pick up a copy of The Walking Dead: Surrounded at your local game store or directly from Button Shy Games.

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Button Shy provided The Family Gamers with a promotional copy of The Walking Dead: Surrounded for this review.