A game doesn’t need zombies, astronauts or Russian gnome submariners to tell a story. Even the most abstract games are story builders, as can be seen with chess. A game of chess has no setting, it’s not really a representation of war, but it has a beginning and an end, it has suspense and reversals, and it can be dramatically retold—so every game is a different story. Of course, this is even more true of a game of Zombicide.
Quotes about stories
There is, however, an important difference between games on the one hand, and movies, or novels, or even music on the other. The game itself is not a story, it’s a story generator.
For me, a game succeeds at telling a good story when you can write down the session as an interesting tale, ideally in a way that an unsuspecting person would hardly recognize as a session report, but the player who knows the game well can reconstruct the game flow from it.
Games are external—they are about people’s actions. Stories (good ones, anyway) are internal—they are about people’s emotions and thoughts.
I like games that tell compelling stories, and that tell stories in both senses. It’s probably why I like to design games in which players cannot hide themselves behind the rules, behind the cards, behind their pawns—games that are actually played with and against the other players and not with and against cardboard components.