The zombie Justice League hits shops before the Kickstarter. Retail is the backer queue now.

The people who paid for the zombie Justice League in 2023 are still waiting. The people who walk into a shop on September 11 can buy it off a shelf. That is the whole story, and it is a cruel one even by crowdfunding standards. Asmodee US has DCeased, a Zombicide game, hitting retail Friday, September 11, 2026, at $139.99. The same Friday brings the expansions Arkham Asylum, Gotham Knights, and Green Lantern Corpse. W. Eric Martin printed the four-title street date on August 7 and updated it August 9. ICv2's Jeffrey Dohm-Sanchez confirmed the US retail date on August 12. Asmodee's own product page, checked this morning, still says this product releases on September 11, 2026, SKU DCS002, $139.99. CMON, in a July 31 update Martin cites, is targeting the end of 2026 for the start of fulfillment for backers. Retail is not late. Retail is early on purpose. The zombie DC board game is shipping to stores before it ships to the people who paid for it.

I am greedy about shelves and funereal about pledges, and this filing sits in the ugly middle. CMON crowdfunded DCeased in late 2023. Michael Shinall designed it as a crossing of the Zombicide system with the DCeased comic line DC introduced in 2019, the alternate-Earth story where a zombifying virus hits humans and superheroes alike. Martin's summary is the right amount of premise. Superheroes fight one another because the infection does not care about the cape. Asmodee's store copy puts players in control of surviving Super Heroes against zombie hordes and zombified Heroes, working together to end the Anti-Life threat. One to six players. Age 14. About 60 minutes, which anyone who has run a Zombicide scenario will read generously. I will not invent a campaign length CMON did not print. I will say the box in the shop is a co-op survival game with 85 miniatures and a famous trademark, and the people who already bought it are not first in line.

The contents of the retail base game are not a rumor. They are on Asmodee's page and in ICv2's August 12 list, which match. 85 highly detailed miniatures. 6 color bases. 122 mini cards. 6 plastic dashboards. 6 dice. 12 tracker cubes. 1 rulebook. 60 tokens. 8 ID cards. 9 double-sided tiles. ICv2's street price is $139.99, same as Asmodee. I will not add a secret eleventh tray. I will not guess which cape is which miniature beyond what the listings already name. The expansions have their own official pages. Gotham Knights, SKU DCS003, $64.99, also September 11. Wayne Manor and the Batcave. Nightwing, Batgirl, Robin. Asmodee lists 30 miniatures, 25 mini cards, a rulebook, a Bat-Signal token, 6 ID cards, 6 double-sided tiles. Arkham Asylum, SKU DCS004, $64.99, same Friday. Dark hallways, Titan-infused former inmates, Poison Ivy, Mr. Freeze, Two-Face. Asmodee lists 17 miniatures, 23 mini cards, a rulebook, 3 Riddler tokens, 6 ID cards, 6 double-sided tiles. Green Lantern Corpse, the spelling is the joke, is the smaller box. Common Ground Games and Miniature Market both list it at $39.99. Common Ground's contents line is 8 miniatures, 12 mini cards, 6 ID cards, a rules leaflet, with Hal Jordan, Jessica Cruz, and Kilowog named as survivors. Philibert already has a September 2026 coming-soon stamp in France. I am printing the retail catalog. I am not unpacking a Kickstarter all-in I cannot see.

The zombie Justice League is shipping to retail before it ships to the people who paid for it.

The reason the shop is ahead of the backer portal is not a warehouse mix-up. It is a cash-flow strategy CMON said out loud. Martin recaps the company's last two years without flinching. CMON had a habit of crowdfunding one project after another, then falling behind, with more than a dozen funded projects stacked in the queue. In April 2025, after tariffs on goods imported to the United States, CMON announced a hold on future crowdfunding and a staff reduction. Then came the IP sales. Blood Rage, Rising Sun, and Ankh to Tabletop Tycoon. Zombicide to Asmodee. Cthulhu: Death May Die to Asmodee. Martin points at Mike Didymus-True's BoardGameWire work for the financial entrails. Starting in July 2025, CMON posted irregular updates. In March 2026 the company noted that mass manufacturing was beginning for DCeased, and that to proceed with full production responsibly it would fulfill retail orders first, then use those funds to pay for manufacturing the games for crowdfunding backers. That sentence is the SKU. Retail is the printer. Backers are the invoice.

Asmodee is not a random third party in this. Martin notes the US branch has distributed CMON titles since 2019. ICv2 says the game was later acquired by Asmodee as part of the Zombicide IP deal. The shop page still brands the publisher as CMON. The logos on the box art, the official 2000-pixel still Asmodee is serving, still wear DC, Spin Master Games, and CMON across the bottom, with a credit line for Shinall from an original design by Guiton, Lullien, and Raoult. Cover art is Roger Cruz, per the work-in-progress rulebook CMON hosted. I will not pretend I know who owns which percentage of the zombie on Friday morning. I will say the till is Asmodee's US storefront and the street date is theirs. The only other CMON title on Asmodee's immediate US schedule, Martin adds, is Peanuts Talent Show! on September 18, a non-crowdfunded redesign of Wish Upon a Star. That one did not leave a 2023 pledge manager hanging. DCeased did.

Backseat Gamer filed the mood two different ways, and both are useful. The first piece treats September 11 as the grim-comic getting its tabletop treatment, $139.99, Shinall's co-op, 85 miniatures per ICv2, original 2023 crowdfunding, backers still waiting, CMON targeting end of 2026 for pledge fulfillment via Board Game Chronicles. The second piece is the headline I would have written if I had gotten there first. DCeased reaches shops before its crowdfunding backers. Asmodee UK lists the base game at £129.99, Gotham Knights and Arkham Asylum at £59.99 each, Green Lantern CorpsE at £34.99, whole line £284.96 if you want all four boxes on day one. That is a UK RRP snapshot, not the US till. Backseat Gamer is also careful that the September 11 date is a US date, and Asmodee UK still had the line tagged as pre-order without a British street date. UK buyers should watch their local shop rather than pencil in the 11th. I will not invent a UK Friday. I will say the American shop is first, which is the same direction as CMON's manufacturing plan.

I have a standing suspicion of licensed board games that arrive as funerals. Marvel and DC both love a what-if corpse, and Hollywood is currently selling Avengers: Doomsday as a funeral that already has a trailer. The comics movie I actually trust right now is the one that does not want to be a comics movie, which is why Clayface is the smarter DC bet on the film side. DCeased is the tabletop version of the funeral instinct. The World's Finest are the problem. The box art is Wonder Woman facing a zombified Superman over a ruined city while Batman dives and Cyborg fires into the Anti-Living. It is a handsome corpse. It is also a three-year-old Kickstarter walking into a shop ahead of the people who funded the corpse. I can want the miniatures and still hate the queue order. Those two feelings are the job.

Retail is the backer queue now. The pledge was a pre-order that lost its place in line.

The comic is 2019. The crowdfunding is 2023. The manufacturing note is March 2026. The retail date is September 11, 2026. The backer promise, as of July 31, is the end of 2026 for the start of fulfillment, which is not the same as a tracking number in your inbox in October. Start of fulfillment means cartons begin to move. It does not mean your all-in pledge, if you had one, lands before the shop's Christmas window. I do not have CMON's internal packing calendar. I will not invent one. I will say the published order of operations is retail first, backers later, and Friday's shop date is the first half of that sentence coming true. If you are a backer reading this on a Tuesday, the honest consolation is ugly. The line is being printed. You are just not at the front of it. If you are a retailer, you are the front. That is the product.

I keep a neighboring warning on the tabletop desk about what happens when a publisher tries to turn a famous science into a box. Foundation's people are about to learn, or refuse to learn, that you cannot turn psychohistory into a board game and have it remain psychohistory. DCeased is an easier conversion because Zombicide was already a machine for putting named miniatures on modular tiles and letting the game run the zombies. Shinall did not have to invent a new verb. He had to dress the verb in capes and an Anti-Life Equation. Asmodee's bullets are the Zombicide loop restated. Command iconic DC superheroes. Cooperative strategy. 85 miniatures. Double-sided modular tiles. 122 mini cards, color-coded bases, dice, tracker cubes, tokens. Complete mission objectives, defeat enemies, rescue bystanders. Killing zombies gives experience, and the stronger you are the more zombies appear. That last clause is Zombicide's oldest joke. Power is a spawn table. The DC skin just makes the spawn table wear a familiar face.

I will not file a playtest I did not play. I will not grade the sculpts from a box-front JPEG, even a 2000-pixel official one. I will not pretend the 60-minute playtime survives a six-player table with new players learning dashboards. I will not claim the Kickstarter extras are in the retail box, because CMON's whole manufacturing split exists to keep those extras in a later carton. The retail SKU is the one Asmodee priced. The pledge SKU is the one still waiting on the money from the retail SKU. That recursion is the business model CMON described in March. It is also the reason this story is a Tuesday brief instead of a happy unboxing. Crowdfunding used to mean you paid to make the thing exist. Here it means you paid, the thing exists for someone else first, and your money is the sunk cost that did not quite cover the print run.

Spin Master is on the box because DC licensing is a pile of logos, not a single parent. Guillotine Games is in the rulebook's original-design line because Zombicide was never only CMON in the credits. Asmodee is on the invoice because Asmodee bought the system and still distributes the leftover CMON calendar. None of that will comfort a backer who watches a store clerk scan DCS002 in September while the pledge manager still says end of year. I am not telling anyone to boycott the shop. I am describing the sequence. If you buy it at retail on the 11th, you are participating in the plan that prints the backer copies. That is the least ugly reading. The uglier reading is that crowdfunding has become a subordinated loan, and the hobby shop is senior debt. I have seen this movie with other CMON lines. Martin has been documenting the queue. Friday is just the first DC-shaped carton in it.

So here is the Tuesday filing, ten days out. DCeased: A Zombicide Game hits US retail September 11, 2026, at $139.99, 1 to 6 players, 14+, about 60 minutes, 85 miniatures in the base box. Arkham Asylum and Gotham Knights are $64.99 each the same day. Green Lantern Corpse is listed at $39.99 by US retailers. Asmodee US set the date. ICv2 printed the contents. W. Eric Martin explained why retail is first: CMON began mass manufacturing in March and said shop orders would fund the backer print run. A July 31 CMON update targets end of 2026 to start fulfilling those 2023 pledges. UK pricing is a different sheet, and the UK street date was still a pre-order tag when Backseat Gamer checked. Designer Michael Shinall. Cover Roger Cruz. Premise from the 2019 DC comic, mechanics from Zombicide. I have not punched a zombie Superman on my table. I am reading the shipping order. The zombie Justice League hits shops before the Kickstarter. Retail is the backer queue now. Buy it on Friday if you want the virus. Just do not pretend the people who paid first were first.