Joe's hand, Tanzi, and Witmer (l-r) on what appears to be about turn 7 of Zombies. (Also note Tony rocking in the background.)As the night moved on past 11pm, our friend Tanzi, a local RAWK GAWD, showed up. This is also about the time that Joe started unpacking his Zombies game. Joe, Witmer, Tony and I had played once before (at a previous game night at my place some time ago), but neither Tanzi nor Anna had ever heard of it, let alone played. They are both ravenous fans of zombies in general, so we thought they'd get a kick out of it. We were right.
In-game zombie movement...very intense.
The game is played by adding a piece of the cityscape at the beginning of each turn, stretching the game board, with streets and shops on the table. Each tile comes with a certain number of Zombies (and in this game we had the choice of zombies or zombie dogs!), some heart tiles (life), and bullets (to boost your die-roll attacks against zombies). So after you add your tile, you draw a card which might have some screw-somebody else over thing on it or some handy kickass move for yourself on it. Once your new tile is set up with zombies, bullets and hearts, you then roll to move yourself, but only after you defeat a zombie that may be on your space with you (which there usually was). Then it's on to moving around the board, according to your die roll. Along your way you can fight more zombies. The ones you defeat, you keep. We enjoyed placing ours in goofy formations, as pictured below.
Zombie Musical Dance Number, perhaps? (These were mine.)
Zombie Square-Dance was also a popular formation, as exemplified here, by Anna's collection.
Witmer marvels at how graceful the undead seem in his stunning Zombie Chorus Line.
So once you've done all that on your turn, you can roll a die to see how many zombies on the board you can send towards your opponents. This was usually a chance to box in or dog-pile the rotting, undead masses upon your closest friend. Good fun, honestly.
Witmer commands the undead to attack, um...looks like the red guy, which was Joe.
Now, truth be told, there are about six different versions that have been created for Zombies, and the awesomest/horriblest thing about this is that you can combine all of the sets into one gigantic Land of the Living Dead game. That would take forever, though. I'm sure it'd be awesome, but I'm not sure any of us, even Joe, are brave enough to undertake that venture. However, Joe thought it'd be cool to combine two of them in this session: the city and the mall.
So, when the mall showed up, we had Tanzi draw a mall interior card, so we could expand the mall and have some extra shops and zombies on the board. Good idea, eh? Turns out, the first card we drew was the Food Court, which also happens to be a dead end. D'oh! So our mall turned out to be just an over-hyped food court. What a gyp.
Tanzi expresses his deepest feelings about being boned by the Mall Fiasco (TM).
Meanwhile, back at the PS2, Tony and Paula are in the GH spirit, rocking all night long. They were on a hardcore tour de force, and the zombies seemed uneffected by their monster ballads.
Seriously...could they rock much harder? I think my face is melting. OK...so...in order to win at Zombies, you can either collect 25 zombies or get to the heli-pad first. The heli-pad is the last piece of the game board played, and when it drops, everyone turns their attention that-a-way. Coincidentally, it also draws the attention of every single zombie on the board (or so it seemed.) It was like they all heard that there was a sale on fresh brains and Haggar slacks at Zombie-Mart. (C'mon! Who can resist a sale on Haggar slacks?!) Below is a shot of the road leading to the heli-pad... ALL AVAILABLE ZOMBIES TO THE HELI-PAD. ALL AVAILABLE TO THE HELI-PAD, PLEASE. (L-R) A perturbed Joe, a happy Tanzi, a tired Witmer, and a cheerful-even-in-defeat Anna at the end of Zombies!
This was the scene shortly after the heli-pad appeared. I'm the blue dude at the bottom. Witmer's off to the left (the skin-toned/orange guy). Anna's off-camera trying to hack through a shit-load of zombies in a valiant and gore-spewing effort to reach the goal of 25 zombie kills. And Tanzi is forging ahead to the goal line, followed closely by Joe. In the end, it was brave Sir Tanzi for the win. He is seen below, reveling in his victory by pretending that his piece is enjoying his parting gift for playing: an imaginary helicopter ride to safety while his friends watch themselves be consumed, flesh and bone, by the horrible undead jerks all over the cardboard city.
I call this "The Humble Victor".
And for some, this is the end of this particular Game Night. My estimate is that Zombies ended just before or around 1am.
Tanzi bailed in a glow of his own Zombie win. Witmer, too, bade us a fond farewell. But others, however, were still awake, seemingly unaffected by the passage of time. At least one of those people was, apparently, a Douchebag...
I look like I'm takin' it pretty well...considering.
So, it's about 1am...and that puts me at hour 4 out of 8 of my Game Night experience...
In the next and final chapter of this saga, I'll show you the fist fight that broke out during the Zombies game and what was at stake. You'll also find out how many games of TaleSpin we played! And...you'll never believe the unexpected and unprecedented way we end this Game Night Extravaganza! So tune in next time for the conclusion of Eight-Hour Game Night: A Photo Journey!
