Nuclear Candy

Like many a geek girl and boy, this holiday season I was really hoping for Last Night on Earth, the zombie survival board game. (Don’t act like you didn’t want it…or do now that you have heard of it.) A board game with play designed after horror movies where you are encouraged to kill zombies? It’s a no (don’t eat my) brainer.

When it comes to games, I keep it pretty classic. Think Trivial Pursuit or Scrabble in lieu of WoW or D&D. So the idea of playing a game using scenario cards, eight six-sided die and multiple player figures was daunting at first.

But for the urge to hone my zombie survival skills was too great to ignore. Christmas night, the boy and I sat down for a good ol’ fashioned holiday Zombies vs Heroes bout. Naturally, I played the Heroes team, and the boy graciously played for the Zombies (who says chivalry is dead?). Getting the game set up was pretty easy and quite interesting. There’s a center game board surrounded by four L-shaped boards picked at random from the six included. We played the basic game, you know, to get our zombie-slaying and human-hungry feet wet and to get used to the rules.

Essentially, the Heroes have a set number of turns to slay a certain number of Zombies that are overrunning the town.  In our case, I had 15 turns for my 4 Heroes to kill 15 zombies.  Each side (in this case, each player) has a set of steps to take each turn. The game included handy cards that listed the steps for the forgetful (or those, ahem, drinking whiskey while playing). The Zombies get to walk around and pick fights with Heroes, each match settled by a roll of die. Enter in Zombie Event cards (such as cutting the power to disable some Heroes or challenge them to a re-roll) and Hero Event and Weapon cards (pump action shotgun, anyone?), and the game gets increasingly more interesting.

It should not come as a surprise that I vanquished the zombie scum from the town of Woodinvale (I’m considering renaming the town for my personal amusement), but it wasn’t without struggle against my foe. I can see how the game could fulfill its claim of never being the same as well as the extra fun in adding more players. If you love to hate zombies, adore horror films or just like to play board games, see how you fare on Last Night on Earth.