Let's Talk...Last Night on Earth

I remember blowing up the entire fort with Michael over this.

I still stand by it being a very good zombie survival game. I also think A Touch of Evil may be better in hindsight, mostly because it's so different to so many games. I kind of think it's a spiritual precursor to Eldritch Horror in some ways. Like someone put it and Arkham into a closet with 4 tabs of ecstasy and some electronica, and Eldritch is the son.

I'd still play it anytime but I'm still of the mind that the combat is too complicated for what it is

I'd play this game in a fucking heart beat if someone asked. Yes Barnes is correct in that this isn't so much a homage to zombie films as it is a poor facsimile of slasher movie horror tropes. It was what had to be done in order to make the game playable and interesting.

I consider Last Night on Earth to be classic style Ameritrash. It's just good ol fashioned dice chucking, memorable/dumb moments, swearing, and not too taxing on the brain. Anyone can sit down, figure out what's going on and have a good time. If I'm being honest I don't think the zombie genre has improved much since LNoE and Zombies!!! were the only two shows in town. Not the most popular opinion, but I think those two pillars of the genre don't get nearly enough recognition as they deserve.

I still fondly remember driving all over Rhode Island trying to locate a copy of LNoE. At the time, the game was in between print runs and nobody really knew when Flying Frog was going to print more. I stopped into all sorts of game stores and comic book shops. When I finally managed to score a copy I was beyond stoked. I played the shit out of the game and even if I didn't realize it at the time, it made a profound impact on the types of games I wanted to be playing.

I still think it's fun. For all its flaws, it's often very exciting and can lead to some memorably goofy moments.

And sure, I get why it's a poor zombie game in many ways. It only manages to capture the surface essence of the genre. But until I played The Walking Dead game - which was very recent - I'd struggle to name a better one.

Which Walking Dead game is that Matt?

Never found the game interesting, to be frank. Ultimately what you do in the game, the actual gameplay is very poor. It's simply a matter of rolling die for movement, drawing cards and moving around, with few, if any decisions. Were you to remove the cards, which are mostly variants of take-that, there won't be much of a game left. I also don't think it's much of a zombie game for the same reasons, the mechanics are too generic to represent anything.

Dunno, I'm not feeling it.

I'm in the group that enjoy it. My friends and I used to play it a few times a year and it was a standard in our Halloween game days. It's a simple game that we could teach to new players easily and gave us the feel of a cheesey zombie game. It's not a horror game per se, but we would frequently be on the edge of our seats and laughing over it.

I haven't played it in a few years. I'm not sure over the comparison to Touch of Evil as while that does seem like the better game, I just haven't had the desire to play that one like I have for LNoE.

Sevej wrote: Which Walking Dead game is that Matt?

fortressat.com/articles-boardgame-review...d-all-out-war-review

Last Night on Earth was my first exposure to Ameritrash as we would generally conceive it. When I played it I was neck-deep in German and Euro designs. Mostly I tried it at the request of a friend, and I liked it okay at the time. I have only played two or three times, and it's been a number of years since I've last played now. However, I remember it being more entertaining in the second half, when the zombies were closing in.

Upon reflection I don't think it's a very good game. It's the sort of game that was an opening salvo in the AT vs. Euro debate, but it's been lapped many times over by other designs, and even at the time I remember thinking it didn't stand out that much. To put it another way, it wasn't the AT game that converted me to this side of the hobby.

90 percent of this game's popularity is because there is a card that makes the characters have sex. 5 percent is because of the Hootie McBoob character. 5 percent is because it was a 50/50 choice between this and Zombies!!! at the time.

I'm possibly the only person at this site who will stick up for Zombies!!! The original set was an amazing value. A complete game with dice, a deck of cards, a stack of map tiles, six hero miniatures, and 100 zombie miniatures, for $20. And since the miniatures are made of cheap plastic, I can play with them without feeling guilty about leaving them unpainted. The game is easy to learn. By mid-game, it looks epic on the table, with a sprawling city that is overrun by zombies. No other zombie game that I've seen has come close to capturing the right look for a zombie game. Unfortunately, people tend to spend to much time dithering over which zombies to move, and the game tends to last about one hour too long.

I was never even slightly interested in Last Night on Earth. The cheesy design was an affront to my eyes, and everything that I heard about the gameplay sounded lame, or at best, no better than Zombies!!!

Several years ago, we had an interesting discussion here at F:AT about trying to brainstorm a better zombie game. Can't remember if that was at this site or the old blog site.

Michael Barnes wrote: 5 percent is because of the Hootie McBoob character.

It was good advertisement at the Gen Con closest to release. I heard that she was wearing a sweatshirt by Saturday though...

Geez, Barnes is dedicated to hating this game. Kudos, stick to your guns man.

I still like it. I have a lot of good memories around that game and while no one in our group owns a copy anymore we enjoyed it a lot while we had it. It was nice for a light game while drinking some beers. It was ridiculous and the rolling doubles thing used to piss me off at first but I got used to it and I really liked how accessible it was. We were constantly brining in non-gamers in those days and people took to it right away. The game itself was not that well designed... but it didn't really matter because it facilitated fun simply by being easy to step into and understand. The gameynes of it occasionally pissed me off and you had to step in and make sure people played the Zombies properly at games end. It was possible to start making Zombies run away at the end of certain scenario's because if the heroes didn't kill anymore you'd win so, very unrealistically (either in the Zombie universe or even just the games universe) the Zombies would suddenly start running away because they knew it was hopeless. That made for an anti-climactic ending. If I was the Zombie player I'd just finish it off properly even though it did suck. We ended up with one expansion that I think was called Growing Hunger and there was some cool stuff in it.

One of it's greatest assets was the sandbox nature of it. The rules were so simple and the game so easy to understand that you could easily make scenario's yourself. I call that a robust design in that it can handle tweaking without screwing up the basic game. We did this a few times and had fun with it. We even had some weird World War Z thing where we mixed Tide of Iron with LNOE and it was pretty damned cool actually. The rules blended surprisingly smoothly.

I don't think I'd buy it again (unless it was dirt cheap) but I would certainly play it again. I have almost nothing but good memories of it.

I never did sell Touch of Evil and still play it on occasion. Interesting game.

I'm in on Zombies!!!. Does exactly what it's supposed to.

Jex, I despise "cheesy".

I like Zombies!!! It is better than most other zombie games, and it was the first game to capture the feeling that you were going to have to run through a teeming horde of zombies to get to a helicopter. It felt much more authentic.
Goofy, but grim. At one point I had all of the expansions, at least up through the medieval ones or whatever.

I still remember Robert Martin rolling up at Atlanta Game Fest circa 2005- during Caylusmania- and trying to get people to play it. One person- a noted Atlanta gaming luminary- saw it in is pile and said "you aren't actually going to play that are you?" People would literally walk by our table shaking their heads and smirking. It was also peak "These Games of Ours" era.

2 years later all those motherfuckers were playing Last Night on Earth, mostly because of the sex fantasies as noted above.

Yeah, by "good" I mean it worked for an audience and got hype for their game.