Its a fun way to play zombicide and each play has a few fun surprises as you unveil new objective cards, but it's not a true campaign
Fort Hendrix is the second "Campaign Expansion" for Zombicide 2nd Edition. The campaign expansions for 2nd Edition all share some features, such as character progression, persistent weapons, objective cards, day and night rules, all-out dice and permadeath.
For those unfamiliar with the All Out concept, the campaign expansions allow you to push your luck, rolling additional dice but with the chance that you'll break your weapons.
Fort Hendrix itself introduces a few unique things however. First up we have 6 new survivors, like with Washington Z.C there is a focus on the "All-Out" mechanism that makes these survivors less useful outside of a campaign setting, although some characters, such as Marian can be played without choosing all-out options. You can also choose to use the All-Out rules in standard play if you really want to use these characters outside of the campaign.
Next we have new a equipment deck which replace the core deck, like for like, but displaying the All Out statistics. The Epic Weapon deck does have a different selection of weapons giving a little bit of a different flavour for those of us who have been playing the base game for a while and the Military Equipment deck is an equivalent deck to the Secret Service deck in WZC, providing more flavourful, military focused weapons.
Finally, Fort Hendrix has a new spawn deck which is identical to the one in the base game with the exception of the addition of the shooter icon on some cards. This icon is how the new zombie type will be introduced into scenarios. Shooter Zombies are very dangerous and change up how you play the game drastically. When a shooter icon appears on a card, any shooter zombies on the board deal 1 damage in every zone they can see and they are unaffected by Dark and Night Rules. Then more shooters spawn in any zone with the zombie type shown on the card that has line of sight to a survivor.
The addition of shooter zombies will mean that you really don't want to end your turn in a street zone, or even adjacent to an open door if you can help it. This leads to a more stealthy style approach to play, more akin to the original edition of the game, before survivors became super powered beasts! But it also makes the game less forgiving and a simple positioning mistake can spell doom for the entire team.
While we haven't finished the campaign yet, it feels very similar to Washington ZC, which is a very story lite experience, without much in the way of branching options. Its a fun way to play zombicide and each play has a few fun surprises as you unveil new objective cards, but it's not going to rival true narrative driven campaign style games. That said, I'm still looking forward to playing through the campaign and seeing where the story goes and kicking some zombie butt!
