Okay, I haven’t played in a year or so, but my recollection of Zombies!!! is basically that you never have enough bullets, health or lives, mathematically, to make it through any serious amount of zombies to the end. Bullets only work half the time and there are far more zombies than bullets, hearts and power-up cards put together. There are essentially two strategies: wait for other people to exhaust themselves clearing a path to the helicopter and then make a break for it, or work cooperatively and mostly still die a couple times. Admittedly these are pretty good strategies for a real zombie outbreak, but they don’t make for a very fun game–it’s more a matter of slog than strategy.
Josh and Kevan have already been discussing an appropriate postapocalyptic twist using the Zombies terrain tiles. What else can we do with it? The building-board-as-you-go could be cool for a tactical wargame, with the “player” tokens controlling armies of zombies (although it’d be tough to remember whose were whose–maybe colored dot-stickers?). Can we combine the figurines with other toys (Dieslinger: Zombies vs. Polyhedrons) or use them as currency?
There’s this Andrew Bird song, “Tables and Chairs,” about looking forward to the holocaust. My favorite lines in it:
“‘Cause listen, after the fall
There will be no more countries, no currencies at all
We’re gonna live on our wits
We’re gonna throw away survival kits,
Trade butterfly knives for Adderall”
Which in turn reminds me of the snippet in “Fragments of a Hologram Rose,” in which the protagonist–stuck in a post-secession Texas shantytown–scrounges a leather jacket off a corpse in a gulley. He ends up leaving the jacket hanging from the knife he finds in one pocket and taking the fifteen ampoules of antibiotics in the other, which are priceless, or anyway worth enough to buy him passage out through an Army cordon.
How do you play the postapocalyptic bartering game? Is it a deck of custom cards, or a markerboard on which people can asynchronously scribble new inventory and offers? Is the goal to amass wealth, and if so, how do you manipulate relative worth to prevent everything from staying zero-sum? Is the goal just to stay alive from day to day, and if so, what are the risks involved in scrounging for new items?
So, yeah, new software. Everybody who had contributed an article in the old days is linked in the sidebar now, and those are also your pre-registered usernames; the password is the same as the old admin one, but if you don’t remember it, let me know and I’ll email it to you. (Royce and Zaratustra, you’re registered too, I just didn’t have URLs for you.) Obviously you can change your password as soon as you’ve logged in.
All the old links should work, but let me know when you discover the inevitable things that slipped past me during the import. Registration is not currently required to comment, but that will probably change at some point in the future, once the spambots realize we’re a Wordpress blog now.
Games are fun! Let’s get back into this.
I’ve talked about Journey to the End of the Night already, but what I haven’t talked about is any of the other games that Gideon Reeling ran that weekend, because we didn’t get to play them. The description that intrigued me most was that of A Small Town Anywhere: message-passing, paranoia and a relatively short time limit. Sounds like a Dispatch game to me!
We could probably investigate to find out what their actual setup was–there’s an email address right on the page–but I want to try working it up from first principles, as an exercise. Say you’re one of 20 villagers with a dirty secret. You have some dirt (or possibly just clues to dirt) on other villagers, which you want to expose, while preventing anyone from exposing you. You have an “idiosyncratic postal service.”
How does exposure work? What role does the post office play? Do you actually know other villagers’ secrets, or just clues to them, and if the former, what’s to prevent you from blurting it out immediately? Does this run on a point system, or is the last unexposed person the winner?
