Should I shuffle the Zombicide zombie “deck”

Question

The rules for Zombicide just state:

Make a deck with the Zombie cards and another one with the Equipment cards, then place them face down, close to the gameboard.

Clearly the equipment cards needed to be shuffled as when supplied, they are sorted so all the cards are grouped together.

The Zombie cards are all numbered in the upper right corner, and do in general get harder as the numbers increase.

In a recent game with a shuffled deck the first spawn resulted in the Abomination appearing, which completely outclassed our party and resulted in a very quick finish.

The flip side of that would obviously be the fact that with the harder cards spawned earlier, if we had survived, we'd be playing against less zombies in the later stages of the game.

Should I be shuffling the deck or playing it in order? The order of the rooms and which spawn point we start from should provide a reasonable amount of variation even with an ordered deck.

Answer 1

I would say that any games that include decks of cards and do not specifically tell you to arrange the cards in a particular order assume that the cards are shuffled prior to playing. Getting them in order is time consuming and unusual, so it would need to be specifically mentioned if that was the intent.