[Mike]

Wow. I love this game already.

Zombie Cinema: Story Game of the Living Dead

It comes with the zombie tracking board, six character pawns and a zombie pawn. Six dice to match the characters. A deck of cards for building characters. A six page pamphlet of rules. It's really simple.

So on the drive home last night, we had 30 minutes, so I explained to my two oldest how the game works. I had made a sample character for myself earlier, and I had each of them do the same, just to get a feel for it.

I drew Leadership--cool, I can dig that. Then Organization--nice, maybe I'm military or ex-military. My last card: Dependent--shit, I'm the 85 year old crippled dude in a wheelchair. I know what to do and I have resources and contacts, but I can't move unless someone pushes me, and no one listens to me, because I'm a crotchity old dude in a wheelchair.

My oldest gets a wannabe-anarchist skateboard punk who is going to be thrilled at the prospect of the fall of civilization but who will ultimately be a coward at heart. All talk, no action.

Son #2 goes for the asshole day trader who dreams of being Gordon Gekko.

We decide our example movie will be at a mall. We'll start in the food court. We imagine a fourth character--a woman psychic.

There's no GM. Players take turns setting scenes. I declare that I will go first, just to get it started. I say the scene is in the food court. My idiot son-in-law was pushing me around the mall, and now he's left me in the food court so he can run into Sharper Image. Son of a bitch left me facing nothing, so I'm going to just sit there and complain loudly about anything and everything.

Skatepunk is just trying to buy a runza sandwich and flirt with the clerk. Daytrader is on his cell phone, making deals. I posit that psychic-girl is having some sort of vision, mumbling about the end of the world. She's dropped her Slurpie, leaving a huge mess in the middle of the food court.

We're all just goofing with this, but to explain the rules, we need an example of conflict, so we decide that my old man and my son's daytrader are back-to-back, and daytrader is getting increasingly pissed at my complaining. Finally, he confronts me and tells me to go somewhere else, because HE has important business. "Do you know how much money I could have lost?" We start shoving a little, and I explain that this is where the dice would come out. Skatepunk, has the option of joining the conflict or he can simply put his die out to ally with one side or the other. He chooses not to get involved, but says that he would put his die out on the old man's side. We pretend that the psychic would have passed on this conflict.

We didn't have a way to actually roll dice, so I said, "just imagine that I rolled a 3, Sticky (daytrader) rolled a 5, and Gygax (skatepunk) rolled a 6. Gygax has the highest roll, so even though his character isn't getting involved, our side still wins, and he gets to narrate the end of the scene, because he has the high die."

Gygax decides that even though the old man can't move much, he wheels forward just enough to shove daytrader. Daytrader backs away and slips in the Slushie. Now he's covered with red sticky mess, and he's humiliated in front of the whole food court. This draws attention to the psychic who acts like she doesn't even notice any of this. Instead she starts yelling, "The dead are coming!"

Since old man and skatepunk were on the winning side, they both move one step up the zombie track--one step farther away from the zombies. Daytrader moves one step back, because he lost. Psychic girl chose not to get involved, so she doesn't move.

Now it would move on to Gygax's turn to pick a scene. Sooner or later, the zombies will get to move up on the track. If ever a character winds up on the same level as the zombies, they get eaten, and that player narrates how they fell. If anyone ever makes it all the way to the Escape level at the top of the zombie track, that character survives and is removed from the movie.

The whole way through, we actually collaborated a lot on how any particular move might go, each of us making suggestions for how other characters or NPCs might act. We each decided for our own characters, but we didn't move on until we were all satisfied that we liked where it was going. It became clear that if we were playing an actual game, moving up or down the track wasn't the important part. Escape would be cool, but so would getting eaten. We had a good time with each of us describing how cool our death would be if we did get eaten. Gygax decided that if my old man died, I should go out with guns blazing, stuck in my wheelchair (or laying on the ground next to my broken chair), holding off the zombies for just a moment so everyone else can escape. Sticky said that daytrader should die still trying to dial his cellphone. And if we see him come back as a zombie, he should have the broken cellphone jammed into the side of his skull so that he permanently has the phone attached to his ear.

And all of this was just 30 minutes of me explaining the rules and throwing out some quick examples just to demonstrate how things might go. And even with that, we had a blast doing it. The potential of this game is huge.

The rules say 3-6 players. I'm guessing it works best with five. I can't wait.
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When you're in your little room, and you're working on something good... but if it's really good, you're gonna need a bigger room. And when you're in your bigger room, you might not know what to do. You might have to think about how you got started, sitting in your little room

[Brasky]

Dude.

DUDE.

I got it yesterday and over lunch today, my three oldest boys and I decided to just read through the rules so we could play sometime this weekend. Well, we then decided just to try out a scene or two and familiarize ourselves with the pieces.

An hour later we finished our first game... AND IT WAS AWESOME!

Thank you, Mike.

[Mike]

You're welcome.
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When you're in your little room, and you're working on something good... but if it's really good, you're gonna need a bigger room. And when you're in your bigger room, you might not know what to do. You might have to think about how you got started, sitting in your little room

[rerwin1]

CRAP! Purchased product beats free nudie girl pic again!

I hope we hear about the games on the podcast.
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All I needed was 101 damn puppies. You brought this on yourselves.

[Brasky]

Yeah, we definitely will. I really, really like this game.

[Brasky]

You know, since this game only takes about an hour to play, if we have enough players with the game (and I mean people who have actually paid for it and not stolen or pirated it from somewhere) we could actually play a game on the podcast. Normally I'm opposed to "actual play" podcasts- but considering that this game is entirely a shared narrative with minimal dice rolling- I think it would lend itself well to that kind of thing. Thoughts?

[Mike]

Son turned 11, so we played Zombie Cinema for his birthday. It was just the three of us. Friggin awesome. Friggin. Awesome.

Much zombie reportage to come on this week's podcast.
_________________
When you're in your little room, and you're working on something good... but if it's really good, you're gonna need a bigger room. And when you're in your bigger room, you might not know what to do. You might have to think about how you got started, sitting in your little room

[Markku Tuovinen]

I'm glad you enjoyed the game. Thanks for taking the time to report your experiences in the podcast and here on the forum. Eero, the designer, has published some variant boards and rules on our web site (www.arkenstonepublishing.net). There is also an English forum for our games at http://www.indie-rpgs.com/forum/index.php?board=72.0 for any questions that might crop up.

Markku Tuovinen
---
www.arkenstonepublishing.net[/url]

[Brasky]

Now I feel guilty for calling him Bjorn. The game is awesome. Thanks for the links.

[ChairGraveyard]

@Brasky, well, I have a fair few Finnish friends myself, and if there's one thing I know about those crazy Finns, it's that even if their names might possibly LOOK pronounceable, you'll soon learn that they aren't. You were right to call him Bjork, rather than attempt to pronounce his real name. If you'd inserted a diphthong where there was none, or some other mangling, you might have opened a gaping wound in the very fabric of spacetime.

Zombie Cinema for some reason reminds me of Left4Dead in PnP form.

[Mike]

We rescheduled our Boy Scout overnighter thing for tomorrow night. So in addition to HeroScape and my Scout Camp Horror game, I'm planning to bring Zombie Cinema. I don't know if we'll have time to play, but my son really really REALLY wants me to introduce his friends to this game.
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When you're in your little room, and you're working on something good... but if it's really good, you're gonna need a bigger room. And when you're in your bigger room, you might not know what to do. You might have to think about how you got started, sitting in your little room

[Lawbag]

been gagging to get this game since you guys pimped it on your Podcast.
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Ghost of the Navigator

[Riggah]

So we played ZC tonight. A lot of phun. One of our regulars is _not_ a strong role-player (in our D&D game he is using "Kathra", one of the iconic characters because he lacks the imagination to come up with his own character). He did not excel at ZC and essentially came up with BS conflicts just to try to get the game over. Not a hit with him!
But the rest of us had a great time. I'll bring ZC out again the next time he misses a session.

The setting was an inner city NYC public school. The characters were:
the stuck up Cheerleader
the overly enthusiastic Science Teacher
the gun-nut addled vet Custodian
the homeless, psychotic Cat Lady (me)

Really great fun. The last scene was the Custodian kicking the Cheerleader off a news helicopter and flying to freedom(?) while the zombie horde closes in on her.

Couldn't do it every week, but for a one-shot every now and then -- highly recommended.
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the Onion Horoscope: Statistics say that nearly 78% of rapes are committed by someone the victim knew, but you'll insist next week the more correct phrasing is "thought they knew."

[Mike]

[dar]

You should come down to one of our game days or cons. You could play this game with adults.
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Awe crap. This thing IS on.

[dar]