The 31 Days of Halloween: Day 14

Halloween is the best time of the year. It's a wonderfully indulgent time, where your inner ghoul is given societal license to be put on display. To celebrate it to it's wicked fullest, the Midnight Cheese will be posting every day in October with excellent ways to enjoy the season. Whether it's horror films, video games, books or activities, check back every day for some new Halloween fun.

Zombies!!! the Board Game

A board game? Is Chuck for real?
Yes. This is a table top strategy game. But you control a "shotgun guy". The setting is an overrun town. Zombies are everywhere. This is a fun game to play while watching a horror flick with friends.

You can't tell, but there's a whole mess of zombies in this box

If you aren't familiar with the game Zombies!!!, allow me to elaborate. All players start as "shotgun guys" in the town square. Each turn the players make starts with drawing a placing a tile adjacent to one of the others already on the map. Then they place zombies on that tile. Once all that's in place, they then get to move their character AND move some zombies. So yes, you can actively screw your friends over by moving brain munchers right to them.

Combat is handled with simple dice rolls and there are also event cards, used to simulate either luck for the player or terrible happenstances for their opponents. The objective is to be the first to escape at the helicopter (which is in the bottom half of the tile deck - not even available from the start) or the first to kill twenty-five zombies.

There's a lot of subtle strategies available here, especially when you factor in the special location cards- fire stations, police headquarters, garden stores and hospitals all have either extra life or extra weapon bonus' to be had if you're willing to brave clearing them of shufflers. Some players might choose to combine forces in repelling the undead, only to have one partner turn on the other when the helicopter seems attainable. It's fascinating how well a tile and dice board game can cause zombie aficionados to emulate the worst in human behavior over something so small as a game. I wonder how quickly they'd do the same when the real zombie apocalypse comes calling.

There are also 10 expansions, adding new locales to the game for those who like additional flavors of zombie death. Those expansions include a military base, sewers and subways, a cemetery, a school, a prison, and of course everyone's favorite location, the mall. If your attention span is somewhat lacking, there is a video game version of Zombies!!! available for Windows Phone 7. Of course, that's not going to help most people.

Snag a copy of Zombies!!! the board game, with it's hundreds of little plastic zombie men, today and get your brain-munch on.