Zombie Fest

I love zombies. As a matter of fact I did my University dissertation on Zombie movies.

I love board games. The first board game I bought that got me back into gaming after my Warhammer period ended was "Zombies!!!"

What zombie board games would you recommend?

I have Zombies!!! (plus expansions 2, 3 and 4), and Zombie Plague, but which games would you guys recommend (hey, I value your opinions)?

Is Dead of Night really as good as they all say? Is it worth the effort to hunt down/make?
The Dawn of the Dead wargame?
How does Last Night on Earth rate in your eyes?
Should I just wait for "All Things Zombie"?
Should this have been a Geeklist?
Why does no one say "He fucking dick and then bullshit" anymore?

BradH wrote:

I love zombies. As a matter of fact I did my University dissertation on Zombie movies.


Is Dead of Night really as good as they all say? Is it worth the effort to hunt down/make?

Since the deal to make the game fell through, the designer put it up for download.

All in all, it isn't bad, but it has some problematic areas with the rules for PvP, in my opinion. I've made a set myself and played the scenarios a few times. I especially like the "barricade yourself in a house and board it up so you can hunker down" mechanic.

I heard that DAWN OF THE DEAD was pretty hot shit. There's PnP versions out there, print up a crummy version and see if worth it to try harder.

Home Page of the Dead .

Witch Master Creations .

I'm sick to death of zombies. Having grown up watching seedy, questionable Italian zombie movies in the 80s, it disheartens me to see how widely accepted and "cuddly" zombies are now. Haven't these people seen CITY OF THE LIVING DEAD?

Anyway...most zombie games range from fair to horrible. There's not been a really good one yet. Actually, the best one I know of is this tiny little Polish game from the guy that did NEUROSHIMA HEX, it's called ZOMBIAKI. It captures the whole zombie siege idea better than any other game I've seen. There's also one called DARK, DARKER, DARKEST that um...is in various stages of development that could be incredible if the designer can ever get it to print. It was in the hands of a huge publisher who apparently backed out of it. I can't say much, but it was tied to a VERY popular zombie license.

Is Dead of Night really as good as they all say? Is it worth the effort to hunt down/make?

It looks pretty good...make it and tell us how it is.

The Dawn of the Dead wargame?

Very old timey and expensive. I haven't played it in 15 years or so. I remember it being pretty cool.

How does Last Night on Earth rate in your eyes?

Fair. Pretty dumb. I like it a little less every time I play it. Some fun scenarios don't make up for the goofy attempts at "B-movie" humour. Part of what made the 80s Italian zombie pictures so damn good was that they were grim, bleak, and completely serious. None of this goofy "hyuck hyuck, I'm the farmer's daughter with a chainsaw!" crap.

Should I just wait for "All Things Zombie"?

I don't know man, I'm not very excited about it. It could turn out to be pretty good, but it could turn out to be just another tactical wargame with zombies instead of nazis.

Should this have been a Geeklist?

Your mama should have been a geeklist.

Why does no one say "He fucking dick and then bullshit" anymore?

Once they started printing up T-shirts, ball caps, beer cozies, and shot glasses it started to get old. But then I saw a baby with an animated mouth say it on the internet and it was over.

Haven't these people seen CITY OF THE LIVING DEAD?

Yup. Probably the ONLY gore movie that makes me feel me feel sick whilst watching it.

There's also one called DARK, DARKER, DARKEST that um...is in various stages of development that could be incredible if the designer can ever get it to print. It was in the hands of a huge publisher who apparently backed out of it. I can't say much, but it was tied to a VERY popular zombie license.

Oh, yeah. I remember hearing something about that. All I could think was "dumb name", and promptly forgot about it. I know that's judging a book by its cover, but....dumb name, man.

I don't know man, I'm not very excited about it. It could turn out to be pretty good, but it could turn out to be just another tactical wargame with zombies instead of nazis.

Yeah, that's why I'm not in the pre-order club. That and paying postage to the UK wouldn't save me any money by pre-ordering anyway.

I think that zombies are great, too, but I've steered clear of several games out there after discovering that my friends didn't want to play Zombies!!! anymore after the first few games. I suspect that Zombies!!! is actually a decent game if you play quickly, maybe using a sand timer.

I downloaded a PnP copy of Dawn of the Dead, assembled it and gave it to a friend on her birthday, because she and her husband love boardgames and zombies. They tried it once, but weren't too impressed. Another friend played it a lot back in the early '80s, but his nostalgia doesn't necessarily mean that the game was good. It got a favorable review in the Dragon back then, too, but I think that better games have come along since then.

Last Night on Earth didn't get my money, because the rural setting seems wrong for the genre, and the photo art looks too corny.

There are two games that you might want to take a look at:

Humans!!! -- Instead of playing a human trying to survive the zombie apocalypse, you control a species of zombie competing other zombies for food during the zombie apocalypse. I reviewed it exclusively for F:AT, and I thought that it was somewhat better than Zombies!!! The combat system in particular is unusual and fun. It is intended to be compatible with Zombies!!!, though I bet there are some issues that will need to be worked out. The contents are comparable to what you get in the base game of Zombies!!!

Mall of Horror -- Although there is combat in MoH, the focus of the game is on tense negotiations and treachery by human survivors. Each player controls a faction of survivors in a mall attacked by zombies, and when a given store gets too crowded, those survivors vote to see who gets eaten by the zombies. This game is a big hit with gamers that I know. My regular group played the hell out of it for the first two years, and we still enjoy an occasional game. My Jyhad crowd tried it and loved it. Even my vampire larp friends had fun with it while drunk at a party. Really nice components, though the rulebook is slightly challenging due to an imperfect translation from the original French. Download the cheatsheets from TOS and this game becomes really quick to teach and play.

BradH wrote:

Is Dead of Night really as good as they all say? Is it worth the effort to hunt down/make?

Some notes on DoN:

-It has an RPG feel.

-Your character must deal with real constraints: you can't walk through walls, weapons break, you can carry or hold only so many things, it is dangerous to fight zombies hand to hand, injuries slow you down, it sometimes can take a while to find certain things (eg fuel) that are necessary to make your escape.

-These contraints work in a way that gives DoN little or no "gamey" elements. The rules do not get in the way of the game experience, or create an artificial situation in which someone would do something to win even though it doesn't make sense thematically. This is facilitated by the game's main rule which originally was the *only* rule: if it happened in a zombie film, it can happen in the game. By putting the film genre in the foreground of the design, Simon Spearing gave players a great way to resolve any rule ambiguities on the spot without stepping out of the headspace of the game.

-Zombie stories take normal contexts and make them horrific, and so a good zombie game should be well suited to new scenarios that would allow players to explore their different horrors. I think DoN is begging for expansions with new contexts, new weapons, new stories. In an ideal world, the game would have been picked up by a publisher and expansions would have followed. I think those of us who play this game need to step up and try to create new scenarios. Spearing was working on a shopping mall scenario but that seems to be stalled. (I have daydreamed, but not yet worked on, a scenario in which players are trapped in a university library, the zombies are the students, and the heroes need to burn classic and precious books to fight the horde of mindless zombie students off...I found this daydream strangely satisfying.)

-The game takes about 2.5-3 hours on average, which is perfect.

-The only criticism I'd have is that I want more scenarios. I'd like a scenario that stretches across a map twice or three times the size and have two different small groups try to join up and make a joint escape, or have one group rescue another, etc.

Michael Barnes wrote:

...this tiny little Polish game from the guy that did NEUROSHIMA HEX, it's called ZOMBIAKI.

small correction: same publisher (Portal) but different designers (NS is by Michael Oracz, Z is by Adam Mnich and Ignacy Trzewiczek)

jeb wrote:

I heard that DAWN OF THE DEAD was pretty hot shit. There's PnP versions out there, print up a crummy version and see if worth it to try harder.

It's okay, it's definitely not hot shit. I prefer Dead of Night. I have a foamcore mounted, bagged version of DAWN if someone wants it. Trashmail me if interested.

Is Dead of Night really as good as they all say? Is it worth the effort to hunt down/make?

No on the first question, eh maybe on the second. My dad made a nice copy and we tried it. It's hard on the humans to the point where it's almost ridiculous, and it's not reinventing the wheel for the genre. It does have some cool RPG "do whatever you want" type play, though, and it's certainly heads-and-shoulders above some other zombie games out there.

The Dawn of the Dead wargame?

DotD isn't really a wargame, and it's not one you really want to play with even two players. It's okay to yank out every once in a while try to clear the mall of zombies. I think you can find everything you need to PnP it on the internet. DO NOT shell out a ton of money on eBay for it.

How does Last Night on Earth rate in your eyes?

What do ass, balls, and shit have in common? They're all things that LNoE sucks. Imagine playing Zombies!!! with all the actual zombie fighting replaced by rifling through toolsheds looking for a gas can (i.e. drawing cards from a deck). Besides, half of the mechanics are lifted straight from Maul of America, which also sucks but at least you're not paying extra money to get a shitty CD with that game.

Though I do feel rotten about bashing a small publisher like Flying Frog, their games are awful, and LNoE is basically them saying "Hey, we know we're putting out a completely unoriginal and not especially good product, because the games we ripped off when we made this are duds that everyone hates. You'll buy this one, though, because we loaded it up with glossy cards, plastic dudes, and pictures of tits because you're too stupid and addicted to buying shit to know any better."

FUCK LNoE.

You want a good zombie game that actually attempts to give you the feeling of playing a zombie movie, get Mall of Horror. It's the only game out there that actually does anything with the more interesting aspects of the zombie movie formula.

Zombie Town, while not being anything great either, still does some cool things with its theme. You run around town trying to barricade houses, shoot zombies, and screw over the other survivors. It's a little better than Zombies!!!, shorter, and more thematic.

Man you guys are uptight about your zombies.

I like Last Night on Earth. It plays in less than 1.5 hours. The rules are very simple. Most games I've played have been quite close. It's got lots of scenarios. There's lots of homebrew scenarios and variants. I've seen a Buffy variant, a Marvel Zombies variant and others. And it's got official expansions too.

Yeah, sometimes it seems like all the heroes do is stand in a building drawing from the deck turn after turn.

I also like A Touch of Evil, for the record. You guys are just a bunch of FFG goose-steppers (I kid, I kid.)

I like Last Night on Earth. It plays in less than 1.5 hours. The rules are very simple. Most games I've played have been quite close. It's got lots of scenarios. There's lots of homebrew scenarios and variants. I've seen a Buffy variant, a Marvel Zombies variant and others. And it's got official expansions too.

Well, you wouldn't be alone on this one. It's a fairly popular game, so they must have done something that works for people. I just think it sucks, and it's not really worth owning if you have Zombies!!! or any of the other games its inspired.

Personally, I'm just sick of zombie games. Very few of them ever try to translate anything that makes zombie movies unique among horror films. It's as if these game designers think the movies are just all about chainsaws and shotguns. They're not.

Also, it looks like they managed to shoehorn the townsfolk thing from ToE into LNoE, which just goes to show how much of a generic "plastic dudes fight each other" LNoE really is. On the plus side, it means you can get the one worthwhile idea that ToE displays without actually having to sit through ToE, which makes playing Runebound seem exciting by comparison.

Personally, I'm just sick of zombie games. Very few of them ever try to translate anything that makes zombie movies unique among horror films. It's as if these game designers think the movies are just all about chainsaws and shotguns. They're not.

This is why I'm sick of anything to do with zombies. This goofy tone has crept into the canon that's kind of ruined it. NOTLD was grim as fuck, DAWN was very funny but satirical and cynical rather than silly and camp, and even DAY was pretty nihilistic. The Italian stuff, as I already said, was serious and very dark. RETURN had some funny stuff, but it still had a hard edge.

It's really Sam Raimi's fault...as great as the ED films were, it set off this whole "har har, chainsaws and zombies!" thing. And SHAUN OF THE DEAD, as great as it is, is what made zombies accessible to mainstream audiences. Now there's all these cute/funny/campy zombie pictures and I'm sick of it.

Of course, there is one "funny zombie" picture that is a total masterpiece but it doesn't have that stupid chainsaws-and-shotguns approach and it's pitch-black comedy- DELLAMORE, DELLAMORTE.

I've played Zombies!! and I think it is one of the worst games I've ever played.

I hear Last Night on Earth is by far the best zombie board game out there.


I've been playing Resident Evil 5 lately

I'm ready for the werewolf revival. I'm a big zombie apologist, but it's time for them to shamble back into the dark. We've talked about how vampires have become an undead soap opera. Yet, Hollywood seems really invested in bringing back the slasher. I suppose that Jason > Werewolf.

As far as LNoE goes, I've only played it three or four times. My group enjoyed the experience, but maybe the game breaks down during additional plays. Truth be told, we have so many games vying for a spot on the table that it'll be a while before LNoE ever hits the table again.