Not 40k but still awesome: The Zombie Boardgame, "The Last Night on Earth"

Happy Friday my people!

Amazing to see how much traffic drops off for a new blog when you don't post for a day!  I'm a bit leery because we're out of town all weekend doing glorious family holiday things, and I'm afraid I'll make everyone who's been kind enough to visit the site lose what little interest they already had.  I'll try to find a good topic to post about while I'm visiting the parents for the weekend -- maybe I'll dig through the attic at my parents' and try to find some nifty stuff.  There's a lot of buried Chaos and Vampire Counts stuff there that's getting on in age.  Plus I want to grab my old Mordheim stuff, because hell yes.  I wonder if I could trick my buxom wench into playing Mordheim?  Very small boardgame leap from Last Night on Earth.....

Oh right!!  We were talking about Last Night On Earth!!

 Gratuitous box shot?

Before I say anything else, let me say that we had a great time playing this and can't wait to play it again.

Impressions:

For those who aren't 'in the know', LNoE (acronym GO!) is a boardgame simulation of the zombie apocalypse.  It plays with 2 to 6 players, allowing for up to two zombie players and 4 hero players.

Straight up, this game is a lot of fun.  

I just asked the girl how she would sum up LNoE in one sentence.  She said:

"Maybe you can win a game once you learn to roll some dice! Bitch!"


She's... hurtful.  We played a test game, and I actually did win, but only by making the game time out before she could kill enough zombies.  Still, I should have won much earlier, but it turns out that I roll Gentleman's Ones just about every damn turn when I should be rolling boxcars.  In a game where an unarmed Farmer's Daughter, all by her lonesome, ought to be easy prey for the walking dead, this happened:

"Next turn, you're all going to attack me an I'm just gonna peace out through that door across the building, mmkay?  Oh you should also know that I'm unarmed and hurt already."  By the way, that's not water in that glass folks.  LNoE makes a great drinking game.

Jenny, the Farmer's Daughter, with no weapons and already down one of her two hitpoints, managed to fend off four zombies and waltz out.  I feel like I let down my poor zombies with my awful rolling.  They looked up at me, judgment in their eyes.

Still, I have to say that the game is solid and balanced.  We only played the basic game, but basically the Heroes have the option of hiding in buildings, searching for weapons, which is awesome.... but they also have to kill 15 zombies in 15 turns, so if they take too much time doing that, they'll lose in exactly the way my number one gal did:

Pictured: Victory.  Sweet, sweet victory.

After chasing down Jenny, finally, I decided to make her work for the kills, and kept the zombies around the backfield while she searched buildings for items.  In the end, she didn't kill enough to win the game because too much time was spent with the heroes scattered or searching.

On the other side of the fence, if you can consolidate your heroes and get a decent weapon early, the zombies don't stand a chance.  Their spawns have to be spread out, and the heroes move 1d6 squares while the zombies only move 1.  Also, the pump shotgun keeps them from clumping up in squares like I did in that game.

How's the hardware?


When I bought this, the very first thing I noticed, before I even paid for it or took it home, was how heavy the box was.  I figured this might bode well, and it did.

Those board pieces are good, thick cardboard with a nice glossy finish.  I've heard people complain about how the decks of cards stick together, and they did when I took off the cellophane, but I found that once I flexed them a bit like I would with any new deck of cards before I shuffled it, they were absolutely fine.  They weren't as glorious as, say, our Jack Daniel's cards...

I don't know how much Paddy O'Lantern had to drink to get these for us, but I do know that it was too much.

Additionally, the artwork is, at least from the perspective of someone who is as unartistic as a living creature can be while still qualifying as sentient, gorgeous.  They use photographs, then photoshop them into looking like drawings, and it just works.  Case in point would be the Hero cards (1 thick cardboard card for each hero, about 4"x7" if memory and metric conversion serve me right), which have a great portrait and detail all the character's special rules.  Quod erat demonstratum:

867-5309!  Also, hot!

The minis are surprisingly decent too.  I'm actually thinking of painting the heroes up, as it would be fun, and make them easier to distinguish on the board since they're all the same shade of grey.  But the base quality is much higher than you might expect.  It's more 'Hero Quest' and less 'Zombies!!!'.

Paddy O'Lantern, hitting on Sally the Highschool Sweetheart before the game.  You might think she's too young, but remember that Hormagaunts spawn and die in a matter of days.  So really she's at fault here.

Conclusion:

After one round of this, we're interested in Flying Frog's other big game, A Touch of Evil.

I gotta say, if you can afford 40 bucks or whatever for a carnifex kit, you can afford this game and should keep it on hand.  It takes about ten seconds to teach it to your significant other or your friends, and it's a great board game, which I think will only get better with more players.  You may have to do a bit of convincing to get the monopoly and scrabble crowd to give it a shot, but I think they'll thank you for it in the end.  Just like that old Nightmare game.

I'm going to see if I can use this and a couple other higher-end boardgames as a gateway drug to trick The First Lady into playing something sweet like Mordheim, Bloodbowl... Space Hulk... anything.  I'll have to be crafty.

Overall:  A great game you can play with your spouse, or a bunch of your friends.  Strip Poker out of ten.

UP NEXT:

I have no idea?  Gone back to the family homestead for the weekend.  Hopefully I can dig something out of the attic that's worth sharing.

Also:

Never feed your Mogwai after midnight.  Waaaaaaait a sec.  If you flew east, and your Mogwai had an in-flight meal, then... Ohh..... That's where Snooki came from.