varingblaarLast Night on Earth: The Zombie Game
This is the perfect self-aware Zombie experience. The board game celebrates all the stereotypes. The characters are a prom queen, a jock, the policeman's son, the goth chick, the farmer's daughter, the priest. They all have an ability that makes sense for the character they play. The locations are all small town buildings randomly drawn during setup. High school, diner, police station, hospital, etc. The objectives are typical movie stuff. Escape in the truck, burn'em out, defend the manor house... You get the idea.
The best number of players is five. Four Heroes and one Zombie player. Each player controls one Hero and a single Zombie player controls all the Zombies. It can be played at other counts, but then players control multiple Heroes or the Zombie players share duties.
Heroes are quick and get things done. Most of the time they're in and out of buildings, getting them very close to the Zombies. Heroes can fend them off in a fight, but it's not often they outright kill a Zombie especially early in the game. Zombies are slow and their basic movement is predictable, but their power lies in numbers. 14 Zombies, or 21 when playing with some of the expansions. The Zombie Turn isn't very interesting, but the Zombie Event cards keep things interesting.
Speaking of expansions, there's a bunch and most of them add something major to the game. The main expansion is Growing Hunger which adds tiles, extra objectives and a bunch more cards. It also adds house rules with indicators to help balance the game. Some objectives use these too, but you can mix them up. Survival of the Fittest adds unique items, tactics cards that can change the tide of the game, and actual weapons for the Zombies. The rest of them add more variety but nothing massive.
Oh the game came with a soundtrack! On an actual CD in the box! It's terrible don't listen to it!
A few people I've played with complained that the game is unbalanced and they didn't stand a chance of winning. It's true that we often have to make a call for specific rules interpretations because it's not covered in the rules, but often we just imagine what would happen in The Walking Dead and go with that. Sometimes we find the official rule hidden in an example of play at the back of the rulebook, or we have to check the wiki. But it's not the kind of game you take that seriously.
It's just sort of how it goes. Sometimes the randomness of the game just gets you. On other occasions we played until 3am howling with laughter at the ridiculous outcomes. It's still one of my favourite games ever, and the sheer variety in setups means we can play it over and over and not play the same situation twice.
As far as I can tell the game is out of print. There was a 10th Anniversary version in 2017 but that was the last. Good luck finding it.
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