The Zombie Clock is ticking... yea!

The word that came to my mind after reading John Wick’s The Shotgun Diaries was desperation.

I’m not a big zombie fan. It feels like, too often, the default theme is humans are the real monsters overlapping with who we really are without society’s rules. Powerful themes but it gets repetitive. And too often, the zombie genre can become some kind of escapist fantasy, that a zombie apocalypse beats the nine-to-five job.

The Shotgun Diaries doesn’t come up with a new theme for zombies. Instead, it strips the zombie genre down to almost the most basic level. You play almost helpless survivors struggling to stay alive with minimal, dwindling resources. 

Seriously, characters are basically one-hit-point wonders who each have one meaningful skill. If that skill doesn’t apply to a situation, you are helpless. You do have access to a group pool of dice but that is hard to replenish and using it increases the overall danger level.

But the hook, the something special that makes The Shotgun Diaries something worth playing, is the Zombie Clock.

Every ten minutes _real_ time, the Zombie Clock goes forward one tick (indicated by adding some sort of token in front of the GM, glass stones or plastic zombies or mouse skulls or whatever) When that happens, a day goes by, the player’s dice pool loses a die and things get more dangerous.

The GM can trade one of the tokens in to do bad stuff. And if the Zombie Clock gets too far, the characters’ shelter get overrun and really bad things happen. 

The Zombie Clock is great because it creates a real time mechanic for ratcheting up tension and danger. I remember when I first played Dread (the one that used a Jenga glee) how having a physical structure that was inevitably going to collapse and cause catastrophic failure added a visceral level of fear and tension. In that first game, we the players started hugging the wall to keep away from the Jenga tower.

The Zombie Clock isn’t quite that extreme but it makes the game more real. You can’t sit back and make detailed plans while the game world is on hold. No, you are literally on the clock.

As I’ve said, I’m not big on zombie games. And there are other zombie games I’d played before The Shotgun Diaries (Like All Flesh Must Be Eaten or Zombie Cinema) However, the potential of the Zombie Clock does make me want to try The Shotgun Diaries.

Clearinghouse of zombie thoughts

I’m about through reminiscing about zombie games but I still have some closing thoughts.

The two zombie games I’ve played the most over the last few years are Zombie Dice and Zombie Fluxx. But, let’s be honest. They are are really ‘zombie’ games with the quotes firmly in place. They both invoke zombie survival tropes, particularly Zombie Fluxx, but they don’t really play out the narrative. They are fun but they aren’t what you really look for when you want zombie.

The single worst zombie game I’ve experienced was ZombieTown (not to be confused with Zombie Town with a space in the middle) A huge part of the problem was that the rules were horribly written. A table of experienced gamers and we could not figure out the rule book. After an hour of attempting to play at GenCon, we gave up, returned it to the game library and thanked our lucky stars none of us had bought it.

Two Print-and-Play Zombie games I’ve played more than a few times are Zombie in My Pocket and Escape of the Dead. Escape of the Dead (Was Escape FROM the Dead taken?) is a cute little exercise in dice placement and minimalism. Zombie in My Pocket, though, tells a complete story and has a really driving timer. Still a fun game and boy, have I played it a lot.

However, in my last limited experience, the hands-down-best game that made me feel like I was playing out a zombie story was Last Night on Earth. It’s been long enough that I only vaguely remember the mechanics.

But the three things I do remember is that it had a timer that kept pushing the game along, that it told a good narrative and that everyone at the table had a lot of fun. I’d play it again if I had the time and the chance.

I am sure there are other zombie games I’ve played. However, those are the ones that have really stuck in my head, for one reason or another.