Obviously inspired by an Australian institution that has their students making a blog to document their thoughts and stuff, Uppsala University campus Gotland has thought the same. 

Personally I applaud the idea, it’s amazing how much more you really learn about not only yourself, but the subject by taking the time to think, why did I do that? What can I change till next time. Now we get to do this a lot more.

Game reflections

This coming weeks in the advanced game design courses we’re going to play board games. My group has already started doing that. The game we picked up was called “Last night on Earth”. It is a zombie game for 2 – 6 players. We’ve played it 3 times already, but the last try was without the 6th person so we will play it once more.

The first run was with 6 players and the basic rule set. Since there was only one basic scenario we had to run that one, which was that the heroes should beat 15 zombies by the end of 15 turns. Zombies got slaughtered and the heroes won after 9 rounds. We got the feel that the zombies were a bit weak, which they should be but they pose no real threat and there’s no advantage for zombies to chase players in a scenario like that. I was playing the zombie with another player, and instead of going to the players, we should have been on the defensive.

That however sounds strange to me, because zombies wants brains, they aren’t supposed to just camp out in a place and not go after the players.

There’s one rule where zombies if they hit higher or equal to the player the zombie wins, in the beginning without knowing how the game worked it sounded very unfair. However after having played it now for quite some time it’s not really unfair. The heroes have so many advantages that it’s outright silly. None of the times we played the zombies won. Actually I would say it’s next to impossible for the zombies to win in certain cases.

The movement system also seemed flawed, there’s no way for zombies to efficiently block the players to force them to go against them, unless you trap them inside a house, but in those cases players can just use ranged weapons and shoot the zombies down.

Although understandable that the heroes are more powerful, seeing as there’s upto 14 zombies and only 4 players, the zombies has so much against them that once they play a card that is good for them, the player, at least in the later part of the game, becomes so much stronger because they search for weapons and items that cancel out the advantages that the zombie player gets.

In the 3 rounds we played, in one round where the zombies had an advantage that all zombies would spawn, if they were in the spawning pool, the zombies managed to kill off 2 players.

It’s tricky though to try and balance the game. We did some changes, since the heroes were able to just escape the zombies without being caught, because they have 1D6 movement instead of just the 1 movement that the zombies can have, we changed the movement rule of the heroes so that they would be easier to catch and create more action, but even then it was very difficult to hurt the heroes as a zombie player.

That said however, it might be because we’re new with the game and that we haven’t fully comprehended the rules and strategy involved with the game. We’re going to have one more full round of the game so that the two remaining players that haven’t played a zombie yet can do that.

As it feels now though, players can for the most part just wait and wait in their house, searching and searching, get the cards they want, then move around with enough gear to blow the zombies up, which in my opinion is a bit silly. Search is all reward and no risk as it feels like now.

Next time I think we will make some addendum to the rules so that the zombie player will be able to roll a D6 dice to decide how many steps to take. So that 1-2 on the dice is 1 space, 3 -4 is 2 spaces and 5&6 is 3 spaces. That way the zombies can move about more quickly and hopefully be able to cause more chaos.

It also feels weird that the zombies spawns are decided by dice, there were several turns in a row where I had a really low number resulting in very few zombies on the board and the few that were there were picked off very easily.

That said though, it is fun to play for now, even if it feels unfair to play as the zombies. Also I think when playing 5 people, there should be 2 people playing zombies and 3 people playing the heroes with 1 person having an extra hero card. It’s easy to feel like you’re the one being picked on when being the lone zombie player, even if it is all fun and games.