Latest / Pick Up and Deliver / Spooky Games, part 4
Transcript
- 0:01Speaker 1: Welcome to pick up and deliver the podcast where I
- 0:03Speaker 1: pick up my audio recorder as I step out on
- 0:06Speaker 1: off the train. As I step off the train and
- 0:08Speaker 1: deliver an episode to you while I walk home, I'm
- 0:11Speaker 1: Brendan Riley. Well, good afternoon friends. It is a lovely
- 0:24Speaker 1: day here in suburban Chicago. The weather is actually very warm.
- 0:28Speaker 1: I'm walking in a T shirt in late October, which
- 0:31Speaker 1: is outrageous. And of course we got two days of
- 0:35Speaker 1: very warm weather and then tomorrow it's gonna be cold
- 0:38Speaker 1: and rainy, which is gonna be Halloween, and that's no good.
- 0:41Speaker 1: If I managed to do everything right, this episode will
- 0:44Speaker 1: come out tomorrow along with the previous episode I recorded.
- 0:47Speaker 2: We're gonna do a double header, two episodes.
- 0:49Speaker 1: In one day to try to get the Spooky Season
- 0:51Speaker 1: episodes out.
- 0:52Speaker 2: While it is in fact still spooky season. Take that
- 0:55Speaker 2: for what it is.
- 0:57Speaker 1: Yeah, let's jump into it. So this is Bookie Games
- 1:00Speaker 1: Part four. As you'll recall if you've been listening, Parts one, two,
- 1:04Speaker 1: and three explore different elements of spooky games. Part one
- 1:08Speaker 1: is sort of general horror spooky games spart Part two
- 1:12Speaker 1: is games with a kind of spooky theme that aren't
- 1:15Speaker 1: in fact horror games. Part three was games based on
- 1:19Speaker 1: the HP Lovecraft Cthulhu mythos, and Part four is perhaps
- 1:24Speaker 1: the most robust part of my.
- 1:26Speaker 2: Horror game collection, zombie games. So, as I think I've
- 1:32Speaker 2: mentioned on.
- 1:33Speaker 1: Here, I could reasonably be called a zombie scholar. I
- 1:37Speaker 1: have written a couple essays or published a couple essays.
- 1:40Speaker 2: On zombie fiction.
- 1:42Speaker 1: I for a long time taught a class called Zombies
- 1:44Speaker 1: and Popular Media that was quite entertaining. And yeah, so generally,
- 1:49Speaker 1: I have explored the idea of zombies in a number
- 1:53Speaker 1: of different places, and I am excited to be talking
- 1:56Speaker 1: about them to you here today, in part because I
- 1:59Speaker 1: have been buying zombie games since like maybe two thousand
- 2:03Speaker 1: and nine, twenty ten, when I think, you know, I
- 2:07Speaker 1: had the game Zombies with two exclamation points or three
- 2:10Speaker 1: exclamation points before that, But really the first modern zombie
- 2:15Speaker 1: game I remember buying was like twenty ten, two thousand
- 2:18Speaker 1: and nine. One of my students, her for the zombie class,
- 2:22Speaker 1: did a presentation on Last Night on Earth the Zombie Game,
- 2:27Speaker 1: and so shortly after that I picked it up, and
- 2:29Speaker 1: that was sort of the spark that kicked off my
- 2:33Speaker 1: interest in contemporary board games.
- 2:36Speaker 2: Again.
- 2:37Speaker 1: I mean, I'd always kind of liked them, but this
- 2:39Speaker 1: was certainly a founding moment or a significant moment for me.
- 2:45Speaker 2: In reigniting the hobby.
- 2:46Speaker 1: Since then, I have purchased a number of zombie games,
- 2:49Speaker 1: and so I thought I would talk about them here today.
- 2:52Speaker 2: On the lighter end, I.
- 2:53Speaker 1: Have a couple of novelty games, particularly zombie Opoly and
- 2:58Speaker 1: Oh No Zombies are both sort of stereotypical, cheap, mass
- 3:03Speaker 1: market zombie style games. Zombieopoly is really what it sounds like.
- 3:08Speaker 1: It is Monopoly, only the properties that you're buying are zombies,
- 3:11Speaker 1: and then you put little screaming heads on them and
- 3:14Speaker 1: I don't remember, and the little hands and then little
- 3:17Speaker 1: screaming heads are the houses and hotels. Otherwise, the game
- 3:21Speaker 1: basically functions exactly like Monopoly, which is really weird.
- 3:25Speaker 2: What a weird thing to do for a theme? Why
- 3:27Speaker 2: do it?
- 3:28Speaker 1: But you know, Sobia, I did get that as a gift,
- 3:30Speaker 1: but I have held on to it for the kitsch factor.
- 3:33Speaker 1: And the properties that you buy are like different types
- 3:36Speaker 1: of zombies. So there's a chef zombie and a construction
- 3:39Speaker 1: worker zombie, and a cheerleader zombie and so on. The
- 3:41Speaker 1: other game that I have like that is called Oh
- 3:43Speaker 1: No Zombies. I believe I got this from a goodwill
- 3:46Speaker 1: and I haven't tried it yet, so I don't know
- 3:48Speaker 1: anything about it except that it comes in a long,
- 3:50Speaker 1: flat box in the style of many classic board games.
- 3:56Speaker 2: From my childhood.
- 3:58Speaker 1: I do own a number of sort of very small
- 4:02Speaker 1: zombie games, either small in footprint or small in box
- 4:06Speaker 1: size or small in play size, so I'll talk about
- 4:08Speaker 1: kind of all three. Badass Zombie Killers is a game
- 4:13Speaker 1: I backed on Kickstarter. Jeremiah somebody or other did the
- 4:16Speaker 1: art for it.
- 4:17Speaker 2: It's got a kind of.
- 4:20Speaker 1: Skateboard aesthetic with cartoonish style zombies. In the game, you
- 4:26Speaker 1: get four different decks of cards with numbered humans and
- 4:31Speaker 1: zombies on them, and you are trying to get rid
- 4:34Speaker 1: of You're trying to help all over humans that are
- 4:36Speaker 1: in your house escape into cars. The gameplay is basically
- 4:41Speaker 1: Dutch Blitz with a couple extra rules tacked on, and
- 4:44Speaker 1: it's pretty fun.
- 4:46Speaker 2: We still have it, although we haven't played it in
- 4:47Speaker 2: quite a while.
- 4:48Speaker 1: It's a nice little quick card game with fun zombie art.
- 4:55Speaker 1: I also have a small zombie card game called Badass
- 4:58Speaker 1: Zombie Killers.
- 4:59Speaker 2: Now.
- 4:59Speaker 1: This is one I think I got. Maybe it was
- 5:01Speaker 1: a gift, like a stocking stuffer type gift. I feel
- 5:04Speaker 1: like we've played it once, but I don't actually have
- 5:06Speaker 1: a recording that we played it at all. I haven't
- 5:08Speaker 1: recorded a play, so who knows whether we actually played
- 5:11Speaker 1: it or whether I just.
- 5:12Speaker 2: Look through it.
- 5:13Speaker 1: But it's a card game, and you have the sorts
- 5:16Speaker 1: of things you would expect where you are accumulating different
- 5:22Speaker 1: kinds of weapons and you're going out and fighting zombies.
- 5:28Speaker 1: It looks pretty dumb, but at some point I should
- 5:30Speaker 1: try just to get it off my shelf of shame.
- 5:32Speaker 1: Maybe it's amazing.
- 5:33Speaker 2: I don't know. That's badass. Zombie Killers.
- 5:36Speaker 1: And then the third very small zombie game that I
- 5:39Speaker 1: have is called I Hate Zombies.
- 5:41Speaker 2: I think this is by Kevin Wilson.
- 5:43Speaker 1: It is a simple party game in which half the
- 5:46Speaker 1: players around the circle.
- 5:48Speaker 2: You sit in a circle.
- 5:48Speaker 1: Half of the players around the circle are a zombies,
- 5:51Speaker 1: half of the players are human, and you do paper
- 5:53Speaker 1: rock scissors to determine who's going to survive as a
- 5:55Speaker 1: zombie and who's gonna die or who's gonna survive as
- 5:58Speaker 1: a human, who's gonna survive as a zombie. It's a
- 6:01Speaker 1: pretty simple game, fun for a few minutes, not amazing
- 6:06Speaker 1: by any means, but interesting.
- 6:08Speaker 2: That's I hate zombies. That's the extent of.
- 6:12Speaker 1: My tiny box zombie games or small zombie games, but
- 6:17Speaker 1: not at all the extent of my zombie collection. So
- 6:20Speaker 1: let's talk about a few that we've heard about here
- 6:22Speaker 1: on the podcast. I already mentioned last night on Earth
- 6:24Speaker 1: the Zombie Game. I do have that, along with a
- 6:26Speaker 1: number of the tiny expansions that make the game pretty interesting.
- 6:31Speaker 1: I don't have any of the big box expansions like
- 6:33Speaker 1: timber Peak or I can't remember what the name, there's
- 6:38Speaker 1: one that's like, oh, Blood in the Forest. I don't
- 6:41Speaker 1: have either of those, but the one that I have
- 6:44Speaker 1: is plenty for the occasional time that I played. I
- 6:47Speaker 1: played about once a year, usually with my zombie student
- 6:50Speaker 1: my zombie class students, and it's a good time. It's
- 6:53Speaker 1: basically like playing a B movie where you're up to
- 6:57Speaker 1: three of the players. We're up to four players are
- 6:59Speaker 1: humans and up to two players represent the zombies, and
- 7:03Speaker 1: the game is surprisingly well balanced. It's the sort of
- 7:06Speaker 1: thing that feels really out of control, but in general,
- 7:10Speaker 1: I find if everybody's playing as strongly as they can,
- 7:13Speaker 1: you usually have.
- 7:14Speaker 2: A relatively close game. Next up is City of Horror.
- 7:18Speaker 1: This is another game that's gotten a lot of coverage
- 7:20Speaker 1: here on the podcast, so I won't spend a ton
- 7:23Speaker 1: of time on it now, except to say that it's
- 7:25Speaker 1: one of the meanest games I own. It is a
- 7:27Speaker 1: game in which you have to constantly be negotiating and
- 7:31Speaker 1: betraying and throwing people out to get eaten by zombies
- 7:34Speaker 1: so that you can survive and get points. I would
- 7:36Speaker 1: never play it without telling people this is a very
- 7:39Speaker 1: mean game, and you need to be ready to be
- 7:41Speaker 1: mean and have people be mean to you in order
- 7:44Speaker 1: to play it. It's a good time, very silly, really dark.
- 7:48Speaker 1: And then finally, I know that I've talked a little
- 7:50Speaker 1: bit about Dead of Winter. I have both Dead of
- 7:52Speaker 1: Winter and Dead of Winter A Long Night. Also have
- 7:55Speaker 1: Dead of Winter Warring Colonies, which isn't a standalone game.
- 7:58Speaker 1: Each of these is about a community in Alaska during
- 8:02Speaker 1: the zombie apocalypse. It's snowy and cold and really interesting
- 8:08Speaker 1: story moments built into the game. The art is amazing,
- 8:13Speaker 1: really compelling stuff, and was.
- 8:15Speaker 2: A huge hit I believe for plaid hat games.
- 8:18Speaker 1: My understanding is plaid hat when they separated from Asthma Day.
- 8:22Speaker 1: Recently they had to leave Dead of Winter with Asthma Day,
- 8:25Speaker 1: which is a bummer because it really is a great game,
- 8:28Speaker 1: and I hope that you get to play it if
- 8:31Speaker 1: you get a chance. The trader mechanism is a little
- 8:34Speaker 1: uneven and can feel not fun sometimes, but generally it's
- 8:39Speaker 1: a good one, So if you get a chance to
- 8:40Speaker 1: play Dead of Winter, you should do so, all right.
- 8:43Speaker 1: The remaining games are all games that I don't play
- 8:45Speaker 1: that often, but I think I have talked about on
- 8:47Speaker 1: here a little bit oh with regard to small games.
- 8:51Speaker 1: And one more small game that I have in my
- 8:53Speaker 1: collection that I enjoy playing is Zombie Dice. This is
- 8:56Speaker 1: from Steve Jackson Games. It's a pretty simple game in
- 9:00Speaker 1: which you are trying to, as a zombie, eat the
- 9:03Speaker 1: most brains without getting shot too many times by shotguns.
- 9:07Speaker 1: It's a push your luck game with Yatzi style dice rolling,
- 9:10Speaker 1: and it works really well. It's a fun little filler,
- 9:14Speaker 1: and if you get a chance to play.
- 9:15Speaker 2: It, you should Zombie Dice.
- 9:17Speaker 1: So I'll just talk through a few more zombie games
- 9:19Speaker 1: that I have that are sort of bigger boxes that
- 9:21Speaker 1: are things I haven't really talked about that much, but
- 9:24Speaker 1: have made the cut at least to stay in my collection.
- 9:26Speaker 1: First one is Zombie fifteen. This is a fifteen minute
- 9:30Speaker 1: real time game in which you play children are teenagers
- 9:33Speaker 1: running through a suburban landscape trying to find survival goods
- 9:38Speaker 1: and complete scenario tasks. Meanwhile, you're being chased by hordes
- 9:42Speaker 1: of zombies. In the game, whenever you go into a
- 9:45Speaker 1: house there are zombies in there. You have to fight them,
- 9:47Speaker 1: and the fighting is done. It's all, as I recall,
- 9:50Speaker 1: pretty determinative.
- 9:51Speaker 2: I don't think there's dice rolling.
- 9:52Speaker 1: There might be a little bit, but you have weapons
- 9:54Speaker 1: that you can use, and as you go along you
- 9:57Speaker 1: are racking up time. The game then has a soundtrack
- 10:02Speaker 1: that is playing and a timer, and whenever the timer
- 10:05Speaker 1: goes off, a big pile of zombies gets dumped in
- 10:07Speaker 1: and they sort of start chasing you again. It's a
- 10:09Speaker 1: pretty silly game, but I remember having a good time
- 10:12Speaker 1: with it a couple times. We played it weirdly, and
- 10:14Speaker 1: I suspect I'm one of the only people anywhere to
- 10:18Speaker 1: have this. My whole set of zombies from Zombie fifteen
- 10:21Speaker 1: is painted because when I acquired paints to start painting
- 10:25Speaker 1: board game minis. It had been a couple decades since
- 10:28Speaker 1: I painted any minis, and so I wanted to kind
- 10:30Speaker 1: of get back in the habit, and so I thought
- 10:33Speaker 1: what would be good practice would be just sort of
- 10:36Speaker 1: speed painting a bunch of Zombie fifteen minis, because they're
- 10:41Speaker 1: low quality and I don't really care if they don't
- 10:43Speaker 1: come out great, but it'd be fun to have them painted.
- 10:46Speaker 1: So I did, in fact paint dozens of these cheap
- 10:50Speaker 1: zombie minis, and I thought they.
- 10:51Speaker 2: Looked pretty good by the end.
- 10:52Speaker 1: I did paint the characters as well, gave them a
- 10:54Speaker 1: little bit more attention, and overall it ended up being
- 10:57Speaker 1: a nice set, and that's what I have now, I
- 11:01Speaker 1: have a painted set of Zombie fifteen. Speaking of painted zombies,
- 11:05Speaker 1: I also have Night of the Living Dead, a Zombi
- 11:07Speaker 1: side game.
- 11:08Speaker 2: Now.
- 11:08Speaker 1: This is when I wasn't gonna buy because it was
- 11:09Speaker 1: really expensive, and then I found it for a much
- 11:12Speaker 1: more modest price, which was great. It comes with a
- 11:15Speaker 1: bunch of zombie minis that I painted in black and
- 11:17Speaker 1: white with splashes of red, which I think looked really sharp,
- 11:20Speaker 1: and then I painted the characters in muted tones for
- 11:23Speaker 1: their regular mode, and then when they get hyper improved,
- 11:28Speaker 1: then I paint them in more garish colors. I think
- 11:31Speaker 1: it looks really sharp and it's a fun game to
- 11:35Speaker 1: play occasionally. It's about the same as Last Night on Earth,
- 11:38Speaker 1: although I have a lot of nostalgia for Last Night
- 11:41Speaker 1: on Earth because of the other games that it I've played.
- 11:43Speaker 1: I will say, however, I have not painted my Last
- 11:45Speaker 1: Night on Earth minis. I probably should do that, but
- 11:48Speaker 1: I play that game so rarely.
- 11:51Speaker 2: But no.
- 11:51Speaker 1: Living Dead a zombi side game, uses these zombie side mechanisms.
- 11:56Speaker 1: You have the player dashboards, you have the same sets
- 12:00Speaker 1: of tools and other things. The way that they've mimicked
- 12:03Speaker 1: the original George Romero movie from nineteen sixty eight is
- 12:08Speaker 1: to or nineteen sixty nine is to have scenarios that
- 12:12Speaker 1: you play that represent different points in the movie, and
- 12:15Speaker 1: you're playing the six humans that are in the game
- 12:18Speaker 1: or six humans in the movie, and.
- 12:21Speaker 2: You can have a pretty good time with it. I
- 12:22Speaker 2: really like it. That's Living Dead a zomba side game.
- 12:27Speaker 1: So next up is a game that has a weird
- 12:29Speaker 1: history because of its really interesting commercial elements, and that
- 12:34Speaker 1: is Raxon Raxon is a game that was released by
- 12:36Speaker 1: plaid had Games that takes place in the Dead of
- 12:38Speaker 1: Winter universe, and it's sort of a prequel cooperative game
- 12:42Speaker 1: about the emergence of the zombie virus, which was caused
- 12:45Speaker 1: accidentally by the Raxon Corporation, who you learn about more
- 12:49Speaker 1: in The Long Night. This game was released as a
- 12:52Speaker 1: sort of viral marketing phenomenon where a number of podcasters
- 12:57Speaker 1: and social media influencers received copies of the game, and
- 13:00Speaker 1: the game is marketed as like a training simulation for
- 13:03Speaker 1: people who want to help fight the zombie apocalypse, and
- 13:06Speaker 1: it comes with three recruitment codes that you can give
- 13:08Speaker 1: to people, and those people can then use the recruitment
- 13:11Speaker 1: codes to buy the game. In a delightful twist, then
- 13:15Speaker 1: if you buy the game, then you get three recruitment
- 13:18Speaker 1: codes yourself that you can give to other people and
- 13:20Speaker 1: for them to buy the game. And for a while,
- 13:22Speaker 1: like months, the only way to get the game is
- 13:25Speaker 1: to buy it from plat hat directly using one of
- 13:29Speaker 1: these recruitment codes. So it had this sort of I'm
- 13:32Speaker 1: on the inside kind of thing that was really pretty neat,
- 13:36Speaker 1: And the game.
- 13:37Speaker 2: Itself is good.
- 13:38Speaker 1: It's a co op game where you are manipulating a
- 13:42Speaker 1: grid of cards and trying to trying to help survivors
- 13:46Speaker 1: avoid zombies and try to kill zombies in order to
- 13:51Speaker 1: get through.
- 13:51Speaker 2: To the end of the game.
- 13:53Speaker 1: It's a pretty kind of standard board manipulation co op
- 13:56Speaker 1: game with an interesting theme built in on top.
- 14:00Speaker 2: So a couple games left talk about. The last game that.
- 14:04Speaker 1: I own that I want to talk about is a
- 14:05Speaker 1: game called Student Bodies.
- 14:06Speaker 2: This is a game from Smirk and Dagger Smirk and Dagger.
- 14:09Speaker 1: Which I believe I received as part of a giveaway
- 14:11Speaker 1: from the podcast of Nonsense of Good Gamers, which is
- 14:15Speaker 1: kind of fun because the phrase top of the stack,
- 14:18Speaker 1: which I use regularly here.
- 14:19Speaker 2: On the podcast, i swiped from them. Haha.
- 14:22Speaker 1: Student Bodies is a game about being high schoolers in
- 14:26Speaker 1: a high school that is infested with zombies. Your goal
- 14:29Speaker 1: is to get to the biology room to get one
- 14:32Speaker 1: of the few antidotes to the zombie outbreak, and then
- 14:36Speaker 1: get out of the high school before any of your friends.
- 14:41Speaker 2: If you manage to get out, then you win the game.
- 14:44Speaker 1: The game is incredibly mean. You're attacking each other all
- 14:47Speaker 1: the time. There's a reason it was published by Smirk
- 14:50Speaker 1: and Dagger, which is a game company that really does
- 14:53Speaker 1: enjoy games about attacking each other.
- 14:55Speaker 2: I will say they have released a.
- 14:57Speaker 1: They have a new imprint that's part of Smirk and
- 14:59Speaker 1: Dgger called Smirk and Laughter, which involves more fun party
- 15:03Speaker 1: games and other kinds of games.
- 15:05Speaker 2: That aren't so brutal. Smart move that Student Bodies is fun.
- 15:09Speaker 2: It's got silly art.
- 15:10Speaker 1: You play high schoolers trying to avoid the zombie apocalypse,
- 15:13Speaker 1: and of course if you're the first one out, you
- 15:15Speaker 1: lock the doors behind you, because high schoolers. So that's
- 15:17Speaker 1: kind of a fun twist. There are two games left
- 15:20Speaker 1: to talk about. One is Zombie Side, which I don't
- 15:22Speaker 1: need to say a lot about except that I said
- 15:24Speaker 1: I already talked about Night Living Dead. Zombiside is a
- 15:27Speaker 1: game that, of course I have played a number of times,
- 15:29Speaker 1: but mostly in the Night of Living Dead flavor.
- 15:32Speaker 2: It's an interesting game.
- 15:33Speaker 1: It's a zombie fighting, a Mari trash game.
- 15:36Speaker 2: It's fun.
- 15:37Speaker 1: I think Last Night on Earth is a better thematic integration,
- 15:40Speaker 1: but you your mileage may vary. A lot of people
- 15:43Speaker 1: like Zomba Side, so enjoy it if you like. And
- 15:45Speaker 1: then finally, Hit z Road is the last one. I'll
- 15:47Speaker 1: mention this is a Martin Wallace game. I don't own this,
- 15:50Speaker 1: but it is an interesting little push your luck game
- 15:53Speaker 1: about trying to survive with your family on the road
- 15:56Speaker 1: during the zombie apocalypse. The theming in the game is
- 15:59Speaker 1: really good and it's an amusing way to play the game.
- 16:02Speaker 1: The way the game is built, it feels like a
- 16:04Speaker 1: board game that was created by a child in a
- 16:08Speaker 1: family during the zombie apocalypse, so like the money tokens
- 16:11Speaker 1: are bottle caps and the cards appear to be pasted
- 16:16Speaker 1: onto regular playing cards.
- 16:18Speaker 2: It's a really fun artifact and a decent game so well.
- 16:21Speaker 1: That brings me to the end of my spooky game marathon.
- 16:25Speaker 1: Part four is finished. So I hope that you enjoyed
- 16:28Speaker 1: these creepy games, and I'd love to hear which ones
- 16:30Speaker 1: you think I missed or which ones you like best.
- 16:32Speaker 1: Head over to board game Get Killed three two sixty
- 16:34Speaker 1: nine and otherwise.
- 16:35Speaker 2: I hope you have a happy.
- 16:36Speaker 1: Halloween and I will see you next time that I
- 16:39Speaker 1: take a walk.
- 16:40Speaker 3: Bye bye.
- 17:10Speaker 2: Brought to you by rattle Box