Shrapnel Games Blog

Last Night On Earth (Flying Frog Productions)

The smell hit them long before the first shambled into view.

“Christ, they know we’re in here. How many shells you have left?”

The Sheriff grimaced. “Not enough. Keep on searching, I’ll cover—“ The exterior door burst from its hinges and crashed to the ground. Silhouetted by the harvest moon Tom McKennitt lurched across the threshold.

Tom had once been Woodinvale’s friendly neighborhood postman, always ready with a smile for his customers whether rain, sleet, or snow. He still wore that smile, though his once pearly white teeth were now adorned with the dried flesh and crimson stains of his last meal. Tom the postman was now Tom the walking, groaning undead.

Raising the shotgun to his shoulder the Sheriff took careful aim at Tom’s face and squeezed the trigger. The skull turned into a fine red mist as bits and pieces exploded out. The twice-dead corpse collapsed. In the distance more shapes recognizable as once living citizens of Woodinvale began to close. The Sheriff pumped a new shell into the chamber and shouted to Jake, who was busy rummaging through the store.

“Dammit, we got a mess of trouble heading this way. How much longer?”

From the back storeroom Jake responded back with his own shouting. “Just a minute or two more. There’s a crate that looks interesting but I need to find something to bust it.”

“Fine! Two minutes and we gotta go, though! So hurry the Hell up!!”

Jake chuckled to himself as he searched for a hammer, crowbar, or something to knock the lock off the huge wooden crate he had discovered. “Man needs to calm down,” he spoke out loud to no one but himself and a few cockroaches. “It’s not like our present predicament can get any worse.”

Suddenly the comforting glow of the overhead fluorescent lights ceased and the entire building plunged into the blackest of black.

It had gotten worse.

How many times have you sat down to play a zombie board game and it felt like the preceding intro? For such a popular theme, and one that has spawned a number of games over the years, zombies games always seem to fall short. At best they make you feel like a zombie yourself, as you shuffle through dull gameplay with eyes glazed over and an inner fire for good gameplay left unfulfilled. Surely someone, sometime, would get it right?

Enter start-up Flying Frog Productions and Last Night On Earth (henceforth referred to as Last Night), a zombie game that finally lives up to the theme’s potential.

Right from opening the box you know that Last Night is special. The components are lush, with thick gameboards, character cards, and some of the stiffest cards ever boxed with a game. The game even comes with a CD soundtrack! Granted, it may or may not be your cup of tea, but including a mood setting soundtrack is a nice touch.

For playing pieces Last Night uses 28mm plastic figures. Now, while plastic figures are pretty common these days the quality of Last Night’s figures easily surpasses games of equal cost, and even the majority of the Fantasy Flight big box games. Each character in the game receives a unique sculpt, and there are three unique zombie sculpts. All the miniatures are done by noted miniature sculptor Gael Goumon, and it shows with the fantastic level of detail each model possesses.

About the only negative that can be said about Last Night’s components is the dice are small, and sorta ugly. Any gamer worth his Crown Royal bag though has pounds of dice at his fingers though, so this is an easily correctable situation.

Designed for 2-6 players this is one of the few multiplayer games that scales perfectly fine within that range thanks to how it plays. There are always four heroes in a game facing off against the hungry dead, who are divided into two colors. If you have two players one controls all the heroes, and the other controls all the zombies. Three players? Divide the heroes up between two of them and let one person control the undead. Six players? One player per hero, two zombie players. So no matter how many folks show up on game day you can always safely pull out Last Night. Well, unless seven people show up. Or no one.

If you’ve played other zombie games you know that while they’re usually big on theme, they’re braindead when it comes to actual gameplay. Last Night manages perfect synergy between theme and gameplay thanks to a number of aspects of the game that sets it apart from every other zombie game.

First there’s the fact that it’s scenario based gameplay. The basic box includes five scenarios, and there is an additional scenario downloadable from their website. Last Night also includes a number of extra pieces not used by any of the scenarios, with the idea being that players can use the extras to craft their own scenarios.

Scenarios range from straightforward kill’em all story lines to the extremely challenging blow up the zombie spawning sites scenario. That particular scenario involves searching the town for explosive materials and then using the found material to turn three of the zombie starting locations into massive craters. Easier said than done when you have to stay and search for the explosives while a horde of undead starts clawing their way through the walls with a hunger for braaaaiiinnnsss. And you have to do it in the allotted time frame. Sure, sometimes the scenarios are extremely brutal on the heroes, but when was the last time you watched a zombie flick that ended with rainbows and Care Bears?

The fact that each scenario has a turn limit also greatly enhances the game. If you’ve ever played a five hour Zombies!!! session (which seems about the average length), then you’ll appreciate that a typical Last Night game will take about an hour to play.

The next thing that makes a huge difference is the fact that you have a zombie player (or players). Similar games usually have the zombies controlled by the system itself, or by the players in a semi-co-op fashion, which tends to lead to a lot of “Fine, you want to move those zombies closer to me, I’ll move them closer to you on my turn!” and the game devolves into the zombie hokey-pokey. Not so with Last Night. By having someone actively oppose the heroes of the game Last Night is a real zombie strategy title, and not one of blind luck and random opportunities.

The zombie player not only gets to control the zombies, and thus ensure that his zombie horde goes after the right hero at the right time, but he also has a zombie event deck to draw from each turn. These cards are perfect for screwing the player over (sometimes literally, as one card forces a male and female character in the same space to lose their turn as they get down and get busy). They are also quite effective at creating a zombie B-movie feel, as cards will cause heroes to argue and distrust each other, lose their faith, and even affect the environment.

Heroes also have cards, but they don’t waltz into them like the zombie player, and instead must earn them by searching locations. Searching takes the place of movement, and for the most part there is no way to know what you’re going to get, so often a hero may have to remain in one building in hopes of finding that perfect item.

Heroes may not have easy access to cards like the zombies do, but they have several inherent advantages. Heroes can take multiple wounds, use items, and all possess unique traits. As a hero player using these traits is key to success. For example, one of the heroes is a drifter named Jake Cartwright who has the ability when searching to take two cards, choosing one and discarding the other. This makes him perfect for scenarios that require the heroes to search for items or people (and thus the hero deck). It also makes him a prime target for a zombie moshpit in such scenarios.

Combat is handled fairly simple. In combat a hero normally rolls two dice, while a zombie rolls one die. Comparing the highest hero die with the zombie die, if the zombie roll is higher than the hero takes a wound (ties also go the zombie). Anything else counts as no effect (the hero fends off the attack, but does no damage) unless the hero rolls highest and gets doubles, in which case the zombie is eliminated. Weapons, and some effects, add dice to the combat pools, making killing zombies (or chomping on humans) a tad easier.

The combat system works nicely. Without a weapon a hero has a chance to defeat a zombie, but not a great chance. Usually the hero will end up fending off the zombie, and since the game allows heroes to move away from zombies on their turn, the hero ends up fleeing from the zombie. This is assuming that it’s a solitary zombie. Against a horde of zombies the odds get progressively more likely that a hero is going to get bitten because the hero must stop upon entering a zombie’s space. This is where having a zombie player matters, instead of a system that throws a zombie or two in a player’s way, maybe.

Something else that really vaults Last Night to the top of the zombie gaming food chain is how well it translates the B-movie theme into the realm of a cardboard experience. This is a game that’s as enjoyable reminiscing about (“Remember when Father Joseph lost his faith while protecting Becky in the general store after the zombies cut the power?”) as playing, a trait more often seen in role-playing games than board games. It helps that instead of the usual painted/inked artwork in most games Last Night uses photos of actors and actresses fighting off the zombie invasion. This could have come off cheesy, but amazingly Flying Frog pulled it off, and pulled it off well. While the shots are cheesy, they’re cheesy in a good B-movie way, and not the shot-in-my-backyard-with-my-$50-digital-camera cheesiness way.

Last Night On Earth is an excellent zombie game—heck, it’s an excellent game, period. It flows well, has plenty of replayability, encourages creativity and teamwork, and provides you with fodder for stories to regale your friends and families with. Playing dead has never felt more alive.