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.

My bad memories of Zombies!!!

In my unintentional and very incomplete exploration of Zombie board games, Zombies!!! was the first. Believe it or not, it isn’t the worst Zombie game I’ve ever played but I still don’t have much in the way of happy memories of the game.

Zombies!!! wasn’t the first zombie game. Dawn of the Dead came out in 1978, more than twenty years before and I don't even know if it was the first. But Zombies!!! managed to make a splash before zombie games became so ubiquitous. (Frankly, I blame the Walking Dead)

Zombies!!! combines map building by drawing tiles, rolling dice to move zombies and shoot zombies and using cards to get equipment and mess with the other players. Someone wins by either reaching the helipad (the last time in the second) or killing twenty-five zombies. (I guess at that point, you have successfully terrified the zombies)

I remember the GenCon when Zombies!!! was released. I hadn’t gotten into board games really. At the time, the game coming with a hundred little plastic zombies was pretty amazing. It’s astonishing how far the game industry has come as far as production values have come.

And the first game or two was a lot of fun. Thematic and pretty much never ending conflict.

But... The more we played Zombies!!!, the more disenchanted we got with it. It had what I think of as the Munchkin problem (although, to be fair, Munchkin isn’t the first game to have this issue or even the worst) A big part of the game is dragging other players down, which doesn’t actually help you out beyond them not winning. Which can make the game drag on and on and on.

A big part of the zombie genre is that the real monsters are other people. And boy does Zombies!!! deliver that in spades. However, that ultimately detracts from the game.

The absolutely killer was playing an eight-player game of it one New Year’s Eve. It took at least four hours and, by the end, we were actively helping each other out, just to see the game end. None of the eight of us involved wanted to ever play the game again.

To be fair, Zombies!!! is not without its charms. And I do believe it was innovative back in the day. However, it is a genuinely flawed game that really calls for some serious house rules. And as time has gone on, better games in almost every regard have come out.

It’s been a long time since I’ve played it and I don’t have much desire to play it again. However, it did leave an impression.

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/2471/zombies

Random thoughts about the Zombie Apocalypse

Reading the Walking Dead comic for the first time made me think about the now vast variety of Zombie Apocalypse games that are out there, both role playing games and board games.

(One thing that I also wonder about is how the Zombie Apocalypse took out civilization in the Walking Dead. As both the original Night of the Living Dead and Sean of the Dead point out, after the initial crisis, humans equipped with regular speed, modern technology and the ability to think get zombies under control)

You know, without even trying that hard, I’ve played a number of Zombie-themed games. Although the only specifically Zombie Apocalypse RPG I’ve played has been Zombie Cinema. 

Of course, one of the significant things about the Walking Dead is that it takes the long view. What happens over the long haul after the whole human race gets upset by the dead not only coming back but coming back mean.

Almost all the board games I’ve seen or read about take place right after the apocalypse started. Civilization has been kicked to the curb but we still can scavenge all the fun toys. The human race hasn’t either been wiped out or, more likely, picked itself back up. The framework of an RPG is where you play out the long term result of the apocalypse.

To be fair, the initial outbreak is where a Zombie Apocalypse is the most distinct aspect of it. If we’ve got the zombies under control, there isn’t much mechanical difference between that and, say, medieval Europe. 

And the initial outbreak is where all the fun, wish fulfillment stuff happens. That’s when you get to be free from all your responsibilities and do whatever you want. (Remember, one of the big points of the Zombie Apocalypse is that human beings are the real monsters) 

Frankly, I think that we’d all end up serfs and slaves in the cruel new world. 

I know that there are a bunch of card games and board games based on the Walking Dead but I think that the actual work, from what I’ve seen, really is more like a RPG. The characters slowly learn how to survive and deal with different threats. In other words, level up or die.

While I doubt I’ll be ever be a big zombie fan, I do have to give them this. They make great terrain and they force character development.

Only fourteen years late to Walking Dead

I am unbelievably late in getting on this train. I just read the first volume of the Walking Dead. I’ll probably never watch the TV show since watching TV frankly takes so much more time.

I’m only fourteen years late taking a look at this franchise, which has influenced the whole zombie genre. So we now live in a post-Walking Dead world. It’s kind of like watching Casablanca for the first time in your forties. (I first watched it as a teenager, in case your curious)

What really struck me was how mild the first volume was. Mind you, I’ve read part of Garth Ennis’s Crossed, which was his take on the Walking Dead and makes the original Walking Dead look like the smurfs.

Of course, the climax of the first volume, ten-year-old Carl shooting Shane, much more effective due to this mildness. The reader’s journey with these characters is a slow one.

I’ll be honest. What collections the library has is going to determine how far I go with the Walking Dead. I am not planning on becoming a dedicated reader. 

And I also know that if you have a long story planned and the characters will be falling, you need to start off high enough to give them a place to fall.

Pocket Landship - It’s fun!

When I was recently doing my once-or-twice-a-month search for new-to-me PnP files, I came across Pocket Landship. It went from ‘hey, this has been well received’ to ‘let’s start printing’ in the same sitting.

Pocket Landship is about controlling an English tank in World War I in a skirmish against six enemy forces that are controlled by dice rolls (seeing as how this is a solitaire game). The whole thing takes up nine cards, plus some tokens and dice.

Each card, no matter whose side they are on, has a health meter and a table of die results. You create two lines of three for the enemy cards, a front line and a back line.

The core mechanic is assigning dice. On the enemy turn, you roll three dice and assign them lowest to highest from left to right and then consult the charts. You roll three dice on your own turn and assign them where you want to on your own cards.

Part of what makes the game actually were playing is that the die rolls determine more than just hitting and missing. The enemy can shift around, making it harder to hit specific targets. Some of your options include modifying other die rules. And damage can also be repaired.

And I’ve just been playing with the base cards. The current files let you make double-sided cards with different options for both sides on the back. And there is an expansion (which is just one more sheet of cards) that I know I’ll be making soon. It’s an awful lot of game for just two pages of cards.

That said, I can’t help but wonder how much control I really have. I have some control over my actions but the dice are powerful. Strong rolls on the enemy side can be devastating. The options of potentially modifying dice give me hope that it’s not too random.

At the same time the game is short enough and interesting enough that the random factor has yet to bother me. It will be interesting to see if it either does come to bother me or if I figure out how to get more and more control the more I play. And this is a game that I plan to keep playing.

One game that really went through my mind as I played it was Ogre. Part of that was because it’s a tank game and part of it is because, with the base cards, you are controlling different parts of the tank separately. 

And I do really wonder what else you can do with this system. How much modification would it take to make it a two-plays game and would it be fun? Could you use this system to make an economic game?

Admittedly, dice assignment is now a well established mechanic with games like Kingsburg or High Frontiers. But Pocket Landship does well in such a small package. I really wonder what more could be done.

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/224303/pocket-landship

A Blorg in the Midwest - oh, it’s quirky

I made a copy of A Blorg in the Midwest because it was a quick project of just nine cards and I was having fun crafting cards. However, once it was done, I decided to give it a try since it’s a solitaire game and doesn’t require any other components.

What I discovered was a remarkably quirky little game.

In the game, you are a juvenile alien who borrowed the family flying saucer and crashed it at a farm in South Dakota. Now you have to figure out how to get back to outer space before the FBI show up and vivisect you. 

The cards are all double-sided and come in two flavors: objects and locations. In addition, every card also has an event, most of which make your life a lot more difficult. 

There are basically three areas for cards. Your hand, which can hold one area and up to four objects. The draw pile. Aaaaand the time line which is four cards that you interact with and where events go off.  

Each turn, you can either move to a new location by either flipping your location card or swapping it with one on the timeline or pick up an object from the timeline if it matches your location. Then, resolve any events and move the timeline along.

There are a number of ways to escape but they all involve getting the right items and either taking them to your crashed ship or having them when the right event goes off. 

While I read that A Blorg in the Midwest was a nine-card deck builder, what it really is is a nine-card deck manager. What cards you have in your hand, which side cards are up in the draw pile, what cards are in the timeline. There’s a lot of interaction between all the cards and you have to manage all that to avoid vivisection.

What the game really reminds me of is one of Infocom’s text games from the 80s. You know, where you had to juggle inventory while going to different areas to solve puzzles. While there isn’t anything like getting the Babel fish from Hitchhiker’s Guide, the whole thing is a moving puzzle with the time line bearing down on you.

A Blorg in the Midwest isn’t a flawless game, although I’m pretty sure some of the quirky loopholes are intentional. And I think I will end up played out with the game pretty quickly. But it has been more engaging than I expected with the silly theme and art helping. I am glad I made it and tried it.

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/220380/blorg-midwest

A geezer’s take on Looking for Alaska

I like to hit the random media button on TV Tropes, which is how I found out about Looking for Alaska, John Green’s first young adult book. Which was easy to find at the library and short so I paused my other reading and read it.

I’m going to do my best not spoil the book and the plot of the book definitely pivots on a spoiler. 

The basic idea of the book is that a geeky, shy guy goes off to school where he meets a beautiful girl who gets him to smoke and drink and just loosen up. You know the plot of more movies and books and such than you can shake a stick at.

What makes Looking for Alaska interesting and genuinely good book is that the girl is ultimately shown to not be some kind of wild savior. Instead, she’s a complete, self-destructive mess. AND the main character’s obsession with her isn’t just unhealthy for him but it’s also not any good for her.

 

The growth of the main character doesn’t come from out of his shell. It comes from him realizing that he wasn’t in love with a person but obsessing over the idealized dream of a person.

Reading the book a couple decades older than the target audience was an interesting experience because both characters reminded me of people I knew when I was younger. Heck, I wonder if I have played both roles to different people.

And the two lessons that the book teaches ring true. One, the promise of the manic pixie girl is a false one and it’s usually not even one that the manic pixie girl really made. Two, you grow out of it. Honest.