Desire often trumps logic. Sometimes we want something so badly that we overlook flaws inherent in people, jobs, movies, or games. In my case, Last Night on Earth. The game seemed perfect: a co-operative, competitive table top game that pits human heroes against my favorite undead. The game comes with five different scenarios, eight different playable heroes, and a mostly-randomized set of map tiles that mean each game is just a little bit different from the last. LNoE comes a TON of awesome collateral such as an old truck, gasoline, and townsfolk tokens, and most importantly, a bunch of plastic zombies. The production value on this game is outstanding. With scenario titles like “Die, Zombie, Die!” how could we go wrong?

NOTE: at the time of this review, I had misread the rules. We were adding the hero fight dice together, which gave them a huge advantage. Any additional dice just ups the chance that a hero may be successful in combat. This is explicit in the rules, but six very experienced board gamers all failed to notice this amidst the rest of a poorly-written manual. In rereading the rest of my review, my complaints about the game still stand. Every game we have played of LNoE leaves someone frustrated. We actually played Illuminati as a joke during a gaming session and I had more fun playing it than Last Night on Earth.

The problem with Last Night on Earth is that it doesn’t play out like a zombie game at all. If you get to play the heroes, you’re in for a good time. You get to do a lot of stuff, like move around a lot, search for weapons and nifty items, trade things back and forth, heal each other, and generally have a grand time punching zombies to death or blowing them up with the dynamite you somehow found in the hospital. Even though each hero may only more or search once per turn, the zombies move so slowly that it’s easy to put together an arsenal that quickly puts zombie players on the defensive.

While the hero player is busy finding his second shotgun, the zombie player plods forward one space at a time. There is a maximum of fourteen zombies on the board at any given time. While I’m a big fan of shambling zombies, it is damn near impossible to trap a human player long enough to actually hurt them. There just aren’t enough zombies and they move too slowly. A human moves on a D6, so they might be able to move as far as six spaces away — six zombie turns!! And since LNoE’s scenarios have time limits measured in turns, zombie players know they aren’t going to finish the marathon necessary to actually catch up to someone … before they sprint away again.

There are some basic game mechanic flaws with the zombies that should have been resolved during playtesting. For example, zombie players get to see if they spawn new zombies every turn. You must roll higher than the current number of zombies on the board in order to spawn new ones. If there are twelve shamblers on the board you can just skip this step. IF you are lucky enough to bring in reinforcements, they must be placed evenly at zombie “spawning pits,” most of which are pre-designated on the game board.

This is a horrible rule for zombie players. Most of the time you only get to respawn two to four zombies, and instead of being near the action you have to place them as evenly as possible on the game board. Remember that zombies move one space per turn? Good luck getting reinforcements to the barn in time. What’s worse is that certain zombie action cards force you to open MORE spawning pits at random locations. This further dilutes your ability to place new zombies close to the action.

Yes, there are action cards that help the zombies move faster (one at a time) or en masse (D6 zombies move forward an extra space and then move as normal). Yes, zombies can — often temporarily — overrun a building so that heroes can no longer enter there and search. But these things are random and preventable by a hero player with good timing or equipment.

As I mentioned before, the hero characters can get equipment or abilities that REALLY make them zombie-killing machines. The priest character can gain “Faith,” which allows him to roll one extra D6 when fighting zombies. Heroes get to roll 2D6 by default; zombies roll 1D6. Zombies wound (not kill!) heroes if they have the highest roll or tie. Heroes push zombies away on a high roll, or kill them if they get a high roll plus roll doubles. My priest found Faith and charged into a mess of zombies. He beat two to death on the first turn and killed the other two in the following two turns. The zombies never touched him once. I’m not good at this numbers thing, but what are the chances of a human player rolling all ones and then the zombie player rolling at least a three?

Weaponry makes the game even easier for the hero players. Heroes may shoot through walls that they are adjacent to via imaginary “windows” or holes in the walls made by relentless undead. The dynamite card is ridiculously over-powered. Hero players can blow up any square up to two squares away by rolling two or greater on a D6. Remember all those fucking zombies you spent six turns moving to the high school? Dead, in one turn. Oh, you wanted to avoid getting blown up next time and spread your zombies out? Father Asswhooping just circle-strafed them with his fists.

I really want to like LNoE. I really do. But in five games played, the humans have won four times. Quite a bit different from the genre that is based on fatalism and overwhelming odds against humanity. It got to the point that zombie players would try to move away from the heroes.

This game needs a lot to fix it, but here are some ideas:

  • Double the zombies. At least.
  • Slow humans down to move three spaces per turn, with one less space moved per wound.
  • “Youth” hero characters cannot heal themselves by skipping a move action.
  • Zombies must start out the game evenly, but may be placed on spawning pits in any quantity thereafter.

Last Night on Earth has gained the dubious distinction of being one of the games in the house that people don’t want to play. Sure, some nights we feel more like Settlers of Catan than Monopoly, but rarely does anyone flat out say “I don’t want to play that game. Ever.” In fact, Illuminati might be the only other game in my collection that has garnered such a reaction.

I’d really love to love Last Night on Earth, but the game just doesn’t click. I’ve supported the publisher by buying their Web-only mini-expansion, and will probably buy their retail expansion, but I wish the zombies stood a better chance. As is, whomever gets the zombie side is in for a lot of twiddling their thumbs while the hero player does all sorts of fun shit … and then kills them.