A couple of posts ago, "anonymous" mentioned that he was developing a variant of the boardgame Settlers of Cataan featuring zombies from, well, Zombies!!!. I think that's a terrific idea, and I hope to play one day soon.
The idea made me wonder if other games could be modified to add shambling zombie action. Certainly the infamous Bruce Lee Game (BruceLeeGame!) would be simple enough to combine with Zombies; just add a few Zombie cards to the deck, add random zombie attacks on your dojos, and you're set. Really, how come no one's made a movie in which Bruce Lee fights off hordes of zombies? (They'd all line up and attack one at a time, of course.)
Zombie Monopoly might be fun. You could add random Zombie cards to Chance and Community Chest..."You have been eaten by a zombie. Do not pass go, do not collect $200 dollars." Zombies could spring up on your holdings, bringing down your property values. "Oh no! Just when I paid off my mortgage!"
I thought about zombie Scrabble, but couldn't come up with anything but bonus points for spelling out certain words, such as "brains," "zombies," "splatterpunk," "boomstick," etc.
Zombie charades would get pretty tedious after a couple of turns:
"Okay, one word..."
(Player tilts his head back, drools, extends one arm, shuffles around in random circles) "Urrrgh...ullllh...mulllghh..."
"Zombie!"
Zombie Axis and Allies might be cool. The game starts as normal, but after two turns, zombies spring up in a randomly chosen territory. They multiply very rapidly, and the focus of the game shifts from a world war between powers to a combined effort for survival, Nazis, Allies and Japanese working together to fight off the horde. Zombie Risk could work the same way.
In the world of computer games, someone should write a Zombie Outbreak mod for Civilization. I would think it would be deceptively simple...just replace roaming barbarians with zombies, but have them multiply faster. And if they win combat with your unit, the unit isn't just destroyed - it's turned into a zombie too!
A Zombies mod for Civilization would be amazing! It would even rock with the original board game before the compute game.
ReplyDeleteMy thinking is, regarding Zombies of Cataan, that although there is the immediate crisis of dealing with a zombie horde, by far the most troublesome issue would be trying to figure out how to send the boorish and expensive zombie-killer avatar back to his own dimension.
There is a zombie mod for Half Life 2.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.zombiepanic.org/site/index.php
We should get in on that.
Said boor represented, of course, by Cataan's robber token.
ReplyDelete"Shop smart...shop S-Mart!"
Huh. That's what my wife said, too, "The robber can be the zombie killer".
ReplyDeleteI hadn't thought of that. I've always liked the robber as the robber. Yet there are not just a few variations on Cataan that do nothing except change the robber's role, from making him into "Robin Hood" to transforming him into an Angel of Ultimate Goodness that heaps bonuses on the lucky player to have him.
I remember chewing out one of my friends becasue she would consistently put the robber where he could do the least harm. The predictable result was an about-face in her gameplay that saw me at the focus of a concerted series of robber attacks and my consequent status as the holder of the fewest points at the end of the game, which she won.
It's intersting to think that the little black pawn is so reviled that people just won't let him do his thing. With society set against him, no wonder he turns to crime.