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Send ... More ... HUMANS!!!
Any game that helps prepare you for the coming Zombiegeddon is a good one, in my book. Some, of course, are better than others, and Zombies!!! from Twilight Creations, is one of the very best. The basic game is an insanely fun romp through a town while trying to either kill twnety-five undead assailants or be the first player to make it to the rescue chopper. Over the years, numerous expansions have been created for the game, adding a mall, a university, catacombs, even a circus. Playing with all of the available expansions is a special kind of madness I have only attempted once. Last week at Little Shoppe of Games, we played a rousing game of Zombies!!! and enjoyed it tremendously. As we were getting ready to leave, I gave into an impulse and used some Christmas money to pick up the latest expansion to the Zombies!!! universe, which can also be played as its own stand alone game.
That game, of course, is Humans!!! It's the flip-side of the world. Instead of playing as the last surviving humans in town, you play as the zombies, bent on eating or infecting as many humans as you can. Each player takes a different zombie character with different abilities and bonuses, based on what those creatures were in life. The game mechanics are similar to Zombies!!!, but twisted slightly to fit a totally new play-style. In instances of zombie vs. human combat, for instance, the player to your right rolls the human's attack dice. It's the same if the human escapes, the player to your right controls the direction in which that human flees. Each zombie character has a point value they must achieve to win the game, and points are awarded for each zombie that player has on the board (made by infecting the humans) and for each human eaten. Combat is initiated by the other players, too: when you make an attempt to capture a human, any other player may play a weapon card to arm that human and give him a chance to fight back. Last night, we cracked that one out to give it a try. As with any new game, it took a little while to really get up to speed on the rules, but once we did, it quickly became every bit as much fun as the original Zombies!!! We managed to make our way all the way through the map tiles deck and discover strategies to herd the humans into smaller areas where they were then trapped and easy pickings. Brianna had to leave before the game was quite finished, but Sam, who minds the store during the week, jumped in to take over for her. It was after nine when we finally wrapped things up, but we're confident that another playthrough or two will streamline our understanding of the rules and make things go faster. And we all knew we'd want to do that.
