Zombie Dice

Do you even dare to reach your hand in a canister such as this? Zombie Dice is a putrid party game that you play with decaying dice. The dice comes loaded with fangs and wants to eat your brains or your fingers or whatever it can sink its rotting teeth into!

So now that you don't want to play this game let me tell you what it's really like.

Zombie Dice is by Steve Jackson Games and it if we want to be alliterative, a better description is that it's a portable party game. All the pieces you need are the dice and the canister (which has a very solid lid that makes storage easy).

Playing the game is simple. You draw out 3 dice at a time, throw them to get your result and depending on what you get either earn points or lose your turn .

You are trying to roll for brains. Each color of dice including green, red and yellow has a different ratio of brains to shotgun blasts to footsteps.

If you get three footsteps on the first throw you lose your turn because your victims got away. If at any time you reach three shotgun blasts you don't get any points and your turn ends. So you must be savvy about the number of brains that will satiate your zombie lust. If you don't keep your points at the right time and your next roll is a shotgun blast that takes you up to 3 hits then you don't get any of your brain points.

The more delicious brains you get the better! You are trying to be the first person to reach 13 points by "eating" 13 brains.

This is another game that can have added layers to it if you tell little stories about what's happening, but it's not necessary to do anything more than roll the dice to have a fun time.

I wonder if you could do a variation of the rules to try to kill zombies by getting shotgun blasts instead of brains? Or footsteps? In any case I think this game would be great to play with people who don't normally indulge in gaming.

Gloom

After some vegan sushi today my friend Anne (of Anne's Distilled Geek Commentary) and I visited our local game store Castle P and after lengthy browsing came away with some excellent games.

Anne bought a game with a seemingly boring name "Employee of the Month", however this proved to be a very fast paced and easy to learn game. You have cards representing favours you owe to co-workers and your boss and then in turn you get cards representing other's suspicions, kudos and brownie points. Basically, if you gamble right and follow the math you can screw the other players and be awarded with "Employee of the Month". We each won a game and earned the suspicion of different parties.

Next, up is a game that I have been waiting to purchase for quite awhile. "GLOOM"!

In this game you assume the role of one of four families (you can also buy expansion decks). The goal is to lower the self-worth of the individual members of your family while raising the self-worth of your opponent's and finally killing off your own family members. The things that befall your characters are comically awful. At the end the player whose family dies off first and with the most negative self-worth at death wins. If you like the Addams Family and have a spooky/dark sense of humour then this game will delight you.

What's even more fun about this game is that it encourages you to tell a story with each modifying self-worth card that you lay down. Anne and I without even consulting each other naturally took on the roles of the very darkly comedic town gossips and dished to each other about each thing that happened. I really enjoyed bestowing good fortune on Anne's characters to try to win the game, while torturing my own characters.

The cards themselves are gorgeous. Done in the style of Edward Gorey they are unique as they are clear!