At my birthday, a few people were playing the boardgame Zombies. Now, much as I like Zombies, the actual game tends to the tedious.

However, there’s a new game that takes the same theme – Zombie attack – and does it much better. The name of the game? Last Night On Earth.

LNOE is a scenario game that it comes with five scenarios of Zombies attacking a small town filled with stereotypical characters like the Sheriff, the Highschool Sweetheart, the Jock, and the Loner. The board is modular – a centre area is surrounded by four L-shaped boards that aren’t the same each game – and movement and battle is determined by dice and modified by cards.

The game just oozes flavour, from the shambling Zombies, to the beautifully depicted cards, to the situations your characters get into. It’s an adversarial game, by which I mean there are one or two Zombie players trying to kill the heroes. There are always 4 hero characters, controlled by one, two or four players.

It’s also fast – a much better trait than Zombies, which crawls. The cards can be used immediately for the most part; the exceptions are the Gasoline and Dynamite, which need the characters to find a lighter first. 🙂

The scenarios range from the prosaic Kill ’em all! which requires the players to kill 15 Zombies, to Burn ’em out! which needs the heroes to find explosives and destroy the spawning pits… you could also need to defend the manor house, or escape in the pick-up (for which you need to find the keys and gasoline first…)

Heroes need to get to buildings to Search (they can either move or search). Searching means they can draw a card… or pickup a card from the discard pile if they’re in the right place. The Zombie player can stop them by playing cards, or just by moving Zombies in until there are too many to fight. There are lots of fun cards – my favourite is This could be our last night on earth… which causes two heroes (one male, one female) to miss their turns if they’re in the same location. Why? Well, the flavour text gives a clue: “Gimme some sugar, baby.” (Also, the Priest is immune…)

All in all, this is a really fun game. I suspect the best number to play it is 3 (one Zombie player controlling all the Zombies, and two hero players controlling 2 heroes each), but I’d say it’s fun with any number – well, from 2-5, which is what the game supports.

Even better, there’ll be expansions. There are already new (free) scenarios online, and more cards, heroes and scenarios are planned. This is a game really worth checking out, and I daresay it’ll be played a few times at game days in the near future…