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Mike Amos
United States
Minneapolis
Minnesota
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A friend of mine got Last Night on Earth largely because of the theme, he and his wife fancy zombies. I don't really care enough about them to be bothered. Being new to gaming they were blown away by the number of pieces in the game. As gamers you'll see it as a pretty sane amount, there are hit tokens, cardboard character sheets, board pieces, 14 zombie minis, 7 hero minis and a couple decks of cards. The quality is good but not quite exceptional, my biggest gripe would be that the cardstock is arguably too heavy and makes then a chore to shuffle.
My first two games were with both couples, four players. With four players each zombie player gets a pool of 7 zombies to which can be thrown at the heroes indefinitely, you can never send and eight but dead zombies recycle to your pool. There hero players get two heroes to operate apiece. This is pretty manageable for zombie and hero players. If it hurts anyone it's the zombie players who need to be synched up for maximum kill power.
There's a hero phase and zombie phase in each turn. The Zombies determine if they will summon more zombies, they max out their hand, march on the players, then summon when appropriate. Zombies are designed to be dumb. The only real choice a zombie player has is whether or not to use cards and the player is incentivized to use them by the promise of a never ending supply so even that choice is a mirage.
On the hero turn the hero moves, does ranged attacks then melee attacks. The number of moves per round are determined by the dice. The ability to perform a ranged attack is determined by proximity to zombies but more often on whether the player has a gun or not, which is determined (usually) by the player forfeiting her turn to draw a random card from the hero stack and hope to get a weapon. There is some but not a lot of incentive to go on the offensive with melee weapons as the loss of one may leave you unarmed and swarmed. Instead melees are best used for defense.
The basic scenario says that the heroes win by killing 15 zombies (indicated by a very nice tracking board) before 15 turns have passed or they have lost two team members, it was this scenario that we played as couples. In this setting the zombies won twice. My friend indicated the scenario as impossible but I thought otherwise. I borrowed the game and did a trial run of a strategy, and it worked. My wife and I tried last evening and again, game breaking - also - not very fun.
With this fruit of forbidden knowledge (that any of you would find twice as fast as I did) this game seems unplayable. The designers foresaw this moment though and included other scenarios, where you have to hunt for specific items or limit the number of zombies in your immediate proximity. These would limit the game break-i-ness but not eliminate it, which is probably good because then you're left with nothing but the mercy of the dice and cards, which is unfortunate.
I don't see Last Night on Earth as a game that I will ever buy or really care if I play it again. I feel like the zombie player is stuck executing a program that was done better in the D&D boardgames and isn't fun to play. I feel like the heroes are almost in as dire straits. Despite the glossy finish, it's not a game that rewards thinking or playing.
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