So obviously all of my loyal listeners are wracking their brains trying to figure out what to get me for Christmas. Well, you can’t all get me bacon-of-the-month club memberships. On second thought, you could…packages upon packages of bacon arriving every month…but then again, if I’m too fat to type, you’ll miss my posts.
Well, if one person out there doesn’t want to get me bacon, how about Last Night on Earth, a zombie board game. $50 seems a little steep on the price, but surely it is worth $50 to try out various survival techniques. Also, you can play as the master of the zombies, and that just sounds cool. I don’t think I even need to mention the “epic CD soundtrack”, I think you’re already sold.
Okay, let’s be honest, ThinkGeek had me at the words “Zombies are officially the new black.” Truer words have never been spoken.
Shane Halbach 
I wondered if you would post about this. 🙂 I thought at some point I’d mentioned it, but we have actually played this game!
I think the second-coolest things about it is that there are multiple game objectives you can choose from, and the board is actually reconfigurable, so you’re not always playing the same scenario over and over. However, since we’ve only played once (the game isn’t ours), we haven’t really taken advantage of this feature.
The soundtrack was a little disappointing. It wasn’t long enough to last the whole game, and I was hoping for something a little creepier and more atmospheric. But it’s nice to have background music provided, rather than having to troll your own collection to find appropriate choices.
The coolest thing about this game, however, is the Jake Cartwright character. In the style of so many cooperative board games (Shadows Over Camelot, Battlestar Galactica), everyone has a character card that reveals their special talents and rules. As I recall there’s nothing particularly noteworthy about Jake Cartwright, but ours somehow evolved into being a playable card, where one can throw down the (massive) Jake Cartwright card and say, “Jake Cartwright says ‘That’s Bullsh**!'” thereby undoing the last move. Okay, so we never actually used this house rule, but we now quote it regularly in ordinary conversation, complete with the motion of playing a virtual Jake Cartwright card.
…And if you want my actual opinion of the game, it’s fun. The theming is well carried out and really makes the game. In the game objective we played, three of us were human and one person played all the zombies. It kind of sucked for that person, because basically everyone was ganging up and plotting against them, which isn’t much fun, especially since there was no period of actual cooperative play beforehand. And there are some funny bits (including the “Last Night on Earth” rules which relate to what happens when a male character and a female character find themselves alone in a room…). So it’s got a good zombie theme. And it’s got guns – that all have different firing rules. But I still think Battlestar Galactica is a much more well-balanced cooperative board game. (I kind of sounded like Kanye there!)
LikeLike
Meg, you are truly the only girl I know who can debate the relative merits of a Battlestar Galactica game vs. a zombie apocalypse game!
And I love the “Jake Cartwright says that’s bullshit” rule. Brilliant.
LikeLike