I had a lot of fun playing LAST NIGHT ON EARTH, a zombie board game, with some writer pals.
The game is tongue and cheek but ruthless. It’s hard to win as the survivors!
The game is split between players controlling the zombies and those controlling the plucky survivors, each a stereotype from a typical zombie movie. I played the high school sweetheart and the drifter. My friend Adam played Billy the track star (the high school sweetheart’s boyfriend) and his dad, the sheriff. We were all split up and had to find each other and weapons while the zombie horde grew around us. The zombie players get a lot of action cards that make life hell for the survivors.
The sheriff got killed pretty early in the game after his revolver ran out of bullets (which I saw as movie justice for not believing the crazy drifter’s warnings). After the lights went out in the high school, Billy and his girl fought back to back with a shotgun and revolver and killed every zombie that came near. The zombies now focused on my hapless drifter, who couldn’t find a weapon and barely escaped one tight spot after the next.
I imagined him barely surviving so he could find Billy and his girl and tell them the reason for the zombies. Then they could go on the offensive and finish the zombies off to win the game, just like in a movie.
Sadly, the horde caught up to and overran the drifter, thus ending the game, creating a movie zombies would like to see.
It was a fun game, very playable and balanced, and I’m looking forward to taking another crack at it. I had just one complaint, which is the rules are a bit hazy, so you might end up having to make some of your own house rules on the fly.
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