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Monday, January 02, 2012

Zombie Apocalypse

This is Steven Petrick posting.

While Jean was here we played a couple of rounds of a game by another company about "zombies" (Jean has a collection of Zombie games from that company).

SVC likes the game, but I find the system simply too reliant on luck. You have to roll to see how far you will move in addition to whether or not you can beat a Zombie that has moved into your square (or into whose square you have moved) in combat.

Dice are not supposed to like people, but if you make a lot of bad rolls in a row you can wind up so far behind that you cannot catch up. Thus, even if you have a good plan (well, you may think your plan is good, I thought mine was after all), you lose because others roll better than you on movement (and in combat with the Zombies) and pick up all the goodies before you can reach them.

Simply put, you need bullets to adjust die rolls to survive combat with Zombies, so you tend to move towards buildings where bullets can be found, but if the other players keep getting there before you, you wind up using up your bullets in fights with Zombies that you cannot evade and, well you die (which, for some reason, makes it very hard to "win").

I can understand that the game is amusing to a lot of people (I frankly find it tedious, but then I tend to roll bad dice a lot and have to make up for it by better tactical/operational play in most games I play). In all seriousness, if the dice I rolled in this game (both times we played it) were photon torpedo die rolls I would be able to conquer the Klingon empire. In this game, a die roll of "one" is bad rather than good, and I rolled a lot of "ones." There was a period in the first game (for example) where I rolled a "one" for movement five consecutive times.

And as fate would have it, the only time in that entire game I got to move six squares occurred only because I had a card that doubled my movement and rolled a "three," only to have SVC play a card that allowed him to control my movement and use that to run me six squares further away from where I needed to be. By the end of the game (three turns later) I STILL had not gotten back to the square I had been on before SVC moved me in the opposite direction.

SVC, Leanna, and Jean racked up lots of dead zombies (not enough to win the game on "body count"), but I only managed to kill six for the whole game.

Placing all the of the zombies on the game board is more tedium to me.

SVC and Jean may like the game (Leanna did not want to play it the second time), but to me it is pretty much "read the cards one time and then forget about it."