What: Zombie Cinema
When: Sat May 25, 2013
Who: Caroline, Shimon, Martin, Tim

Our Zombie Cinema game was set in Seattle. We started on the Market Ghost tour with two Amazon employees (well, one real employee and one intern), a Naturopathic Doctor, and the Navy man. Our intern had the hots for the naturopath, the military man felt he had an obligation to staff her, and the Amazon employees *kinda* got along.

The character cards let us get going very quickly, and I thought the pacing felt very nice and gradual. Eventually the intern and the naturopath die together in a cell (after having been locked up for being contaminated or whatever), and the other Amazon employee (the coder) and the navy man manage to escape up to a cabin in the woods. The zombies closed in rather quickly at the end, due to the increased numbers of conflicts we had.

I love the sacrificing mechanic in this game, and it led to some sweet love developments for my character. However, once Tim and I died we had trouble playing the zombies. I felt like the only move we had was "zombies attack!" in albeit fun and interesting ways, but it got a little dull. Maybe I missed something about how to play the zombies, but to me that was the only weak spot in an otherwise delightful game.

Don't get bit you guys! Don't try to go on dates during the zombie apocalypse!

Sounds like fun! IIRC, you don't have to play zombies if your PC gets killed, you can play NPCs...

Oh we did! But we rolled for the zombies, and in order to feel justified calling for a roll, of course we had to say what the zombies were doing. Looking back, we should have let the remaining PCs call for rolls, because without rolling they couldn't have escaped and we would have slowly crept up on them...

Though it seems like we could still call for rolls against the zombies, and thus escape. The ideal pro-zombie strategy for dead players would be to play NPCs who acquiesce to everything, so that the live players would have no one to engage in conflict with except themselves. That means one of them always has to lose, so they can't both escape.

Bwa ha ha! And that is how we metagamed Zombie Cinema and ensured zombie victory through inter-personal strife!