Zombie Fest

I like LNOE for its tactical miniatures aspects and quick playing scenarios. The setting is okay and yeah I get a kick out of the farmers daughter decapiting zeds with garden shears. I like Zombies!!! too for the massive amount of zombie figures you can get onto the board, but I'll only play with the Quicker Play rules. Although if you get a chance try the zombie master scenario for Zombies!!!, which I thought was fun and I think is on its homepage. Mall of Horror sounds good from everything I've heard.

My ideal zombie game would probably be a re-enactment of The Alamo with little to no chance of winning. It'd be all about how long you can survive and be a co-op game with PvP possibilities.
If I'm planning to play something zombie related though I'd most likely pull out the All Flesh Must Be Eaten RPG and do a one-shot or short campaign. If not then I'd pull out LNOE because its fun.

You can add zombies to other games too. Using the Zombies!!! packs to make DOOM into TimeSplitters is certainly workable.

Count me among those who love LNOE. I think it does a great job at depicting its subject, which yes, is more of the cheesy B-movie zombie type of thing, but so what? Does everything need to be incredibly dark and edgy? Is it not "authentic" enough for the hardcore zombie esthete?? (Where's the eye-rolling emoticon when you need one??) Who cares... It generates some really fun experiences that are memorable and highly thematic and consistent with its subject. When the Sheriff is slowly backing away from a horde of zombies, firing his shotgun frantically, and then it runs out of ammo and he turns around and runs, only to get his face chewed off by the zombies right behind him, that is classic zombie film material. When the drifter has filled up the truck with gasoline and the high school prom queen is racing for the truck with the keys and is about to jump in the truck when she is mauled by zombies, you can picture the slow pull out crane shot and the director yelling "Perfect!" So what if it's cheesy or B-movie zombie film material... it's very authentic and evocative for what it's trying to be, and isn't that what we ask/hope/look for in games? Accept that style (and the photography matches that style well, looking good enough to be low-budget professional but looking campy enough to be campy) and it can be a really fun experience.

LNOE has a good variety of characters and scenarios, so it's not the same thing every time, even within the same scenarios... It's easy to teach and learn (my wife loves it, which I totally didn't expect) and yet has a good amount of detail and "chrome". It includes some decent tactical decisions and combines some very interactive cooperative play with a competetive aspect. There is sacrifice and heroism and dramatic arcs and a good sense that what is happening is part of the cinematic drama (and comedy), lowbrow though it may be. One thing I'd like to see, though, is some kind of traitorous or competetive element within the Hero team, where one of the Heroes doesn't care about the others and just wants to get out of town on their own, or has some individual goal that the others don't necessarily know about. But that would just be yet another zombie film scenario that LNOE could cover, and certainly the purely cooperative aspect of the Hero team is fine for most situations.

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.

Actually, LNOE came first.

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.

Mall of Horror is cool, too, and it does a good job of covering the political/negotiation aspect of "who is going to survive this situation and what can I do to BS my way out of this".

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.

I really don't get what you're trying to say here. Care to elaborate?

I never knew there were zombie snobs before I read this thread.
LNOE is good fun, especially with the expansion. It's one of those games where not every turn is momentous but the overall arc is a lot of fun.

iguanaDitty wrote:

I never knew there were zombie snobs before I read this thread.
LNOE is good fun, especially with the expansion. It's one of those games where not every turn is momentous but the overall arc is a lot of fun.

Dude, there are snobs out there for everything. I'm sure someone out there is a snob when it comes to "Pissing" videos.

"Clearly, the urine was digitally altered!!!"

I really don't get what you're trying to say here. Care to elaborate?

I was browsing BGG, and noticed there was an LNoE scenario where the one of the townsfolk was the "Zombie Master" controlling the undead, and the players have to figure out which one it is. That's pretty similar to that thing in ToE where you try to figure out who the bad guy is from among the town elders. I don't know if it works well in LNoE. It probably does, though, which is my point. You can probably throw any sort of moonbat scenario into LNoE which doesn't really have anything to do with what zombie movies are usually about and have it work because, at the end of the day, it's just a dirt simple dudes & dice game with a bunch of superficial zombie imagery thrown in.

As for ToE, I thought the elder thing was a neat idea, but the game more than makes up for it by being absolutely horrid in every other respect. I found it to be turgidly paced, drawn out, and simply no fun to play. It did feel like an even WORSE version of Runebound to me with, again, a bunch of superficial chrome trying to hide a derivative and lazy design.

I never knew there were zombie snobs before I read this thread.
LNOE is good fun, especially with the expansion. It's one of those games where not every turn is momentous but the overall arc is a lot of fun.

It's nothing to do with any snobbery. I already have 4 zombie games, so why the hell would I spend the $50 to play LNoE when it's not really any different than the worst of the games I already have? I only need one grab-the-chainsaw-kill-the-zombies game and when it comes down to it, I'm not going to pick Go Fish: Zombie Edition.

Yes, I'd rather play something like Mall of Horror, where the onus is on survival and inter-group bickering because that captures the feeling of watching Night of the Living Dead better than watching Johnny Quarterback and Nurse Nancy whack zombies with baseball bats. If that makes me a snob, fine, I'm a snob.

If you like LNoE, go ahead and like it, but don't tell me it's going to be winning any awards for originality any time soon.

Million Dollar Mimring wrote:

iguanaDitty wrote:

I never knew there were zombie snobs before I read this thread.
LNOE is good fun, especially with the expansion. It's one of those games where not every turn is momentous but the overall arc is a lot of fun.

Dude, there are snobs out there for everything. I'm sure someone out there is a snob when it comes to "Pissing" videos.

"Clearly, the urine was digitally altered!!!"

*ahem* Quite true sir, quite true.

I was browsing BGG, and noticed there was an LNoE scenario where the one of the townsfolk was the "Zombie Master" controlling the undead, and the players have to figure out which one it is. That's pretty similar to that thing in ToE where you try to figure out who the bad guy is from among the town elders. I don't know if it works well in LNoE. It probably does, though, which is my point. You can probably throw any sort of moonbat scenario into LNoE which doesn't really have anything to do with what zombie movies are usually about and have it work because, at the end of the day, it's just a dirt simple dudes & dice game with a bunch of superficial zombie imagery thrown in.

As for ToE, I thought the elder thing was a neat idea, but the game more than makes up for it by being absolutely horrid in every other respect. I found it to be turgidly paced, drawn out, and simply no fun to play. It did feel like an even WORSE version of Runebound to me with, again, a bunch of superficial chrome trying to hide a derivative and lazy design.

That must be a fan-made scenario as it is not the base game. Or I guess it could be in the Growing Hunger expansion.

While I don't think ToE brings anything NEW to the adventure game genre, I wouldn't say it does anything epicly wrong. The pace can be a little slow, but I think that can be easily corrected with a home rule of moving the shadow tracker after every round.

That must be a fan-made scenario as it is not the base game. Or I guess it could be in the Growing Hunger expansion.

While I don't think ToE brings anything NEW to the adventure game genre, I wouldn't say it does anything epicly wrong. The pace can be a little slow, but I think that can be easily corrected with a home rule of moving the shadow tracker after every round.

It was an on-line thing that they did on their website.

As for ToE, again, I can't (and wouldn't want to) convince you that a game you like is bad. I don't have any desire to "fix" the game with house rules. That's something I'll do for a game where I couldn't get the same experience elsewhere. I'll just stick with Talisman and Arkham Horror, Return of the Heroes, hell, maybe even a little Rogue Trooper if I want to do the whole run-around-and-draw-adventure-cards thing.