I went out for a marathon gaming session last night, and managed to play four games, two of which I’d played before. In the order that I played them:

Settlers of Catan was the first game I played, and it was the second time I had played it. It was fun. I like the strategy of the game; even if you’re unfamiliar with it, strategies have a way of revealing themselves to you as you play. I got a settlement near some sheep early on, and also got a sheep-trading port. Through some lucky die rolls, I wound up getting tons and tons of sheep, which I promptly traded for resources that I needed more. I feel like maybe I should have bought a few more development cards, and I ultimately lost, but I had fun and I’d like to play again.

The Great Brain Robbery is a game that I actually own, and have played a couple of times before. It’s a fun diversion about zombies in the wild west robbing a passenger train full of government cheese (as zombies sometimes do). I like the game, but I think I’d get pretty tired of it if I played it too much. Still, it was a fun time.

Royal Turf is a game about betting on horse racing. I wasn’t that enthusiastic about it at first, but it actually turned out to be a good little game. There’s a significant luck component with the racing of the actual horses, as well as some strategy and bluffing involved with the actual betting. Do you bet on the stable horse, or the crazy horse? Should you bet on the horse in first position, or maybe one further back that’s a bit faster sometimes?

The highlight of the night, however, was Last Night on Earth: The Zombie Game, which we played twice. I’ve been wanting to play this game for a while now, and I was extremely excited to actually get to. On the first play through we had the full six players (two zombie players and four hero players); I played on the side of the heroes. We played the “Save the Townsfolk” scenario, in which the heroes have to survive the night with at least four townsfolk cards between them. We won, primarily I think because the zombies made some tactical errors (which was probably because nobody had ever played the game before), in that the horded their cards. Card-hording is a great strategy if you’re a hero, but for zombies, you generally want to use as many of your cards as you possibly can every turn, because your hand will be fully replenished at the beginning of your next turn.

In the second game we only had three players. I played as the zombies, while my to friends played as two heroes each. This game, I think, was more satisfying because we were more used to the rules. It was definitely more of a challenge for the heroes. We played the “Escape in the Truck” scenario, which encourages holing up in one location a lot less than “Save the Townsfolk” does. Also unlike the first scenario, if the time limit runs out, the zombies win rather than the heroes winning, so the heroes are fighting the clock. I had some good spawning rolls in the beginning, and wound up with my full compliment of zombies by the second or third round. I also burned through my cards as quickly as I could, and discarded cards that I couldn’t use immediately, and I think that helped a lot. There was one rule that I think we played incorrectly. According to the rules, I believe, any time a hero player loses his last hero, that hero returns as a zombie hero. We were playing such that every hero death resulted in a zombie hero, which I think was incorrect with two hero players (but would have been correct with four). I’m not entirely sure it influenced the outcome of the game, as there are numerous cards that I discarded that would have possibly netted me zombie heroes anyway, and I was killing heroes off at a prodigious rate without a lot of help from my zombie heroes. In the beginning, it seemed that the heroes might win, because the drew Keys and Gasoline right away (both items that they needed to bring to the truck in order to escape). However, I had some lucky card draws and managed to mob the truck and drive the heroes with the pertinent items into a building, then proceeded to corner them and kill them off one by one, forcing them to discard their keys and gasoline. In the end, I won because the round limit expired before the heroes could escape. We had also managed to go through every single hero character, with only two remaining heroes at the end of the game. It was a very good time, and I fully intend to buy this game as soon as I can; I can’t wait to play it again.

Related posts:

1. Zombies
2. Review: The Great Brain Robbery
3. Review: HeroCard Orc Wars, Part 1
4. Review: HeroCard Nightmare
5. HeroCard Initial Impressions, and other stuff