Last Night on Earth

Last Night on Earth, by Flying Frog Productions, is a competitive zombies vs humans board game with a deliciously cheesy 80s horror movie vibe. The game itself has been around since 2007 and is possibly the most popular zombie-themed board game out there. In fact, it’s really only been in the past year or so that any serious competition has shown up to dispute that title. So, the question is, does it deserve that title? Let’s dig in and find out.

Let me start off by saying that I love the title “Last Night on Earth.” Not only is it evocative and pretty cool, it doesn’t have the word “dead” or the letter “z” in it. I have a long rant about that coming up eventually, but that’s for another day. Suffice to say, it’s a breath of fresh air.

First off, the components. The rulebook is good. It has nice visuals. The layout isn’t exactly to my preference though. I mean, it’s a fairly standard layout, but it seems a bit cluttered to me since there is a LOT of art sprinkled around. I prefer my rulebooks slightly more utilitarian, but it’s a minor complaint, since the rulebook still conveys almost everything you need to know clearly and in a fairly logical progression. I didn’t have many rules conundrums that needed to be sorted out. A couple, but not many.

Then the map is broken into a single, two-sided square piece and six one-sided, L-shaped pieces. All standard cardboard, they represent the various places in town that you might explore. Since you always take the middle, square piece but only choose four of the L-shaped pieces randomly, there is a certain random element to the setup that does mean you’ll never be 100% certain what’s going to come up each game.

Next you’ve got the character cards. There are eight in total, each representing a different B-horror movie stereotype. From the drifter to the nurse to the high school jock to the town sheriff. They explain any special abilities the character has and help you keep track of how many wounds you’ve taken. There are a bunch of dice. They’re fairly standard smallish dice. Next are the tokens. Lots of tokens. Oh, I’ve seen plenty of games with more tokens than this game, but it’s still no slouch. They represent and keep track of just about everything else you need in the game, from wounds to special events. Then you have two decks. One for the humans and one for the zombies. They’re pretty much what you’d expect: cards to give you a tactical advantage. It’s also where most of the theme and atmosphere of the game shine through. This is where most of the artwork is, but I’ll get to that later. What I love most about the cards is just how cheesy they are. They really to add the flavor of a B-movie to it. From the card “This Could be our Last Night on Earth,” which encourages two characters to *a-hem* comfort each other for a while, to “Lights Out” and “Unnecessary Self-Sacrifice” you can tell that the designers have seen plenty of these movies and know the tropes and cliches by heart. I also love how the game just completely refuses to take itself seriously. For example, the zombie cards include the eloquently-named “Uuuurrrggghh!” and the obligatory “Brains!”. The flavor text is even better, with things like the high school principle threatening zombies with detention.

There are also a few double-sided cards with the turn order for zombies on one side and humans on the other. Quick reference sheets, basically. Then you have the miniatures. They come in three colors. Gray for the human characters, and red and green for the zombies. The two different colors are for when there are two zombie players so you can tell their zombies apart. The minis are quality plastic miniatures. The detail isn’t the best I’ve ever seen in a game like this, but they’re pretty close. I’ve seen a lot of people online paint their minis for this game, especially the survivors. I’m no artist, but even I have to admit that the survivor minis do pretty much scream to be painted. Good news if you’re the artistic type, I guess.

Finally, there is a music CD. It’s meant to help provide some extra atmosphere while playing the game. From what I can tell, Flying Frog provides a soundtrack with all of their games. It’s a nice touch, and it’s as cheesy as the rest of the game. I mean, some of the songs are pretty cool and fit the tense atmosphere that even cheesy zombie movies can provide, but other songs are just out of place. I mean, one of these seems like some sort of tropical song you’d expect to hear from a movie taking place in Hawaii. But, hey, when you’re being this silly, I guess it’s not too out of place.

The artwork is pretty good. I quite enjoy it. The board pieces are fairly average, but the artwork for all of the cards and other components are mostly photography with some minor photoshopping. The more realistic look adds even more to the B-movie feel since you’ve got real people representing the characters and zombies instead of using drawings or paintings and such. It really adds a nice atmospheric touch that other games generally lack. Plus, the dark and serious nature of the artwork manages to emphasize the silly cheesiness of the rest of the game instead of detracting from it. I would dare say that Last Night on Earth has, overall, the best visuals of any zombie board game I’ve played to date. It’s not that all of the art on all of the components is the best, but the card artwork is so good and so much better than the artwork in other games that it more than makes up for any weaknesses the other components may have.

You’ll definitely want to read through the rulebook a couple times. The rules definitely aren’t intuitive. They’re not difficult to understand either, but it’ll take you at least a full game to get a feeling for them. Broken down, LNOE is a scenario-driven game. The game comes with several scenarios, and you can get more from the various expansions as well as some free scenarios on Flying Frog’s website.

Each turn is broken into the zombie turn and your human turn. Zombies go first. They have more steps to go through, but their turns are more straight-forward. First they move the “sun tracker” (each scenario has a turn limit), followed by drawing cards back up to their max hand size. They then roll to see if more zombies will be spawning that turn. Spawning has an interesting mechanic that ensures that you’ll never have more than 14 zombies total on the board. Zombies then get to move, one space each unless a card lets a zombie move more. Unlike humans, Zombies have no restrictions about how they move. Humans can’t move through building walls or the like, for obvious reasons, but zombies completely ignore walls and such. It’s assumed that they simply break through the window or crawl up through the floorboards. (Like I said, these guys know their B-movies.) Fighting is next (more on that later) followed by finally placing new zombies on the board. Humans start with their movie action, which can be used to either move or search a building, giving them a card. Then survivors in the same space can exchange any items they have. Next the survivors can shoot at the zombies, if they have ranged weapons. Finally they do close combat.

Now, zombies and survivors handle close combat slightly differently in terms of who fights who when multiple minis from both teams are in the same space, so make sure you don’t skip that part. The actual fighting itself is the same for both, though. Humans roll two dice, and zombies roll one. Zombies win on a tie. (Kind of like Risk.) If the zombie wins the fight, then the human takes a wound. If the human wins the fight but doesn’t roll two dice of with the same number, then they simply push the zombie back and nothing happens. To kill the zombie you have to roll two dice with the same numbers. The interesting part is that, if you’re rolling more than two dice, due to extra dice granted by weapons or something like that, then the two same numbers don’t have to be the winning number. That is, if you roll three dice and get 6, 1, 1, then you’d still kill the zombie, as long as the zombie player rolls less than a 6.

So, how does it play? Very well. The start of the game is always a little slow, since the zombies move so slowly, it takes a few turns for them to start catching up to the survivors. This is good because the survivors need a few turns to get into buildings and start looking for useful items.

The different scenarios combined with a good variety of survivors and board pieces (with more of each available in expansions) means that each game will be different enough to provide a lot of replayability.

The game seems to be fairly well balanced. None of the games I played obviously favored one side or the other. It did kind of seem that the endgame would go from “could go either way” to “forgone conclusion” in a the matter of a single turn, but I don’t think that’s indicative of a broken rules system. It seemed to come down to the end being only a few turns away and one side or the other realizing it needed to take more risks and then those risks either paid off or not, turning the tables sharply.

While most people will need to read the rulebook a couple times and play a game or two before they get a good grasp on all the rules, I also feel that the game is simple enough that even casual players could have a lot of fun with it, especially given the great theme and atmosphere the game provides.

I almost wish I had any real complaints about the game so it doesn’t seem like I’m just gushing over the game, but as it is, all I have is a few nitpicks. The biggest one being the lack of a single-player experience. While the competitive game is very well balanced and very fun, it’s always nice to have the single-player option for when you can’t get any friends together for a game. But it is just a “would be nice” option, not a necessity. Another nitpick is that since there are usually more human players than zombie players, there can be a disagreement over who gets to be the zombies. But that really shouldn’t be too big of a deal, and if you’ve got a gaming group that does turn that into a big deal, then you probably need to find a new group to play with.

Bottom Line: So, does Last Night on Earth deserve the lofty place it holds in the tiny niche of board gaming it inhabits? I say it does. While I have yet to play every zombie-themed board game out there, or even every zombie-themed board game of note, I can say that of what I have played, so far this one has had the best theme, the best atmosphere, the best overall visuals, and has been the most fun to play. And that’s saying something considering how much I enjoy City of Horror and The Walking Dead: The Board Game.

Now, as I said, in the past couple years some serious competition has appeared, (mostly thanks to Kickstarter, it seems) and I will be getting to them eventually to see if they’re anywhere near as good. But until one of them proves up to the challenge, LNOE is my reigning champion of zombie-themed board games.

 You can find Last Night on Earth on Amazon.