So, this past weekend I got together with some friends and we did our gift exchange. I got some nice stuff, too. I got to play with one of the things I got a couple of days ago: the Growing Hunger expansion pack for Last Night on Earth. It’s a very cool expansion pack; there are new heroes, new scenarios, new cards for both sides, and a bunch of new optional rules that you can add to the game if you want to.

We played a scenario called Plague Carriers. In that scenario, the zombie player has control of plague carrier zombies, which are tougher and automatically turn heroes into zombies when they kill them, but they can only move when heroes get close to them. The heroes have to kill all seven of them before sundown, or they lose. It was a very tense and exciting game. Early on I got a lot of great stuff; chainsaws, dynamite, shotguns, and other great weapons, as well as some nice first aid, and I killed three of the plague carriers pretty quickly. It looked like things were going my way, but my opponent was quietly stockpiling zombies in one corner of the board, where three of the plague carriers were. He then proceeded to pin me in the church for three or four rounds, which made me act a little desperately, especially since he managed to kill off two of my heroes (though they automatically replenish in this scenario). I made a dash for the last three plague carriers and managed to kill one of them, but lost another hero in the process. My newly spawned hero then went up to draw the last two carriers out so that I could blast them both with dynamite, but my plan backfired as the two plague carriers overwhelmed poor Sally and dragged her to her death. Game over, zombies win by killing off four heroes with 2 rounds left in the game.

At any rate, if anyone wants to see pictures of the event, my wife took some.

So, for the last couple of weeks, I’ve been playing a lot of Left 4 Dead, Valve’s recent zombie co-op shooter. I must say, I love it. It’s not a perfect game, but there’s something really fun about getting together with three of your buddies and spending an hour or two trying to survive the zombie-pocalypse. The weapons and items all feel pretty good (though I feel like the hunting rifle, for me, is the least useful of them all), and the game really forces you to stick together and cooperate; there are a couple of types of infected that can easily kill a lone survivor.

Something to note: if you play this game in single player, you’re not getting the full experience. It’s fun in single player, but not nearly as fun as playing with real people. The AI-controlled survivors are pretty useful; they have good aim and they’ll watch your back pretty effectively. They do not, however, take any sort of initiative like a human player will, and they also can’t use grenade items. That said, however, playing with even one other human player, especially if that player is someone you know, multiplies the game’s fun by a factor of 10. If you’ve got all four slots filled with people who know each other and gel as a team, you’re in for a real treat.

Also of note is that the versus mode, where one team plays the survivors while one plays the boss infected, is something of an acquired taste. I really didn’t like it that much the first time I played it. Playing the boss infected can be kind of frustrating at times; they die very quickly, and you have to wait 15-20 seconds to respawn. You don’t get to choose which kind of infected you spawn as, which can be irritating at times. Also, it can be hard to judge the range of an infected’s attack and, in the case of the smoker and the boomer, you have to wait a while for your attack to recharge if you miss. Playing a tank can be either very satisfying or also very frustrating; sometimes it feels like your big, meaty fists are going right through the survivors’ bodies without effect. When you get in a few good hits, though, you can really turn the tide of a match.

All that said, though, versus mode is starting to grow on me. I feel like I’m starting to get a better handle on how to play the infected; you have to be very patient and precise, and you have to coordinate both with your fellow boss infected and with the AI horde. You’re most effective when you wait until the survivors are distracted or panicking, then strike. If a smoker and a pair of hunters all strike at the same time during an infected rush, it can spell curtains for the survivors.

There’s also something to be said for playing the survivors against human opponents. They’ll often do things that the AI-controlled infected won’t do, and those things are often unexpected. It is, however, a very different game; there’s less continuity and it’s not quite as cinematic as campaign mode; in many cases, you won’t be making it through an entire level, but you’ll play the next level anyway.

At any rate, I think that there’s a lot of merit in both modes of play. It’s a great game, full of zombie-stomping fun, either way.

First of all, the most recent session report is up.

Second, I recently downloaded the beta version of the D&D Character Builder. I have to say, it’s very impressive. The program makes it really easy to make D&D characters, and it’s fantastic how they’ve got content from Dragon and other published products, like the Adventurer’s Vault right in there for you to use, even if you don’t own the physical product. It’ll automatically generate a character sheet for your character, which you can customize to a pretty great degree, and it’ll generate power cards, magic item cards, and reference cards for you, too. It’s pretty sweet.

It isn’t perfect, though; there are a few things it could use. The ability to create your own items would be really nice, since most DMs are going to be giving their PCs various things that aren’t in any published product. I’m not even talking about new weapons or magic items here; the ability to give a PC an item like “an old, tattered journal” or “a necklace depicting a skull with ram’s horns” would be fantastic. Similarly, it would be nice if you could edit the text in the character sheet and power cards. Most of it is pretty good, and there’s a lot of auto-calculation (though there could be more), but I would like to be able to type in my own notes in various places. There are also some issues with the personalized information that it puts on your power cards. The ranger’s Twin Strike, for example, allows you to attack with both your primary weapon and your off-hand weapon, but the power card only includes an attack bonus and damage for your primary weapon. It would be nice if your off-hand weapon were included, or if you could type that in yourself. Since many of the ranger’s powers allow you to attack with two weapons, this seems like a glaring omission.

It is, however, still in beta, and there’s time for it to be tweaked still. As it stands, even with a few things missing, it is a fantastic product, and when the full version comes out, I’ll be really happy to be a D&D Insider subscriber.

So, for the last couple of days I’ve been checking out the Left 4 Dead demo on Steam, and I really like what I’m seeing so far.

At first blush, the zombies appear like your garden-variety zombies; they shamble around aimlessly and don’t seem to intelligent. Well, the second part’s right; they really aren’t that smart (as you’d expect). But they don’t shamble around when they spot you; they charge at you, full speed ahead, like something out of 28 Days Later. Individually, they’re not that tough; a couple of shots will take one down. Trouble is you almost never run into them individually; it’s a full-on zombiepocalypse, and that means huge swarms of zombies rushing you from every direction. But that’s not even the worst part.

See, there are these boss zombies, infected that have somehow evolved beyond the rank-and-file undead. Smokers have long tongues that they use to lasso you with and then constrict you, and they blow up in a puff of smoke when you kill them. Hunters are super fast and super agile, and can pounce on you and rip you to shreds with their claws. Boomers are huge and fat, and can vomit on you; when they do this, it blurs your vision pretty severely, and attracts mobs of infected from every angle. Tanks are . . . well, they’re like the Hulk. They smash things. And they’re really, really tough. There are also witches, who sit in the dark and cry until you shoot them or shine a light on them, at which point they go absolutely batshit crazy and rip you to pieces.

I think what I like the most about the game is the sense of teamwork and camaraderie that the game fosters. Sticking together and watching each others’ backs isn’t just a good idea; it’s absolutely critical. separate from the group, and you will die a messy, painful death. Stick with the group, though, and you can watch out for each other, cover each other when you reload or heal up, and fend of the hordes of onrushing Zs with hails of bullets and shotgun shells. It’s absolutely awesome.

Now, the demo is only available for a few more days; once the game comes out, they’re turning it off. Originally I was kind of ticked about that, because I figured I probably wouldn’t be able to pick up the game until after Christmas sometime, if I didn’t get it for Christmas. But then my friends Chris and Tad decided to buy me an early Christmas present. So, when the demo runs out, zombie season officially opens. And I’ll be there, shotgun in hand.

As it turns out, the article ‘the’ can be pretty important. Let me explain. I recently rented the movie Gamers thinking that it was the movie The Gamers. The latter is a movie that I’ve heard about on many podcasts, and I’ve heard mostly good things about it. The former is the cinematic equivalent of a wedgie: uncomfortable, unpleasant, and leaving me feeling like the butt of someone’s joke.

Gamers is a movie about a gaming group about to break the world record for the most hours gamed, or some such thing; at least, that’s what it’s ostensibly about. In reality, it’s less about humor that gamers would enjoy, and more about frat-boy dick and fart jokes that constantly point out what big losers these gamers are. They fit into just about every stereotype that exists for RPG enthusiasts. If done tastefully, this would probably have come off as being charming and self-deprecating. As it is, it’s unfunny and mildly insulting. If you enjoy gaming, don’t rent it. If you enjoy movies, don’t rent it. If you enjoy dick and fart jokes, you might find something to like here.

There are a lot of games out there with interesting mechanics, deep strategy, potent themes, and plenty of replayability. Flying Frog’s Last Night on Earth does not meet all of these criteria: the mechanics are fairly simple, and while some strategy exists within the game, luck can play just as big a role, if not a bigger role, at times. It does have one of the most well-implemented themes I’ve come across in a board game, and its modular structure and simple mechanics make it easy to modify and create your own content, making it extremely replayable.

First, a few words about the mechanics. As I’ve already said, they’re pretty simple. It’s a game that is easy to pick up and play quickly, and easy to teach. One or two players take control of the zombies, while one to four players take on the roles of the four heroes present in the game. Frequently the heroes have some goal to accomplish while the zombies are simply trying to stop them from reaching their goal, though sometimes this paradigm is reversed. There’s a lot of dice rolling, both for movement and combat, and there’s a lot of card play on both sides. Even the board is randomly generated, with a central Town Center tile and four L-shaped building tiles around the edges (six come with the game, so there will generally be two unused tiles during any given play).

Both sides have similarities, but it is the differences between the two that make the mechanics more interesting. Heroes are tougher and faster than zombies, but zombies are far more numerous. Heroes must search to get their cards (both events and items), spending precious time getting each one, while the zombie player’s hand is simply refreshed each turn. This encourages heroes to hoard their cards, saving them until they absolutely need them, while the zombies burn through their cards as quickly as possible, trying to get and maintain an advantage through relentless assault and constant de-buffing of the heroes. Combat is somewhat Risk-style, with zombies rolling one die and heroes rolling two (card play can increase this on both sides), and the highest single die roll winning the day (though zombies do win on ties). In play, zombies are relatively easy to fend off, but wind up being extremely difficult to kill; you see, if you simply beat the zombie’s roll, you fend it off and nothing happens. To kill a zombie, you must both beat the zombie’s roll and roll doubles, something that comes up rarely, unless the hero is able to roll more than two dice.

The mechanics, while interesting in their own right, are far from the strongest element of the game, however. Where this game excels is in the fact that it is thoroughly saturated with the theme that it sets out to capture: that is, the conceit that you’re playing through a zombie movie. While playing as the heroes, you often feel beleaguered and outnumbered, and sometimes downright hopeless. The zombies come in relentless hordes, and while heroes are more mobile than the zombies, the zombies are simply everywhere. The artwork and other components (including the CD soundtrack) all reinforce the zombie-movie feel; much of the artwork seems to be based off of actual photographs (though they are touched up somewhat), and it frequently depicts iconic zombie movie scenes. The cards, themselves, have great, thematic, and occasionally campy names, such as “Oh, The Horror”, “Braaiins”, “This Could Be Our Last Night On Earth”, and “Teen Angst”.

The game’s other chief strength is its replayability and ease of modification. The game is scenario-based, and comes with five scenarios out of the box. Other scenarios can be downloaded from Flying Frog’s website, as well as the fan community, and the game’s expansion packs also come with scenarios. It seems pretty easy to create your own content, and Flying Frog even includes a number of components that are not used in any of the scenarios that come with the game; these components are intended to be used for your own scenarios.

The components, themselves, are of very high quality for the most part. While I’d like the boards themselves to be slightly sturdier stock, they do the job, and all of the punch-out chits are quite sturdy, themselves. The cards are the thick, laminated variety, and while they can stick together sometimes, this is easily remedied by bending the cards back and forth before separating them for the first time. Also included are thick, attractive hero and scenario cards, an abundance of small dice, and a turn reference card for each player (six in all, double-sided).

One cautionary word, though, regards the high degree of luck in the game. The board is randomized, there’s a lot of dice rolling, a lot of card play, and you can even draw random heroes and a random scenario. With all this chance, it’s easy to see your best-laid strategies fall apart due to a lucky card draw or roll of the dice by another player. Some people may not like this. Personally, I think it reinforces the zombie movie theme, and typically the game doesn’t last more than an hour anyway, so having a high-luck game doesn’t, in my opinion, pose much of a problem.

The Good: Few games nail their theme as well as this one does. If you like zombies, you’ll probably love Last Night on Earth. The quality of the game components is also a huge benefit, as is the ease with which the game can be modified and added to. Not only that, but it’s just a fun game, period.

The Bad: Some may not like the abundance of luck-based mechanics within the game. If you’re looking for deep strategy, you may want to look elsewhere. Also, if you’re not a fan of the zombie genre, this probably isn’t the game for you.

The Bottom Line: I love Last Night on Earth. It’s a fun, quick-playing, theme-saturated game with an easy learning curve and a lot of great-looking bits. If you like zombie movies, you’ll probably like this game. Otherwise, it may not be for you. It is, however, clearly a labor of love.

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.

I had some friends over yesterday and we played some games. I’ll start with the ones that didn’t make that strong an impression, and move on to the ones that were more fun.

My friend Chris showed me Set. While I recognize the potential for this set-finding game to be a lot of fun it is, unfortunately, not particularly friendly to the color-blind community. I mean, come on; red, green, and purple? Were you guys even trying? How hard would it have been to make the colors something more easily to distinguish, like blue, red, and black?

We also played Bang!. I like the theme, and I can see how it would be fun with a large group, but with three players it pretty much falls flat. It is technically playable with three, but it really isn’t that interesting. Also, some of the cards are simply broken with only three, where you already know who is in which role (and thus, who to kill). Willy the Kid can use any number of Bang! cards on his turn, while everyone else is restricted to one. This meant that our first game ended before I even got a chance to act, because the Tad (playing Willy) had more than enough Bang! cards to finish me off and there was nothing I could do. Not a fun outcome, really, but I’d be willing to try the game again with, say, five or six players.

We played some DS games, too. New Super Mario Bros. has some minigames which are kind of fun, but I wasn’t really all that impressed by them. Mario Kart, on the other hand, is a blast in multiplayer.

Finally (actually, this is the first game we played yesterday), we played D&D Miniatures, which I got for my birthday. We played using the starter set and one Dungeons of Dread booster pack, for a total of thirteen minis, not all of which were used. We had two 100-point warbands with two players on a side, and we played on the Dwarven Ruins map. It was a lot of fun, and I can’t wait to play this game again, and to get more minis. The sculpts themselves are pretty good for the most part, though some are better than others. The grick, for example, has a pretty unimpressive paint job, while the young green dragon and the balhannoth look fantastic. As far as the actual gameplay, this is one of those strongly exception-based games where you have to play it a couple of times before synergies between minis start to reveal themselves. We disregarded alignment and faction restrictions because we otherwise probably wouldn’t have been able to construct very big warbands, so some of our synergies probably weren’t tournament-legal. That said, the yuan-ti swiftscale combined with the dwarven battlemaster is a pretty devastating combo, even if it isn’t strictly legal due to opposing alignments. I also think that the dire wolf and goblin picador go well together, though by the time the poor goblin was able to immobilize something for the wolf, the wolf had already died.

It may be simple, and it may be something that a lot of us have been doing for decades anyway, but I absolutely love quests in 4th Edition. The fact that the DM’s guide gives really good guidelines on how much experience to award for quests at different levels, and the fact that that experience is built into the leveling system, is all really good stuff. I’ve taken to designing Quest Cards (similar to my Power Cards) to track quests for the PCs. My plan is, when they trigger a quest’s start, they get the card for that quest. It’ll have a quest name, and a basic rundown of what they have to do (vague enough to allow for multiple solutions, generally), and it’ll say whether it’s a major or minor quest. Oh, and a nice space for the PCs to take notes.

I’ve already created a number of quests for Keep on the Shadowfell, so that I can hand out carrots that draw the PCs toward the parts of the adventure that (I think) are interesting and fun. But what’s really got me excited are the personal quests. See, I gave my players homework. I told them that I wanted them each to come up with a short-term goal for their characters, and that I’d turn that goal into a minor quest. The stuff they came up with is really great, and helps to flesh out their characters quite a lot more. Even better, it gives me an inclination of what they’re interested in doing in the future, which will make it that much easier to create adventures that engage them once KotS is done. I plan on telling them that, any time they think of something important that they’d like their character to do, they can tell me and I’ll make up a personal quest for them. I think that this sort of feedback and shared storytelling is important to RPGs, and it tickles me that D&D is finally incorporating it into the core rules. If you read through the Dungeon Master’s Guide it actually becomes clear that not only are they incorporating it, they’re actively encouraging it. It’s great.

The thing that got me thinking about all this and how cool it is was actually a conversation I had with one of my players over IM. He was the only one who hadn’t given me a personal quest yet, and it kind of felt like he didn’t really have any idea who his character was, other than a race-class combination. So I pestered him about it, and he asked for help. I asked him some questions about his character, and he answered them as best he could. Eventually we came up with a quest for him (a really cool one, too), but what’s even better is that I really feel like his character has become a unique individual, completely differentiated from all the other members of that particular race-class combination. You could actually see the character growing and taking shape in between the lines of text in the IM window, and I’ve gotta say, it’s a pretty rockin’ character. (Don’t worry, I think all of you other guys have pretty rockin’ characters, too.)

I just created my first encounters in 4th Edition D&D today. I actually created a series of connected encounters: two social encounters and a combat encounter that can be avoided entirely if the social encounters go well.

The social encounters were a breeze to create, and were a lot of fun, too. The skill challenge system allows for a lot of customization, such that these two encounters, both of which are basically negotiations, have different uses for the same, and different, skills. There are a couple of things that I really like about the tools given to craft non-combat encounters. First and foremost, I love the fact that I get to reward the PCs for their choice of skills, and encourage them to pick up more skills. If you read the Player’s Handbook, it’s not immediately apparent that skills have become more important in 4th Edition. Sure, the rogue has a lot of powers that key off of skills, and some of the other classes have utility powers that improve skill use, but it almost seems like an afterthought. Until you read the Dungeon Master’s Guide, and it all clicks into place. Between skill challenges and terrain effects, there are lots of ways for a DM who is so inclined to reward skill use in 4th Edition. When crafting these encounters, I made sure to include at least one skill that each PC had, so that everyone could feel useful, but I also included some other skills that nobody has, to nudge the PCs into picking up the Skill Training feat a couple of times in the future. I love that I have a tool to do that with.

The other thing that I like about the skill challenge system is that it gives me a way to take something like a negotiation and create an actual mechanical encounter out of it, with plenty of role-playing as well as plenty of die-rolling, and an XP reward at the end. Suddenly, non-combat encounters have become just as important as combat encounters.

The combat encounter that I created took a little bit more time, but it was still pretty easy, and it really served to highlight for me the things that I like about 4th Edition encounter and monster design.

Monster design in 4th Edition is great. Monsters are tactically and thematically interesting, with mechanics that both inform and are informed by the flavor of the monster. I also really like the idea behind minions, as well as the other end of the spectrum: elites and solos. I put a bunch of minions in this encounter, a couple of standard monsters, and an elite. The fight, itself, will be big, but I don’t think it will be difficult for me to manage.

Another thing that I like about monsters in 4th Edition is that they’re really easy to customize. Only one of the monsters that I used in the fight is straight out of the monster manual. The others have all be tweaked in some way. For the elite, I took a different elite, changed out some powers and characteristics, and reduced its level to be more in line with a 1st-level party. There are four different monster types in the fight, three of which have been customized, and it took me maybe 20 to 30 minutes to do the customization work for all three. Not too bad, really, when you compare it to 3rd Edition.

Something that I really like about encounter design in general is that terrain is a lot more important than it used to be. There are some really fantastic rules for creating terrain in the DM’s guide, and the DCs and Damage by Level chart on page 42 is absolutely invaluable for scattering all kinds of improvised attacks around the encounter for the PCs to make use of.

All in all, I’m very happy with encounter design in 4th Edition. There’s some work involved, but it feels like you get a lot of bang for your buck. And, truth to be told, I find the work to be a lot of fun in and of itself.