Board Games

Posted by Stropp on January 24, 2009

This last Christmas, my friends and I all seemed to get the same idea, and a number of the gifts that were given — a big percentage anyway — were of the board game type. It was one of those moments of synchronicity because none of us discussed or mentioned the idea, and it wasn’t until the last minute that I came up with the idea of giving some of these games myself.

I had mentioned a few months before Christmas of my fondness for Zombie movies and a passing comment became a gift of the Zombies!!! board game.

Zombies!!! has a fairly simple set of rules which makes it really easy to get into and to get started, but the game itself can take two to three hours.

The premise is pretty simple. You and your friends start off in the town square. At the start of each players turn, they draw a town tile and place it next to an existing tile. This tile might have a number of zombies on it, and/or some health and ammo. The player then rolls for movement and if a zombie is encountered, there’s a combat roll. At the end of his turn the player rolls for the number of zombies to move a single space. The first player to kill 25 zombies, or reach the helipad tile, wins.

What’s fun is the the cards you can draw and the backstabbing you can do. It’s always a joy to double the number of zombies in a room that your friend is in.

We played another board game today. It’s called Twilight Imperium and is a far more involved game than Zombies!!! It’s basically a space conquest game on a board made up of hexes with different planets and the like. The goal is simple — the only part that is — just get 10 victory points to win. How you get those victory points is harder to work out.

I said it was complex, well it took my friend around six hours to remove all the different tokens, cards, and other pieces from the frames holding them together. And it took over an hour for five players to complete the first turn. After constantly checking the rules, and about six full hours of play, I figure it’s going to take us a few sessions to get Twilight Imperium down pat.

And that’s just two of the games that were given at Chrissie. There’s a Starcraft board game, as well as another called Starfarers of Catarn. It looks like there will be quite a few Saturday nights rolling the dice over the next 11 months. And of course the common refrain, "Stupid game!"

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