How I Spent New Year's Day

Having wasted my New Year's Eve playing LEGO Heroica with my family on New Year's Eve, I decided to follow it up by wasting New Year's Day playing a different boardgame with friends and family. This time, it was the zombie survival game Last Night on Earth, which a friend of mine bought at a local game store during their after Christmas sale. I saw Last Night on Earth played back in November, when I got together with some people to spend the afternoon and evening playing boardgames. However, I never actually had the chance to play it myself until yesterday.

I'll be honest: the game didn't quite live up to my expectations. Some of that is undoubtedly due to the fact that this was my first time playing and so I didn't quite grok the mechanics and thus played in a sub-optimal fashion. Some of my disappointment might also have to do with the fact the introductory scenario -- kill 15 zombies in 15 turns -- isn't ideal for someone still grappling with the fine points of the rules. But that's not all that bugged me about the game, as I'll explain.

The game uses a randomly generated map map up of five cardboard pieces depicting buildings and terrain. Half the players take the roles of "heroes" and half take the roles of zombies. The heroes all have names and special abilities and are chosen randomly from a collection of cards. Each hero also has a plastic miniature that represents them on the game board. In our game, there were four heroes: Johnny, the high school jock; Jenny, the farmer's daughter; Becky, the nurse; and Jake, the drifter. The zombies also had minis, too, but no personalities or special abilities.

Zombies can only move one space per turn, but they are unimpeded by terrain (including walls), whereas heroes move 1d6 spaces each. When a zombie and a hero are in the same space, combat ensues. Zombies roll 1d6 and heroes 2d6, with the highest dice roll (not sum -- the dice are treated individually) winning. If a zombie wins, the hero takes 1 wound. Adult heroes can take 3 wounds before dying and teenage heroes 2 wounds. If the hero wins the roll, he successfully "fends off" the zombie, unless he has a weapon that can deal damage. If the hero rolls doubles, he deals 1 wound of damage, which kills most zombies.

Weapons and other equipment can only be found by giving up a movement phase and spending it "searching" in a building. Searching is represented by a random draw from a deck of cards. The result might be a piece of gear, but, more than likely, it's an event card that gives your hero some situational benefit (like "Just a Scratch" that negates a wound by a zombie). There are a large number of cards and only a few weapons, so, unless you spend a lot of time searching or get very lucky, odds are you're going to spend most of the game running away from zombies into various buildings and hoping you get a useful weapon.

Even leaving aside the odds against finding a weapon, one of my beefs with the game is that most of the weapons aren't very effective. A baseball bat, for example, allows the wielder to roll 3d6 for damage against a zombie, but, unless doubles are rolled, no damage is dealt. And a fire axe deals no damage at all. This annoyed me. A lot. My drifter, Jake, got a fire axe, waded into combat with some zombies and I discovered the axe was utterly useless against the undead. That broke my suspension of disbelief and sapped my enthusiasm. Looking through the deck later, I discovered that only firearms had much chance to kill zombies with any reliability, but they also had the chance of running out of ammo and becoming useless.

The chainsaw is the only truly good melee weapon and it's, in my opinion, too good. The game was winding down to the last few turns and the heroes had lost half their number. Things looked terrible for them -- until Becky got lucky and scored the chainsaw. In short order, it was all over for the zombies. I actually felt bad for the zombie players, because they'd played much better than the heroes and a single card turned the tide quickly and decisively. That struck me as unfair and an opposite manifestation of the problem I had with the other weapons.

To be clear, the advanced rules introduce many more complications and I'd like to give them a whirl sometime. I get that the game is -- and should be -- slanted in favor of the zombies, at least initially, but, from what I experienced yesterday, I think the success of the heroes relies too heavily on the luck of the draw. Now, obviously, I don't mind randomness, but I think Last Night on Earth is too random, to the point where it's impossible to form an effective strategy against the zombies. That, plus the fact that most weapons aren't particularly effective, hampered my ability to enjoy the game as much as I'd hoped I might. But, as I said, I intend to play the game a few more times before I render a final verdict.