Last Night on Earth Review

Last Night on Earth.  What a roller coaster ride playing that game was.

First of an explanation of how this game works.  In it you are on one of two teams, humans (or as I like to call them Breathers) or zombies.  You play through some sort of scenario/mission which usually has the humans trying to accomplish a specific goal, like gather 12 supplies which was the goal in our game, and the zombies are pretty much looking to eat all those tasty, tasty brains.

The game is played in alternating turns for each team.  On the Zombie turn the hordes of mindless undead are represented by one or two players (or in our game 3).  All of the zombie players do each of the steps in the turn together.  First you move the Sun Track Marker, which counts down the rounds in the game until the sun rises and either the humans celebrate surviving or the zombies show up in force and swarm the remaining humans; just depends on the scenario.

Then you each draw until you have 2 zombie cards, which give you nice advantages like more zombies, more movement, better attacks, etc.  You then roll to see if new zombies spawn.  Roll 2d6 and if you roll more than the number of zombie on the board you get more this turn.  In our scenario however we skipped this step because zombies automatically spawned each turn.

Next, move the shambling hordes towards their delicious targets.  Most of the time the zombies move one space, though cards can improve that.  After movement if any zombies are in the same space as some humans they get to chow down.  Combat involves rolling one or more d6s versus the humans two or more d6s.  The person who rolls the highest number wins, zombies win ties.  If the human gets a higher number but no doubles the zombies is Fended Off, basically the fight ends with no one taking any damage.  If he wins and gets doubles he kills the zombie.  If the zombie wins he does one damage to the human.

Finally you roll a d3 to see how many new zombies you spawn if you do get to spawn new ones.  Add new zombies in at the various designated spawn points on the map, distributing them as evenly as possible.  You also have an option of trading in two possible new zombies in order to draw a Grave Weapon card.  These add interesting weapons to the zombies that give them cool and usually powerful advantages.

After that the silly breathers get their pointless turns in an attempt to deny zombies their rightful dinner.  Each of the human players is playing a Hero character.  Each Hero takes their turn in sequence, each one finishing their whole turn before the next goes.  First up there is a Move Action.  You roll a d6 and can move that many spaces.  Alternatively after rolling you can decide to Search an area for useful stuff.  Next up is Exchange Items.  All heroes in the space with the active hero can both give and receive items via the Hero whose turn it is.

After that you break out the guns and do Ranged Attacks.  You get one shot a turn and the card gives you the details on what your roll means.  Next you Fight Zombies, using the same combat method detailed above, and then the next person does all that for their turn.

Okay so lets look at what I thought about the game.  To start I have to say that we played a game with 8 players, and the game is meant to only have 6 players.  We had an extra human and an extra zombie player.  Since this was my first and only game of LNoE I can't speak with authority on the game speed, but it really seemed to move slower than it probably should.  Other players were saying that it was not normally this slow.  It was really bad in this particular game though.  There was a TON of downtime and the game took so long that people were yelling for it to end during the last hour.

Other than that the game seemed okay.  I played on the zombie side, so I can't really say what the human play was like.  I have to say that the zombies were fun from a thematic point of view, but in general there was not much there.  I really feel that they could just be automated by the game system and you could just have human players.  Yes, it was fun to be the zombies and try to eat brains, but I don't think that that side of gameplay would hold up for multiple plays.  There just really wasn't enough there.

The various Heroes that were available to play all looked fun and cool, and gameplay for the human side seemed like it would take a good amount of thinking, planning, and tactics.  I'd give that side a try for sure.  In the end this isn't going to become my favorite game of all time or anything.  But I will definitely give it another chance, and I think it will be improved by trying out the human side, playing when I haven't been awake for over 26 hours, and possibly imbibing some alcohol while playing.  That always helps.