The first half of 2010 seems to herald the oncoming zombie plague. Flying Frog Productions has released three expansions for their popular Last Night on Earth game as well as reprinting their base game. Lock ‘n Load has fought past a variety of production problems to release All Things Zombie: The Boardgame, a tactical boardgame based on the popular ATZ wargame. Zombie State Games will soon release Zombie State: Diplomacy of the Dead, a strategic-level area control game where world leaders try to protect their populations against the zombie apocalypse. Steve Jackson Games is coming out with Zombie Dice, a nice “press your luck” dice game filler. Twilight Creations is releasing Zombies!!! 9: Ashes to Ashes, an expansion for their popular zombie game allowing you to investigate a cemetery. Even the popular PopCap PC game Plants vs. Zombies has seen iPhone and iPod Touch releases of that game this year.
Can gamers just not get enough zombies? Or are there too many zombie games for our own good?
I think it’s more the “unstoppable terror” feel, and the form of it most people are familiar with. Survival horror as a game genré can come in other forms, but if consumers see zombies, they instantly have a sense of what the game’s about. We can always retask the system to achieve slightly different goals.
I ran a session for my weekly group recently that threw them into a survival horror scenario, using a zombie game system, but not in the traditional manner. I won’t go into the details here (we’ll be talking about it in an upcoming podcast), but it still modeled the look and feel of a zombie game without actually being zombies.
But yes, there’s a lot of zombie gaming to pick from lately. 🙂
Zombie Smash for the iPod/Phone/Pad is also good.
All Things Zombie is very enjoyable.
Upcoming podcast? you still do those? 🙂
We try. Multiple shows are in the editing stage. I’ll let everyone know when they’re up.