All Wound Up - Escape from the Cemetery

In All Wound Up, you are dead. Being dead, can be quite boring sometimes, so you and your friends think that it would be a great idea to have a race. First one to the gates is the winner.
Ready.
Set.
Go!

All Wound Up is a game like no other I know. In it you control windup Zombies as they race each other to the gate at the end of the grave yard. But first you have to find out what your Zombies will get up to. To do this, you have to go through two phases, the drafting phase and the bidding phase.

In the drafting phase you are given a hand of ten cards which each correspond to a different action, for example 'wind one' lets you wind the handle of your figure once. To start the drafting phase you hand five of your ten cards to the person on your left and receive five from the player on your right. Then you pass four to the player on your left on receive four from the player on your right and so on until you pass only one card, selecting the cards you want to keep at each pass. Once you have done that the round is over. This lets you refine your hand so that you have the best possible chance for the next phases, the bidding phase.

In the bidding phase you have to bid with your cards to get the opportunity to complete the actions on them. To do this, when it is your turn, you call out a type of card that you have and play all of them: after that everyone else plays all of the cards of that type from their hand too. The person who has the most cards of that type wins and does whatever action is on the card to their Zombie (unless it is the 'turn opponent' card, a card designed solely to destroy your friends marvellously laid plans).

We were lucky enough to pick our copy of All Wound Up second hand, but unfortunately one of our zombies was a bit worn out. Not that this stopped the fun as it is easy enough to find new wind up figures. We played with these wind up pumpkins on the picture to the left which tended to bounce in a curved path, adding to the hilarity.

One problem we did encounter was that the rule book is basically intangible. I had to resort to asking my Dad to read it, and even he struggled to make sense of it. This meant that for some rules we had to guess and go with what felt like the right ruling. As well as that, in contrast to its light and fluffy theme, it is actually quite complicated. The drafting and bidding seem to get in the way of what the game actually wants to be, a fun family friendly game about racing with wind up toys.

But even with all of the problems with the rules, there are still some incredible moments in the game, as your friend goes careering off the side of the board or your windup toy ends up facing the completely wrong way and you haven't even made it past the first tile. Overall I would give this game a four out of ten.

Continuing with this scary theme, next week I will be back reviewing Call of Cthulhu and its counter part, Pulp Cthulhu.
P.S I have known discovered the wonderful world of technology with Blogger. I have now added a subscribe feature to my blog! You never know, next I might even look at putting some of my blogs on BoardGameGeek.