Let's Talk...Last Night on Earth

Wow...if you can believe it LNoE came out....10 years ago.

Amazing how time messes with ya.

Anyway, this game was sort of a big thing 'back in the day'. I think it may have gotten rebooted with a new starter or something, but I have no idea.

Can anyone speak to its current status? Is FFP still making material for their flagship title? Do you still play it? Ever do anything cool with its sandbox nature? Can you rate the expansions?

Or...let's don't and say we did.

It was SUCH A BIG DEAL. Everyone was playing it. The game night I was doing at the time, I remember looking around and like six tables were playing it.

But yech...zero interest in it anymore.

Haven't played it in years, no interest in playing it now.

It was fun for a while but the rules were a mess. Some guns ran out of ammo on a 1, others you had to make a separate ammo check ... ugh. Sandbox style games need a streamlined rule system.

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┻┳| •.•) A Touch Of Evil is vastly superior
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I probably don't need to peek out from behind the wall to say that anymore but if you so much as thought it back in the day, maaaaan oh man were the knives coming out for you.

It's a fairly bad game, due to its over-reliance on cards coming up in search decks. I have only kept my copy for the following reasons:
- some day my kids may want to play a zombie game, and it is one.
- it was the first game I completely painted
- mine is signed by the designer and the photographer.

I'll stick up for it.

- Personally, I don't think the rules are horrible, and once you've played a couple of games it's pretty easy to teach. New players can pick up humans with just about no rules at the start, if you have at least one experienced player.

- Plays 2-6, and doesn't fall off too horribly at any number of players. Playing time is relatively short - 90 minutes tops.

- The scenarios, event cards, and characters are all straight out of zombie B-movies. This isn't a bad thing. "Do X, try not to get eaten."

I haven't played it in a while, but I'd play it right now if someone wanted to. And like Hotseatgames below, it's the first (and so far olny) game that I've completely painted.

Alright, I have to retort.

I have seen just about every "zombie b-movie" you can name as well as any number that you have likely never heard of. NOTHING in LNoE resembles ANYTHING in any of those films. Instead, what you have in that game is an approximation of what goes on in a "zombie b-movie" made by people who really don't know what they are referencing...because what they are referencing really doesn't exist.

"Zombie B-movies" are FAR more often boring or incompetent than they are "cheesy". The better ones are gritty and grim, but not ever "cheesy". It's just like when people who have never really seen blaxploitation films think it's all about this "cheesy" pimp shit.

So what you have is game made by people who saw Night of the Living Dead, didn't really appreciate it as a great film because of its DIY/low budget qualitiies, and assumed that other zombie b-movies are "cheesy" with a bunch of silly, jokey bullshit in them.

It is completely inauthentic in every way.

Used to be a favorite of mine, but yeah, it doesn't hold up that well. Biggest problem I think was that it was never as fun to play the zombies, moving a bunch of zombies one space at a time and hoping some "win the game" cards might come up. Would have been better if it had a zombie AI and was fully co-op like Zombicide ended up being (though I do prefer LNOE to Zombicide in some respects). It does a very good job of depicting its subject in a cinematic way, and in order for the heroes to win, they often need to be heroic and sacrifice themselves at the right times. There are some meaningful decisions to make and some strategy. It's also the one FFP game where the photographs for the characters makes sense, being that it is supposed to be a B-movie as a game. (Whether it accurately portrays that or not, as Barnes says, is another story.)

It will always have a soft spot for me for being the game that shifted me from Euros to AT. I was at my first game convention in Utah. I played a few games, mostly light Euros, and at one point I jumped in on a game of Pillars of the Earth. And it dragged and was as dull as you'd expect. Next to us, several people sat down and started played LNOE, and they were laughing and chucking dice and trash talking and just having a blast. I remember feeling like the kid who has to sit inside taking piano lessons while his friends are outside playing hide-and-seek on a beautiful sunny day. Picked up LNOE shortly thereafter and had a blast with it myself for a few years, among other great AT titles.

I dunno. It's an ok game if you're comparing it to Zombies!!!, which is what was happening when it came out. It's also ok if you're a board game newb and don't know any better.

Nowadays... Hmmm.... I might play it with a fun group, but otherwise I'd actively avoid it.

I can't speak about current status of it or anything like that, because it seems that FF games are pretty crappy now that I do know better. If you've played aToE, then there isn't much of a reason to explore their other titles beyond masochism.

If the game was co-op it might have saved it, barely. As it was I sold it. Move, draw a card. Move, draw cards. Meh. Mechanics were dull. Nitpicky stuff like how ugly (and not in a good way) the whole thing was and that dumb CD didn't help it. I'd rather play Talisman or something. Never bought a FFP game since.

I don't hate on LNoE for misrepresenting zombie films. I guess I see the game as a decent try at any sort of creature feature where disparate townsfolk have to work together to survive or get the hell out of dodge.

I think of flicks like Critters, Tremors, Maximum Overdrive, or Slither or even fun, shallow zombie fare like Return of the Living Dead. And on my table, LNoE does a pretty good job for those.

So, there's no Romero commentary in the zombies here, but I'm ok with that.

Colorcrayons wrote: I dunno. It's an ok game if you're comparing it to Zombies!!!, which is what was happening when it came out. It's also ok if you're a board game newb and don't know any better.

It was one of the first games I played (and bought) post-Heroscape introduction in 2008. A bunch of the guys from that community dug it, and we played it one night before a tournament. It was fun and silly, and very simple. I still have it, but haven't played it often in years. The other game I got from that time period was Descent 1E- I traded that.

But yeah, I think the last Zombie related board game I had played before that was Zombies, which I thought was terrible even back in 2000 or whenever that was, so this was a marked improvement. And this was when I'd happily play Munckin or Lunch Money when we didn't have enough people to play the D&D campaign.

I still don't mind playing LNOE; I put it in the same category as Betrayal at House on the Hill. That being said, I have the new stand-alone base game of LNOE, Timber Peak, as well as the expansion, Blood in the Forest, and I can't see any reason to own the original or the Growing Hunger expansion after playing those two.

TP introduced a simple XP system for leveling up Heroes and BitF adds a couple of tougher, unique zombies that the Zombie player can buy with zombie spawns and XP. Sure, there's still a bunch of randomness but there's character progression for the Heroes and more decisions for the Zombie player to keep things interesting for everyone. We haven't played it in a while but that's more because we have so many other games to play rather than us not enjoying it. It's just too bad FFP didn't come up with the XP and unique zombie concepts at the outset because I think most people assumed TP and BitF were just more of the same and didn't bother checking them out.

The "Defend the Manor" scenario is ok, the rest of it is largely junk. We generally had games where one side or the other just had absolute control. At that point it wasn't all the much fun for either side.

I mentioned this to my group. I owned the game, and I got some push-back. So I told them they could play it anytime they liked, and the next time they played (without me) they agreed.

Real zombie movies, even bad ones, have some sense of drama and suspense. The game doesn't. Everything is so arbitrary. In my comments on BGG (which I just reread) I compared it to Buffy the Vampire Slayer The Board Game which is very much in a similar vein, but head and shoulders better. No comparison between the two in spite of their similarities. This may be the single best example of designers who "get it" vs those who don't.

If this had come out in the Kickstarter era it would have been a $100 title. They missed it by just a couple of years.

I bought it maybe eight years ago and still have it. We don't play it that often because I have a lot of other games I love massively and want to play but will get it out now and then if we have 90min to kill (that is a shorter time for us). Some scenarios suck but that can just make you more determined sometimes, I do agree the the item deck is too big with the main expansion and this can impact on shorter turn scenarios, and either search or move is a pain but many games give you a choice of just a couple of actions each turn. Maybe I'm just not that critical on games these days (except for euros) and if it gives me fun when it does come out then it's done its job.
I have no plans to sell it (although sussing out a few games I'm keen to trade for one of them was after LNoE so ...) at the moment but it isn't a game I'll hold on for sentiment.