Here’s our take on the evening’s events and these two variations of zombie-themed boardgaming…
Pitched as a unique zombie game that forces you to face zombie ‘from a first person perspective’ (as in a first-person video game), RFD does a swell job of creating that sense of rising tension.
Each player has their own board in front of them, divided into three zones. Zombies enter the board in zone three and each turn they advance a zone as more come on behind them (and sometimes in front of them, depending on your cards and dice). If they move past the final zone, you take a wound.
First you roll an event die to see what happens (anything from a hideous ambush or zombie charge, through to discovery of much needed medicine or an extremely rare and welcome ‘all quiet’ event in which nothing happens). Then you roll the main dice, which is where the action happens.
And you can’t re-roll zombie icons unless you take a ‘fleeing’ card in return…which frequently turns it into an out of the frying pan and into the fire experience.
Run, Fight or Die is a fun game of rising tension. We enjoyed it. It was a little longer than it needed to be on our first play as we were all playing it for the first time, but by the final rounds it was speeding along and once familiar I think it would run to a good 30-40mins which would be ideal. A healthy dose of light-hearted fun that paved the way for the real star of the evening’s death and destruction…
Last Night on Earth is hands-down my favourite zombie game. It’s one of my favourite boardgames full-stop.
We’ve also played City of Horror, Dead of Winter, and Zombicide – they’re each very different and we’ve thoroughly enjoyed them all.
But everyone seems to agree there’s something really special about Last Night on Earth.
Our game got off to a fantastic start as we quickly found a can of gasoline and a chainsaw. “This is going to be far too easy; it’s almost unfair” we thought…wrongly.
Turns out whoever had bought this chainsaw had been shopping at The Warehouse or Kmart. Thanks to a poor roll of the dice the chainsaw stalled and failed on it’s first go. I went down in a pile of hungry should-have-been-headless-but-now-I’m-about-to-join-them zombies in utter shock and horror.
Craig made it to the first zombie spawning point and hurled the gasoline. On his next turn he dodged between two zombies, stepping out of the range of danger and hurling a lighter behind him to bring this first foul chapter to a fiery close.
Another failed dice roll and the lighter when out, failing to ignite the gasoline. Well that was irritating – but we’ve still got the chainsaws right?
Wrong.
Whoever was responsible for maintaining the tools in this town, well let’s just say that they were clocking up the frequent flyer miles at Cheap & Cheerful Limited. Except it wasn’t so cheerful for us.
It was a contagious fate with Kelvin coming to the very same end.
With a chainsaw in hand, you roll an extra dice in combat (bringing your total to three dice against the zombie’s one dice). You also automatically kill the zombies on a roll of 3 or higher. Basically you can’t lose – except we all did.
‘Just one more; it’ll start this time!’
Except it didn’t and now Craig was left with the fate of humanity resting on his shoulders alone.
But it was shortlived.
Sadly for Craig he’d drawn Sally the Highschool Sweetheart as his character, and despite finding an abundance of shotguns, she simply wasn’t strong enough to lift one, let alone shoot the thing.
Craig/Sally held out well – fending them off with a pitch fork for a while until, like all good things, it snapped and came to an end. So did Craig.
Our night was over. The Zombie horde had won and were left to crawl the ravaged plains of civilisation looking for their next victims.
If they come to your house, our advice is to forget the chainsaw. Go for the machete and the axe - those weapons won’t stall on you!