New Year's Eve: Zombie Dice

Continuing the tale of my previous post ...

We had about 40 minutes before ball dropped on New Year's Eve, and the egg nog was actually some kind of throat-burning rocket fuel, so someone grabbing the little cylinder of Zombie Dice.

This is such a quick and simple filler game, I'm surprised I don't have a copy at home.  Basically, you pick three dice and count the brains.  When the first player reaches 13 or more brains, everyone gets one last round to try and beat the highest score.

But every game needs a balancing act of numbers and forces.  In this case, the dice also have shotgun blasts and footprints.  You can keep rolling, but if you get a third shotgun blast in a round, all points gained in that round are lost.  You reroll three dice each time, including any footprints from the previous roll.   So, if you had two footprints, you grab one new die from the can plus the two footprints already rolled, and those are the three dice you roll.

The second level of variables: the dice are red, green or yellow, with the number of brains vs blasts changing based on the color of the die.  The green dice are most likely to turn up good things, where the red dice are mostly dangerous.

Zombie Dice plays out just like a game of Greedy Dice (which is a very basic game with ordinary dice) but with the funny icons on the dice.  Doug tells a whole story about his zombie character while rolling his dice.  I just count the outcomes and try to win a bit at a time.  Other players may roll one time too many and bust.  But you can also have fairly long runs of 7 or 8 brains in one hand, and come back to win it.

Fast and simple, with laughs and losses, Zombie Dice hit all the marks.  And brains.