The Zombie Rights Campaign Blog

ZRC Review: Zombie Dice from Steve Jackson Games

The ZRC likes games you can play on a convention floor, and so we had ‘Zombie Dice’ from Steve Jackson Games recommended to us at many a convention.

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Well, now we’ve tried it!

It’s not kind to Zombies.
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The rules are simple enough. You have 13 total dice, and a dice cup. You pick 3 out of the cup at random, and roll those. You keep the brains and shotgun blasts you get, but get to roll the ‘feet’ dice again, along with however many random dice you need to get to 3 each time. This iterates until you accumulate 3 shotgun blasts or quit. Unless someone reaches 13 brains, at which point you finish the round, tally up scores, and highest brains count wins.

Meanwhile as one might expect, 3 shotgun blasts is bad. You lose all your brains if you get there.

The dice come in three colors, green, yellow, and red, with a progressively higher shotgun-to-delicious brains ratio in that order.

So a roll could go something like this, for one player. I rolled my first 3 dice and got a shotgun blast, a brain and a foot.

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I foolishly decided to roll again, using that foot and two new dice…

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Oops. My character, a poor, defenseless, hungry Zombie, is now deceased. Again.

So how is this game in terms of Zombie Rights? Honestly it’s a bit disturbing how abstract it makes the experience of surviving rampant Anti-Zombie violence in society. The Unlives of the hungry Undead searching for sustenance in a hostile world is reduced to pure mechanics, simulating the probability that they will meet a tragic end.

Mere gambling with virtual Zombie unlife, if you will.

Meanwhile of course the best outcome the Zombies can hope for is another day of toil, struggle, and desperate attempt to obtain food while avoiding gunfire.

That’s no way to Un-Live, and it’s not the sort of escapist fun the Zombie Rights Campaign can endorse.

The Zombie Rights Campaign therefore rates ‘Zombie Dice’ from Steve Jackson Games as Anti-Zombie.


About The Author

The role of 'Administrator' will be played tonight by John Sears, currently serving as President of The Zombie Rights Campaign.

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