Zombie Book Club
Welcome to Zombie Book Club! We're a Podcast that's also a book club! We talk about Zombie / Apocalyptic horror novels, TV and movies.
Zombie Book Club
"The Last Night on Earth" Board Game | Zombie Book Club Ep 71
Get ready for a thrilling dive into the chaos and camaraderie of Last Night on Earth: The Zombie Game! In this episode, we recount our pulse-pounding adventure with our friends Ollie Eats Brains and their Zombae JC, playing through the "Escape in the Truck" scenario. From cinematic zombie mayhem to hilarious antics our game night captured the essence of a classic 1980s zombie movie. With immersive artwork, modular boards, and a perfect balance of strategy and storytelling, the game kept us on the edge of our seats—when we weren’t laughing, that is.
We also discuss how tabletop gaming brings people together, even in virtual spaces. From creative house rules like zombies having to use doors to the joys of making new zombuddies, this episode celebrates the blend of nostalgia, strategy, and community that makes Last Night on Earth a must-try for zombie fans. Don’t miss this fun-filled episode and a glimpse into our plans for more zombie-themed hijinks!
Game: Last Night on Earth: The Zombie Game
Studio: Flying Frog Productions
visit their official website at www.flyingfrog.net.
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Welcome to Zombie Book Club, the only book club where the book is a game and the game is played with friends. But then you realize you don't have any friends to play with, so you have to start a podcast to make friends with people who want to play the game with you. It's all been a long con to play a board game About zombies, about zombies. I'm Dan, and while I'm not conning an entire fan base into playing board games with me, I'm writing a book about a con artist who's responsible for a zombie apocalypse, but that's kind of a stretch. It's not really about that guy, but he's in the book for sure, and I'm trying to manage expectations here.
Speaker 2:I'm Leah and I learned two things this week while playing a tabletop simulator game. One, dan's mouse is really fucking fast and I feel like an old person trying to use it. I cannot actually do anything with his mouse, which leads me to number two. I need my own laptop with Steam on it, because I like being on top Control. I mean in control, whatever. You know what I mean. So what I really mean to be talking about here is that we release episodes every Sunday that's what Leah's talking about On all podcasting platforms. So skipper, so skipper, and podcasting platform. So skipper, so skipper, and give us five stirs five stirs also, it says here on our notes and five dollars.
Speaker 1:Um, this is my get rich quick scheme, although we have no way for you to give us five dollars in the mail.
Speaker 2:I'm not giving people my address for five dollars. We're not like a scammy church. Yeah, it costs more than that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, today we're talking about a game. We mentioned this earlier. Yeah, and we're talking about a zombie.
Speaker 2:And their zombie and their zombie. We're talking behind the zombie and zombie's backs, even though we know that they'll be able to hear this, so we this game that we played.
Speaker 1:It's called Last night on earth. We played it with ollie eats brains. You might know them. Yeah, they're amazing. Yeah, we love ollie. Yeah, ollie is the best.
Speaker 2:And also, we joined zombie jc yeah, that was really nice to meet oliver's zombie jc you're great.
Speaker 1:You know, I wasn't expecting it, but um but once. Once we got into it, I was like this is amazing and this person's very nice.
Speaker 2:I agree. I feel like Oliver. You probably told us at some point that JC would be there, but then you told people with ADHD. So when there was another person, I was like what's happening?
Speaker 1:I thought Ollie was using a voice changer. Really, app. I'm like, is Ollie trolling us right now? Because Ollie trolls us.
Speaker 2:Ollie messes with us, that's true and did while we played Last Night on Earth. And JC was the truth teller. Jc was the rule clarifier. Jc played a very important role in this game with us. Jc, let us know when Ollie was lying yes, kind of a perfect couple, if you think about it but yeah, uh, it's called last night on earth.
Speaker 1:It's a board game. It's called uh, it's, it's last night on earth the zombie game. There's different scenarios. We played the escape the truck scenario, escape the truck or escape in the truck in the truck.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you gotta get to the truck and escape.
Speaker 1:Yeah, we didn't have a truck. We used a blue square that kept getting bigger and smaller. Yeah, that was Ollie Definitely Took me a minute. Ollie was gaslighting us with the size of the truck. It's true, ollie gaslit us constantly the whole time. Yeah, so Leah and I we played Survivors. Ali and Zombie were zombies. They commanded a horde, and we're going to talk a little bit about this game because it was a lot of fun.
Speaker 2:It was a lot of fun Once I got over my nerves.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I was so nervous it's.
Speaker 1:you know it's not like a role playing game. That was good.
Speaker 2:I thought it was going to be. I was like, oh no, I have to be this like sexy nurse Becky, yeah, and, but it's a board game.
Speaker 1:It has different, different like tiles that you can fit together, so you can, you can you can make like different boards and stuff and it kind of has like the cinematic quality to it, like it's fast paced. The artwork on it was really good. Uh, of course you know ollie lives on the other side of the country from us so we had to play it via tabletop simulator, but we were in a bunker which together yeah, which was fun. We were in the.
Speaker 2:We were in a fallout bunker and there was art buys by ollie in the bunker well, ollie drew on the table yeah, I want to know how I could draw on the table, but I couldn't do it with your, your murse, my murse yeah, your mouse is too, you know you say that my mouse is too fast.
Speaker 1:But like your mouse, you have to pick up your mouse and and uh and reset it like five times to get from one side of your screen to the other.
Speaker 2:Do I? Yeah, I'll have to like pay more attention to this. Yeah, your mouse is ridiculous, I think I'm just not a gamer, so I've never had to have that degree of like fine motor skills.
Speaker 1:I just have my mouse set up so that I don't ever have to lift my hand off the table to like reach things on the other side of my desktop, I will say it explains a lot of some of your talents.
Speaker 2:Desktop, I will say it explains a lot of some of your talents. We'll just leave it there, let's just leave it there.
Speaker 1:Let's not talk about that. No, whatever that is.
Speaker 2:Our dog is very groany. If that picks up this episode. All week Nero has been moaning and groaning. We're taking him to the vet next week. We're not really sure what's going on. So give our dog Nero some love. Yeah, give Nero some love. Every time you hear him groan, light a candle for him. Yeah, which will be a lot.
Speaker 1:Also keep track of how many candles you lit and don't fall asleep with the candles burning, true? So let's talk about this game, leah. Yeah, here's some things that I know about this game. It was released in 2007. So it's been around a while, and I remember released in 2007. So it's been around a while, and I I remember hearing about this game. I even uh saw like a show that was on youtube. Where will wheaton himself from star trek fame? Uh played this game with friends and it looked like a good time, and I then I forgot that it existed. But it was made by a company called flying frog productions. Uh, the the game itself. You can have uh between two to six players that play as heroes or survivors, which felt like a stretch for at least one of your characters.
Speaker 2:Really, yeah, one of your characters sucked. Well, I forget what his name was. Oh no, you should all see the look on dan's face when I said that. I feel like I just kicked up.
Speaker 1:No, I mean two to six friends can play with you oh, I, oh, yeah, it's yeah, but you're calling it. Well, they're called heroes so I was, I was insulting one of the heroes you were playing right, which one?
Speaker 2:I forget his name because I forget everything. Are you talking?
Speaker 1:about jake. Yes, jake was epic. Jake fought more zombies than anyone in the game and didn't stop moving ever.
Speaker 2:Jake was consistently saved by Becky, the sexy nurse. I think Becky saved Jake twice.
Speaker 1:That's important. Jake fought an entire board of zombies all night just to get to Becky, so that he wouldn't die. Let's get back on track, you can play this with two to six of your friends. Um, two, two people can play zombies. They play the zombie role. Um, I don't know how many people you can have playing heroes. This, this just says two to six, but uh, I don't know. I feel like you could probably play more than that might get chaotic though I think it would get a little too much.
Speaker 1:I think it would get a little too much. I think it'd be a lot of fun in a big group though.
Speaker 2:We each played two roles, two hero roles, and I don't know how that would work if there were more players, if we would have just had one.
Speaker 1:I would have liked it with just one, because it was kind of hard to keep in mind what your special abilities were with both of your characters and what items you had. Also, we were sharing a screen, so all of our items just went into our collective pile.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it was confusing a little bit, which is again why I'd like to have more control and my own steam. Yeah, we should do that it costs $20.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's time, it's time.
Speaker 2:This thing says? Your notes say that this gameplay is strategy driven, with dice rolling, and I am I. I can see the strategy with the zombies and I have a like an inkling of what it might be with the heroes, but I still feel like it's relatively random compared to other strategy games.
Speaker 1:But that might just be that I've only played it once and I just grasped the rules in the last third of the game there are random elements, like you draw cards, like when, when you get it, like you set up this modular board, um, it has like a center area that's like a bigger grid zone that you can move faster across, but the outside grids have a smaller grid pattern. Um, that buildings, and if you go inside of a building you can use a turn to search for items, and those items are in the form of cards. So you draw from the hero deck and you get these cards. The strategy part would be like how you move about the board and get to buildings and what you do with the cards that you find, cause sometimes they're just like special abilities, sometimes they're weapons, sometimes they're the things that you need, like we needed keys and gasoline for the truck which get away.
Speaker 2:We did not get either of those things we played.
Speaker 1:No, we did no, we did at the very end, but I was gonna say we played.
Speaker 2:Oliver and jc were like this game normally takes an hour, dan and I, because we were like what the fuck is going on? We're like trying to figure out how to play together on one computer and, despite their excellent attempts at giving us clarity of instructions, I think we were just tired, yeah and um so and like also sharing a computer. So I think we played for like three hours. It was definitely three hours it didn't feel that long, but it was. So I would say like in the last like half an hour.
Speaker 1:We also spent a lot of time just chatting.
Speaker 2:Yeah, the last half an hour we found the. I think we found the truck keys first.
Speaker 1:Yeah, we found them like both in the same turn, which was the last round that we had to make it to the truck.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, that's actually an important part of this is you have how many turns until sunrise?
Speaker 1:For that scenario we had 15 turns.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So if you loot, like if you don't find your keys and your gas and you don't get to the truck in 15 turns, you lose no matter what as heroes.
Speaker 1:Also, the artwork was really great, like he agreed, it was very immersive, even though it's like a top down and you just you know, you, you know it's hand, hand drawn, um like it. It gave you that nostalgic feeling of being in like a 1980s zombie movie it did, I think ol Oliver's choice of zombie.
Speaker 2:Um, what do we call them pieces? Yeah, they were animated and really creepy and weird. Oh, yeah, that helped.
Speaker 1:Yeah, he had like little animated zombie miniatures that you can use with tabletops in.
Speaker 2:Yeah, they were deeply emaciated and naked, yeah, and they could grab at you.
Speaker 1:If we were going to play this more often, I'd like to find survivor character yeah, same things instead of the the little paper pop-up things, which was probably what the board came with yeah well, if you bought, if you bought the, uh, the, the actual physical board which we should that would be fun yeah, I, I looked it up on.
Speaker 2:On online you can get like the whole, the whole, everything for like a hundred dollars I think we need to do that because we do live in a zombie commune and we need at least one zombie game to play with our friends and I think that comes with all the expansion packs.
Speaker 1:There's actually a lot of expansions, um, but yeah, the the mechanics are engaging and it's fast paced. But also I didn't feel pressured to like really focus on the game, like, like we said, we spent a lot of time chatting, so like it was easy to jump in and out, like we would start talking about some random thing and then it's like okay, now, now we got to get down to business and it's, it's so-and-so's turn.
Speaker 2:I mean yes and no.
Speaker 1:Oliver had to use an air horn sound effect to remind us that it was our turn. Well, oliver also just never said when their turn was over. I think they did sometimes. Yeah, uh, famously did not, though now. Most times just sat there waiting and then I I had to ask yeah, I really feel like there was.
Speaker 2:I didn't pay enough attention to what they were doing because I was learning so much too. Yeah, and I'd like to pay more attention to what's happening on the board and where the zombies are being moved around, because that's kind of crucial yeah, um, the zombies.
Speaker 1:Uh, there's a certain number of zombies that they can spawn. At the beginning I think it's like eight each, I think, or six, I think there was like 16 total, don't quote me yeah, oliver, please correct me um, yeah, and they have.
Speaker 1:They have to roll, uh, for how many they can spawn, and there's certain locations that you can spawn zombies and there's rules about how you spawn them and there's a different deck for the zombies. So, like it's a completely different game if you're playing as the zombies. It's a whole different strategy, a whole different mechanic.
Speaker 2:Yeah, once we've mastered being heroes which might be a while I would like to try being a zombie. I think I would really enjoy being a zombie.
Speaker 1:My sole desire in games like this is to be the survivor. Really, somebody's got to be the zombie, right, somebody's got to do it.
Speaker 2:I think I intuitively want to be the zombie and we there there could probably a psychological test or like a buzzfeed quiz about this. Joe is our resident social worker. What does it say about each of us? Joe salazar is the writer of the dead weight, for those who don't know, and also a social worker. Yeah, I would like to know what it says about a person. If they'd prefer to play a zombie versus a survivor, a hero.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mentioned that there were some expansion packs, a few of them Growing Hunger, timber Peak, blood in the Forest but there's some that just add extra hero cards. All of them add extra hero cards. All of them add like extra, extra ability cards and like new things that didn't exist in the base game, I think. I think some of them might have like specialized zombies one of them. One of them was also, like it's called, like airstrike, so I imagine that there's probably, uh, a card that you can pull that's like an airstrike and maybe just like eliminate a lot of zombies on the map or something. There's also a fire system later on, like the forest can catch fire or something. I'm not sure how all that works, but that's something that we could look into if we really got into the expansion packs.
Speaker 2:Yeah, maybe this is what we're going to be doing all winter together, Dan. Maybe it's just like luring people into our house and being like play this game with us. We need to get good enough to beat JC, and Oliver, I think we can.
Speaker 1:We almost did it last night, was it last night?
Speaker 2:No, it was two nights ago. Two nights ago, okay yeah, we were up past our bedtime and very loopy.
Speaker 1:They were very gracious and when we ran out of turns and had the keys and the gasoline it was over Like we ran out of turns.
Speaker 2:We had died, yeah.
Speaker 1:But Ollie was gracious enough to allow us to try to get to the truck. Epic fail, couldn't do it. Well, we got one, we got the. I think we got the gas to the truck with one character, but the three other characters did not make it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, let's talk about the type of zombie in the in the game, because I think they were interesting in the fact that they were just the classic Romero inspired, classic Inspired, yeah, inspired. I really can't talk. This is just so you know. We're recording this on a Friday night after a really brutal work week where lots of bad news happened yeah, like like political news that I'm not. We're going to dissociate from that for this episode.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think people got enough of that in the last episode, yeah.
Speaker 2:I hope yeah, but just to say, like the extra word, challenges I'm having are probably the result of me overworking to respond to some critical emergencies around our democracy.
Speaker 1:But yeah, Classic Romero style shamblers. I feel like maybe in some expansions or maybe if you just homebrewed some new rules, you could probably have fast running zombies.
Speaker 2:I think it would be fun to make up new rules. The rule that I loved and hated is that zombies can just like appear through walls.
Speaker 1:Yeah, Of buildings.
Speaker 2:They don't have to enter and exit through doors, but humans do.
Speaker 1:It's explained as if, like, they're busting through walls, knocking down doors, climbing through windows, coming up to the floorboards, but to me it kind of felt a little bit like I don't know, like it didn. They didn't have to stop or or like, do an action in order to go through the wall, it just was automatic. And to me, I know it gave the zombies a little bit more of a chance to make it, you know, a little bit harder to do that, like it, you know, gave them an advantage. That's the word I was looking for. Yeah, um, but I, I personally felt like that was a little bit immersion breaking um. But we'll talk about that later because I have some ideas about that interesting.
Speaker 1:Well, let's talk about what we loved, about our experience yeah, um, first off that cinematic feel, it feels like you can, you can almost see the movie as you're playing. You're like this is a movie and I'm in it yeah, yeah, and it feels like classic b zombie movie.
Speaker 2:Yeah, the characters have that vibe, the art has that vibe.
Speaker 1:Yeah, the plot itself is like get to the truck with your gas and keys, um, so I really enjoyed that too and it moves along so quick too that, like it doesn't it kind of feels like you're seeing the narrative play out as you're playing. Yeah, the best thing I think about this game and this is something that, like, everybody comments on is the replayability, because there's so many scenarios, even with just the base game, and there's so many different possibilities of what could happen. Like you can play this game back to back and play two entirely different games because it's there's so much variation, there's so many things that could happen, and then you throw the expansion packs in there and you could play this game endlessly.
Speaker 2:I think this game has the potential to be a new hyper-focus of mine because of that opportunity and the fact that it's a twinkle in my eye the possibility of strategy, but I haven't played deeply a board game since Catan.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And I was obsessed with Catan Obsessed and I don't want to sound egotistical but very good at it. People got mad and thought I was cheating, but actually they were just agreeing to give me cards that they should never have agreed.
Speaker 1:Yeah, they were just bad at the game and didn't like that you were beating them.
Speaker 2:It's why I think I'd be a good diplomat in the zombie apocalypse, because I could definitely barter with neighboring communities and, uh, convince them to give us stuff give me two grain.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's gonna be a different podcast, that is, it's gonna be leah's settlers of katan cast yeah, you know, we stopped calling it settlers of katan.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, I think they just call it katan now.
Speaker 1:Sidebar because I think you're right. I've seen that.
Speaker 2:Because of the colonialism aspect of it, which it still absolutely is as a game it is, I think, like all of my colonist ancestors literally just arise within me and I'm like I must conquer this land.
Speaker 1:You know it doesn't change the game. That's like calling Monopoly just Socialism Go around the board and have money game.
Speaker 2:but it doesn't change the fact that that's it's about capitalism yeah, well, it's about yeah and it's about this yeah, katan is absolutely about imperialism and colonialism, and I do think it's interesting that there's some part of me that fucking loves it, yeah, and I'm like, oh, there's my ancestors cool that's that's why colonialism was so successful because people love it. People love taking other people's shit as long as you're winning. This is almost embarrassing.
Speaker 2:I deeply want to cut this out, but I'm just going to be brutally honest and say that's, that's my alter ego.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I'm good, you know when it's a game.
Speaker 2:It's fun? Yeah, I guess, but I think it's still problematic. And while I'm like what's problematic about last night on earth? I guess we'll get to that in a minute on representation, but I would.
Speaker 1:I think it's like the next game I really want to dive deep on um, another thing we loved it was just fun to be with with our zombesties, you know is uh, is this really good balance of like cooperation? Like you had to use teamwork together on your team, not with the zombies, of course, but also the zombie. There's no high stakes. Like the zombies are just like, yeah, we're just doing the zombie thing, no hard feelings, and we were able to just like have a fun game.
Speaker 2:That was kind of competitive, but also have fun doing it I thought that they were incredibly gracious, and also oliver kept pointing to things for us with this little blue arrow that would hover over the board. And at first I was like are you trying to fuck with me? And then I was like no, I think they're actually helping us. So thanks for that. Appreciate the blue arrow. It would be fun to play again. It would be fun to play with maybe a few more of us from the zombie community.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I'm curious if folks would be interested that I really enjoyed doing something with Oliver and getting to meet zombie JC, which they will forever be known as zombie JC. To me I mean zombie has a has a ring to it. It does, but so does JC.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And also call it. I hearing Oliver call them hun was just very endearing. They were very cute together. But my point is it was like it was nice to just hang out and not be on any kind of recording, but also it could be really fun to stream maybe. So just putting it out there, if folks would like to see that, we might do it.
Speaker 1:Leah what do you think could be better about this game?
Speaker 2:My self-esteem. Yeah, let's work on Leah's self-esteem. I definitely felt self-conscious playing a game online. It's a very new thing for me.
Speaker 1:Yeah Well, online, it's a very new thing for me. Yeah Well, I think you did great, especially considering the fact that we were sharing a computer. And also, tabletop sim is not for the weak of heart, it's not. You know, there are times where tabletop sim can feel really clunky and weird, and weird shit can happen, like throwing your dice off the side of the table and not knowing where your dice went, or your cards hovering above the table for no apparent reason. Yeah, we had cards that, like were hovering above us that we couldn't see, and for like several rounds we didn't know that they were there. And then suddenly we're like hey, there's our cards. Did we have these?
Speaker 2:all along. So that's a tabletop simulator problem, maybe, I think, ollie did that they claim they didn't. Jc. I don't believe you, ollie. Jc. We need to know the truth. Jc.
Speaker 1:Help us uh, so something I think could be better some of the mechanics, like. I think that for the most part, this is like a very simple and easy game to play and that's like the beauty of it, but there's some things that I think would be so much better, like the zombies passing through walls thing. I personally think that you know the idea of them just being able to go through walls. That's not a zombie thing, that's a ghost thing.
Speaker 2:I think if it was framed differently somehow I'd be cool with it. Like they're smashing through the window, and I know that's how they described it to us. They both described it to us like that and also it's like an advantage that they have, because zombies can only move one um space at a time.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so that was like the the thing that helps survivors can roll a d6 so from one to six spaces they can move yeah, so those.
Speaker 2:I feel like there's some fairness there, but it did break the immersion a little bit because I'm like how are you getting through a wall? I feel like this is where maybe some role playing would help and like there's some storytelling that helps me believe that yeah, and I have some, uh, I have some house rule ideas.
Speaker 1:We'll get to that after after in a little bit, okay, um, but I've got some ideas for that. Like we can, we can home brew some of the rules. Um, there's some other stuff too that like I think could, could use a few subtle tweaks, um, but again, I'll talk about that in the house rules, yeah, cause I I've I've got some ideas. Um, ollie shared some ideas. We were in the Discord and we nerded out about what new rules we want to play by. And that's the great thing about this is, I think you can just make up your own rules and you can make a pretty fun game out of this.
Speaker 2:You know what's cool? You can make up your own rules for literally everything. This entire society we have is just some people making up rules.
Speaker 1:So what if we play Catan and I make up my own rules?
Speaker 2:I mean as long as we agree to the rules. That's how society works, right. We have to agree. A certain number of us at least have to agree to the rules, Okay. So yes, that could be possible. We could turn Catan into a commune game and like a cooperative game, Although I think it would be difficult because of the way it's designed. But anyways, I think this game has a lot of room for new rules. I think this game has a lot of room for new rules in terms of what could still be better. We have a new segment. We're calling.
Speaker 1:Oh, you're waiting for me representation is it a grower or a shower?
Speaker 2:this is inspired by a weekend that we had with one of our besties who's not a zombie bestie, just a bestie Molly. Molly came to visit us and we joked a lot about growers and showers I don't know the penile persuasion? I don't know either it just happened.
Speaker 1:Oh, we were talking about survivor and how andy from season 47 is a.
Speaker 2:Grower is a grower because it started off really bad. There's people that could be listening to Survivor.
Speaker 1:We can't spoil it, Look this is just the episode one stuff. It started really bad and then became a grower.
Speaker 2:You think you became a grower in episode one.
Speaker 1:Let's just say that Okay.
Speaker 2:Well, let's put it this way Andy had room for growth, which is kind of why we're making this double entendre. Andy has room for growth in episode one of Survivor, and this game has room for growth in representation of people who are not white and stereotypical.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah, this is definitely a grower, Because here I'm going to throw two female archetypes of characters at you and tell me if you think that this passes any of our tests for feminism.
Speaker 2:Okay, nurse. I mean they do have their own plot, because you can make your own plot as the player, but they're very one-dimensional. In fact, they only have one power, which is healing others, which is really gendered actually, now that I think about it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, they're caring for everybody else, okay.
Speaker 2:How about the high school sweetheart, sally, who was being accosted by the priest?
Speaker 1:Yeah, she has one less hit point than everyone else Does she.
Speaker 2:Yeah, Because she's a teenager. Oh yeah, that's right. We joked about how, as a teenager, she should have more hit points because she's got the advantage of youthful limbs. Yeah.
Speaker 1:They said that because she was a teenager, she has one less hit point, but I don't think that's accurate at all. Have you ever seen a teenager fall off of a roof of a house? They bounce, yeah, they just bounce like there's a trampoline under them at all times.
Speaker 2:Meanwhile, when I was like 10, my grandpa fell off the roof.
Speaker 1:He had to go to the hospital. Yeah, so he has one less. If I, if I fell down the the porch stairs in front of our house, I would die. I have one hit point left.
Speaker 2:So yeah, there's a lot of. You wrote here subtle reinforcement of tropes. I'm gonna replace that word subtle with overt. Really obvious, like the nurse is is basically like a sexy halloween costume nurse. Absolutely, yes, excellent, hello nurse yes, excellent push-up, bra like bugs bunny nurse yeah, I don't remember what sally the teenage looks like. Uh, she looked like a cheerleader, right of course. Yeah, yeah, and then what about your? What on the male side?
Speaker 1:so I I played two characters. I had Father Joseph, who was a priest, couldn't use weapons or couldn't use firearms Because he believes in peace.
Speaker 2:but he gets the power of faith.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I don't remember what his powers were.
Speaker 1:I don't know if I used faith on him, it would last eternally. His faith would be eternal, but everybody else would only last for one interesting one. Uh, one thing, and it gives you an extra die to roll in combat. Uh. And then the other character I played was jake, and I've oh, he was a drifter and jake was able. His ability was that he could search and draw two cards every time he searched in a building, instead of one like everybody else. I never got to use that until the very last round, because I was constantly being assaulted by zombies.
Speaker 2:I do wonder, I was like are they deliberately picking on Dan with their zombies?
Speaker 1:I mean, it would have been a very strategic choice to harass me, jake, that's true oh, insidious, I see yeah, because because I I would have been able to win the game so much sooner if I was able to search, like, like you had characters that like just hunkered down in a house and just searched endlessly, turn after turn, because you didn't have any zombies around you. Jake was not given the opportunity to do so. No, he was on the run.
Speaker 2:Yeah you know, my favorite part of the game going back to favorites was shooting, uh, zombies and killing them and then joking that I felt bad about it. I didn't. I felt the I okay. So brief brief history of leo with guns um, I grew up in a rural place so of course, I had exposure to, credit, to guns. My grandfather on my dad's side is like a hardcore hunter and trapper. His house was literally filled, every room, on all of the walls, like just dead animals, dead taxidermied animals. That's what I grew up with and my dad taught me how to shoot, um, obviously, like out back in the fields and I shot like cans and shit like that. But honestly, the last time I shot a gun I was maybe 12 yeah, it's been a very long time and I felt the rush of power. See again, I like control and I like some part of me likes domination. I'm just saying it because I was like, yes, I'm like this is. This is why guns are dangerous, because I'm enjoying, using it way too much.
Speaker 2:It's that a shotgun that I have. Yeah, you had a shotgun. Yeah, Ooh, you know what? Actually, the very first gun I've ever owned is a shotgun. So clearly this is my gateway drug to actually shooting the shotgun.
Speaker 1:You know, I always forget that you own a shotgun, which I've never done.
Speaker 2:Should we have a quick sidebar and have our shotgun story?
Speaker 1:Yeah, so this was right before the pandemic and we lived in Augusta, Georgia.
Speaker 2:This isn't right.
Speaker 1:Before the pandemic, this is when the pandemic, yeah, like first couple of weeks and we knew that shit was probably going to get real. In Augusta, Georgia, and you know, Leah lived in a place where like one in four people are robbed. Yeah.
Speaker 2:That was the literal statistic was like if you live there, you had a one in four chance of getting your house broken into at the very least your car shots yeah, you could hear gunshots. Your car was going to get broken into. There was some level. I wouldn't say it's like it was not the most frequent shooting area in town, but there were incidents of people like driving down the street with just like popping off their gun yeah, and also this is georgia, so like there's a lot of racial tension as well.
Speaker 1:Yeah, um, I mean, luckily we didn't stick around long enough to see this kind of stuff, because we moved, uh, but like I, I heard about, like you know, like rednecks riding around the back of pickup trucks with with, uh, with rifles, like their militia, um, like during the pandemic, and we thought it would be a good idea to be able to protect ourselves if things got really fucked up, because we didn't know what was going to happen. We just knew that there was an absolute moron in power who was igniting hatred between people and also there was a pandemic and things might have just popped off. I own a few guns, but my guns were in upstate New York at the time, like I, I had, I had all my stuff in storage. So, like, ironically, the one time that I'm like it'd be good to have those things, they weren't around.
Speaker 1:Um, I only have a, I have a couple I've, I have a shotgun, I have a bolt action rifle and I have a 22. You know it's a pretty, you know it's nothing special, but like they've been with me my entire adult life because I bought them when I was a kid. Yeah, rural life. Yeah, my first gun I bought when I was 14.
Speaker 2:Wild. Well, this was my first one, yeah, and we got to buy it with masks on our faces. We were wearing masks. We walked into academy, which is like if you don't know what it is, it's like a big box, uh, sporting goods sort of store, I think. Yeah, I would describe it as, and yeah, uh, we didn't have real masks back then because it was in that time where they're like we're not sure if people should use ppe or not. Also, you couldn't get them. Yeah, yeah, I guess it was pretty early days and so we went in there.
Speaker 2:I had really excellent makeup. I was like, oh, I'm gonna have great eyeliner for all of the pandemic, which I never do anymore because, honestly, it's like just a lot of work for me. I know some people are really good at it, I'm not, anyways, um, and I was, was, am still canadian, but I was canadian at the time of my permanent residency. So when we went to get it, um, we had to wait three days. I had to wait three days because I was canadian. I don't know what kind of background check they had to do, but something yeah, and I couldn't buy it because my id was from new york.
Speaker 1:Yeah, like if I had a south carolina like a bordering state id, I could have bought something in in georgia, but since it was new york I couldn't buy anything I think it's interesting that, like I immediately got a flag check as being a foreigner, you know that was then like oh, foreigner, why do they want a? Gun you know where else it could use some, uh, some, some better representation where dan everywhere but Everywhere, but specifically race.
Speaker 2:I didn't see any characters of color Did you look up to see the other ones, though I did, because we only played four.
Speaker 1:I did, and it was difficult to find a list next to the pictures. But of everything that I found, I did not find anything, a single one. Not a single one that I found. I did not find anything, a single one, okay, um, also, uh, zero lgbtq or disability representation. That's a shame at all. Um, but also, these characters aren't, like as far as I know, not totally fleshed out, so like I guess you could. Just you could give them their own identity if you wanted to.
Speaker 2:I mean we did the priest with an identity. It was a very stereotypical, problematic identity that I'm not going to name, but you can guess we did do that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so yeah that's true, but I know no disability representation whatsoever. I imagine if they did it'd probably be awful. Like this is wheelchair Jimmy and he only can move one square and has zero hit points and it's just.
Speaker 2:the picture is jimmy and he looks like emaciated and yeah, it would be problematic probably, but I mean it was made in 2007, which at this point is almost 20 years ago yeah loud, loud, to say that.
Speaker 1:I have some house rule ideas. So Ali Eats Brains and I we were talking about this in the Discord and we were like some of these rules could use a little bit of a homebrew. Homebrew is a term that they use in D&D. When you make up your own rules or your own stuff, you can homebrew something. You can make the game your own. So here's some of my ideas.
Speaker 1:We discussed this a little bit Zombies using doors, just like the survivors. This would increase the immersion. It would make the strategy a little bit more intense, because you only have a couple doors in a building and if the zombies are coming, you got to think are they going to block the door? Are they going to come in? Are they going to corner me? You're going to have to think about that before going into a building. I think it would be really fun. I uh, ollie did not like this rule at first because he played the zombie right, because because they played the zombie. So I offered this as a way to balance that, instead of having a, a spawn cap for the zombies of like whatever the total number is like 16 zombies, no spawn cap. So every, every turn, you can roll to spawn new zombies, and I think that would increase the immersion as well. Like it, you would just have loads and loads of zombies spawning every turn, so the longer you go, the more zombies there would be, and I think that would balance that out.
Speaker 2:That would be terrifying. I did feel like the stress of being surrounded by zombies and that would only be amplified by this version, and it was. I think it was good practice. You know, we know that the apocalypse is sort of here and coming, and like to build resilience skills. I think we need to play this game more.
Speaker 1:I think so I think that is a good coping with stress, a good excuse to play this game. Another thing is that there was, so there was, different buildings, so there'd be like a gun shop, there would be a gas station, there would be a hospital, a farmhouse, a school, but there was only one hero deck. So you go into any one of these, these buildings and you would do a search, but it just came from the same deck, so like if you went into a school, you'd have to pull from the deck, and it's like maybe you'd find a shotgun, maybe you'd find gasoline, maybe you'd find the keys to the truck, maybe you'd find faith, which is like an ability card. I found three of them, which was helpful. I found three of them and like no gas, not till the very end, yeah, and leah found all the weapons her characters had were packing, yeah, like the pocket, their pockets and their hands were full, I mean you can technically only have four items at a time.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I don't think I ever had more than two. I don't think.
Speaker 1:So yeah, but still no, you had three at one point I did. You had a flare gun and two weapons.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think again, shotgun was my fave.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so here's what we came up with. They would be most likely to spawn in, and then each building would have its own deck. So if you were like I need a gun and you ran to the gun store, you'd pull from the deck and maybe you would find a gun. If you're like I need the fuel for the truck, you'd run to the gas station and you'd pull a card and hopefully you got fuel.
Speaker 2:I feel like that removes some of the chance out of it, which could either be awesome or make it less fun. Yeah.
Speaker 1:There's also a lot of random chance cards that you could just throw into each deck too. So, like you're, like I need to go and get the fuel at the gas station, you pull faith Keys, I think would be the one that's like randomly located.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think you keys all the time. That's a great one to just have be like you don't know where it is.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I would also like to introduce a new item to the game oh, a barricade. There could be different types of barricades, like a wooden barricade, a steel barricade, but the idea is that, because zombies can only use the doors, what you could do is you could. You could use a barricade card on a door and the zombies, if they wanted to come through that door, would have to attack the barricade.
Speaker 2:I mean there might be a barricade card and we haven't found it yet.
Speaker 1:Well, if it exists, it wouldn't make sense, because they can just go through the walls Right.
Speaker 2:I forgot that already. This is our modded version.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so in this case they would have to attack it. So this is our modded version. Yeah, so in this case they would have to attack it. So, like, maybe, like a wooden barricade has has a value of two. So a zombie would have to roll a die and get higher than two to smash through the barricade, and that would be the turn. They wouldn't be able to just go through the door, they'd have to attack the barricade first. Mm, hmm, if it was like a steel barricade, maybe it's like a like a four, so they got to roll higher than a four to get through that barricade.
Speaker 1:Um, I'd also like to see the center board. Um, it had had these much larger grids so it made it faster for you. If you go across the middle of the board, you could pretty much get to the other side in like almost one turn. Um, because there was like nine squares in the middle, but the outside areas of the board were much smaller grids. You could only move one grid per like number that you rolled. If you made the center grid the same size grid as the outside, it would really change the way that you approached dealing with zombies, because you would then have to run from the zombies, and the consequences for your actions would be so much higher, since you couldn't just like zip across the board in an instant okay, I could do that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I have a a random observation I'd like to make. Yeah, we talk about our podcast like we talk about game, we say. We say we talk about books, movies, games. We have not talked about a game since episode three all flesh must be eaten and this is episode 70. So it took us 67 episodes to talk about a game again. And I my question for you is, dan, if you had a choice between playing all flesh must be eaten, the role-playing game or, uh, the last night on earth, which would you play?
Speaker 1:oh, well, it depends, because all uh, last night on earth, you can play in an evening. You can go from beginning to end in one evening, um, whereas all flesh must be eaten. You've got to commit, like every sund Sunday, for several months to complete a campaign. You've got to make a commitment with a group of people that you feel comfortable playing, pretend make-em-ups with and, honestly, I've tried to play All Flesh Must Be Eaten for like 20 years and the hardest thing that I have is finding people that I want to play with and also finding people who want to play a game they've never heard of.
Speaker 2:Didn't you briefly sign up? Oh no, it wasn't. All flesh must be eaten, it was the oh, we do have another one. We talked about the walking dead game. We haven't, we haven't done an episode about it, but we have talked about it at some point.
Speaker 1:I have I have the books for the walking dead universe role-playing game. I do want to talk about it, I think. I think Ali would be into it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think that that's one of those games or one of those episodes that I can just kind of like scroll the internet and occasionally chime in with a random joke. Yeah.
Speaker 1:You know. What I do love about about this game, though, is that it has all of these tiles, it has all these scenarios, has all these scenarios, has all these cool things that would be great to use in addition to a role-playing game. All of these role-playing games all flesh must be eaten famously had like almost nothing to do in the game. All of their scenarios were literally just backstory for how a zombie outbreak happens. Oh, it was. It was bizarre it's. It's kind of. Why the game failed is because they didn't give examples of, like how they can, how somebody can, play the game. They didn't. They didn't say here's a mission, they just said here's an outbreak, and people would get bored with that because they're like well, you can only make so many different kinds of zombies, I guess. So now we're bored. Yeah, you need missions.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and this provides missions and this provides the town that you would be in a very reasonable mission, like the kind of thing you would see in a movie again. Like it feels like it's bite size, like the, the goal of keys and gas for a truck feels reasonable and focused and also has really great survival tip, which is, uh, keep your keys on you at all times and, um, I mean, you wouldn't have to hoard gas if you just kept your tank filled. But we don't know how they got there or why they are out of gas. A truck stalled it was out of gas.
Speaker 1:That's what I think you mean the the blue rectangle that I put in the middle of the yeah, there is. There is actually like a like a little truck that they put in the middle of the board. Yeah, there is actually like a little truck that they put in the middle of the board like a picture of a truck, but Ollie didn't know where it was.
Speaker 2:Oh, that's why it was a blue rectangle. Ollie couldn't find it. What is a three-dimensional blue rectangle called?
Speaker 1:A cube.
Speaker 2:But a cube is a square, a rectangle cube, a rectangle cube. You heard it. Here we A rectangle cube. You heard it. Here we are mathematicians.
Speaker 1:So my answer would be that I'd like to play a combination of this and All Flesh Must Be Eaten, or the Walking Dead universe. I'd like to have something that has a little bit of permanence, so when you find a weapon, that weapon stays with you. There's a lot of object impermanence with this game, where you pick up a card and then there'd be a variable amount of reasons why it would disappear from your deck.
Speaker 2:Yeah, but what did feel realistic was that your weapons could break. Yeah, that was interesting and nerve wracking.
Speaker 1:I'd like it if you could then do something about that, like you'd keep the weapon, like you would find a weapon and it would be in your inventory. I would like it if, like you know it, if you failed with a shotgun, it meant that you were out of ammo. But what if you could just find more ammo? Finding ammo, finding resources I would like to find food. I'd like to find water. I'd like to find gasoline. I'd like to find ammunition. I'd like, if you have a chainsaw, if you utilized the fuel in the chainsaw. That's how you have an attack. So you have to determine whether or not you want to attack a zombie with a chainsaw or put the fuel in the truck Got it.
Speaker 2:I think you'd be a good game designer.
Speaker 1:Yeah, well, thank you. The game design world probably disagrees with you, but yeah, I would love to role play something that's as simple as this, but also add a little bit, a little bit more complexity to it. So there's, there is some elements of it that are that feel like you have a little bit more control over your character. I'd like to play one character for one thing, like we played two characters each if you can play one character.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it was hard to keep track of.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it was hard to keep track of what the characters' special abilities were when you had two of them.
Speaker 2:Again, I think that would have been easier if we didn't have to be going between each other's people and we could have had our own screen and just looked at it. I think that was our biggest disadvantage, only reason why we lost, in my opinion I'm kidding, I lost for other reasons.
Speaker 1:I'd also think it'd be cool if there were stats that you could upgrade. There is something in a, an expansion pack for this game that includes experience points, so I don't know if, like, maybe if you play a character long enough, if they like level up and you have more abilities, but that'd be cool the other thing that felt really realistic, and is probably a survivor survival tip that I don't think I did a good job of, is like don't make small talk while you're surviving a zombie apocalypse.
Speaker 2:You probably just need to focus on what you're doing, and I was like constantly being like let's talk about other stuff.
Speaker 1:Yeah, well, you know that's realistic too. Like people who are surviving the zombie apocalypse, they don't. They might just want to chit chat.
Speaker 2:I don't know about when we're on the last night on Earth and there's zombie hordes coming at us and we need to find gas, and I don't think that was the time for me to be like. So, jc, what's your job? Like you know, that reminds me Tell me your backstory.
Speaker 1:That reminds me of another house rule I would like to see is like instead of there being a sun tracker. Of another house rule I would like to see is like instead of there being a sun tracker, what if you only played the characters that you were given, and all the other roles too? So the zombies can spawn as many zombies as they need to and you either die by zombies or you accomplish the mission and the game doesn't end until one of those two things happens.
Speaker 1:Yes, because, like the, there's stress, like you got to do it but that's kind of part of the fun yeah, it does keep it short. Yeah, like that, that does help keep it short, but I would like to just like ignore that rule sometimes and just go until it's done what do you think our biggest barrier was to actually having it be short?
Speaker 2:because we definitely. I think we were probably the longest play that they've ever had to deal with well, zombie did leave for like 35 minutes to take a phone call so that's right. Oh, I didn't mean to throw shade, I didn't mean to throw shade.
Speaker 1:No, we're not throwing shade. That was actually a really good break because, like my tailbone was hurting at that point.
Speaker 2:So I didn't stand up we need to play down here in our with our more comfy chairs next time also, we had a pizza break.
Speaker 1:We all made pizza yeah, we had a pizza break I made tea a few different times yeah, we're more familiar with it now, so I think it would the the first half of the game would be a lot faster yeah, I think I just I'm airing all my insecurities on this podcast.
Speaker 2:I think I feel self-conscious about like not knowing what's expected and like if I, if I was a good player or if I was just annoying, that was like my anxiety voice. That evening afterwards I was like, oh no.
Speaker 1:I don't think anyone was judging you for your playing. I don't think anybody expected you to play a certain way. I think you know we're just having fun. Nobody if if we do it with a certain type of decorum yeah, I mean, I think that's what I think I don't know.
Speaker 2:like when I played games a lot in the past, it's been in person, yeah, so you can see people, and so there's like more, I think, like social clarity. I'm a socially anxious person in general and but at the same time I'm like I really want to get to know these people more and I really like them and I want to lure them into our zombie commune over time.
Speaker 1:No, I think everything was great. Leah, I don't personally like playing with people who are what we call try-hards oh, what's that? And that's what you're feeling anxious about not being, which is the person that just shows up, knows every rule and is just like let's get down to business and play this for real, but I think I was a try-hard in trying to be everybody.
Speaker 2:I was like be my friend.
Speaker 1:No, I think you were somebody who was being friends with the people who were friends with you and wanted to play a game with you.
Speaker 2:That's nice. I guess now the whole internet will know that I have social anxiety. Yeah, now I feel self-conscious that I said it.
Speaker 1:Well, it can be edited out.
Speaker 2:True, I'll just say briefly to wrap it up, that Ollie and JC were really great hosts and I had a lot of fun. But I think whenever I do something that's really new for me like any social situation that's new and I'm learning a lot. What happens afterwards? I have like a social hangover where my brain decides to dissect every single thing I said and whether or not everybody actually hates me, which maybe is a narcissistic problem. Maybe that's like a narcissistic tendency that I have. If I'm honest, yeah, maybe, yeah, but I'm like up all night being like, oh no.
Speaker 1:I can't believe. I said that thing. Or maybe that is a trauma response that you have developed to dealing with people with narcissistic tendencies.
Speaker 2:Interesting. I mean, one of my coping mechanisms to trauma is fawning, yeah, so that would make sense.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean it would make sense that you would feel deep down in your survival bones that you want to please everybody the best way that you know how, because if you discover that you were less than accommodating, that that might blow up things and cause problems for you that's true and I think that that's actually um a good point that this stuff shows up, even in games like we bring.
Speaker 2:We bring all of our stuff with us, no matter how great other people are or what the setting is. So that's my little bit of vulnerability to share on the podcast that I have insecurities.
Speaker 1:We all deal with our insecurities in different ways. Yeah.
Speaker 2:I want to be clear that they're my own and have nothing to do with anybody else.
Speaker 1:I have insecurities like that as well. Yeah, I think that I typically, I think I've conditioned it in myself to have the fight response. I think I've fawn in myself to have the fight response. I think I've fawned a great portion of my life and I think that I got sick of fawning and now my go-to when I think that maybe somebody doesn't like me is well, they can go fuck themselves. I said what I said and they can go fuck themselves. I said what I said and they can go fuck themselves like in the last episode?
Speaker 2:Yes, I mean, do you think that that translates into the way you play games?
Speaker 1:I think it translates into how I have interpersonal relationships and I think that the people that I have the best interpersonal relationships are the people who know that I'm going to joke about things and possibly those things might be things that you could think are offensive.
Speaker 2:Oh, like your joke on Discord that I will not repeat. Yeah, that I still am like Daniel f*** this. But the people that I have the best relationships with realize that I trust them to know that I am joking yeah, I think this comes back to the discussion we had the first time I had oliver on the podcast, which is like there's this millennial humor of sarcasm, like if you say the thing, you're actually critiquing, the thing that you're saying while you're joking like it's and that can get me in trouble.
Speaker 1:Yeah, because people might think I mean the thing that I'm saying.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, and I try not to do that, but it is like it is in my nature to do that I just think it's interesting how all this stuff shows up in, like no matter what you're doing game, uh, talking to people at work, yeah, whatever you know, a perfect example of what I'm talking about is uh, my boss texted me and he said would it hurt your feelings if I gave you the day off tomorrow?
Speaker 1:And my response back was it would hurt my feelings so much that I would need the whole day to recover from it. And I sent it and I'm like I don't know if he's going to understand what I'm saying. I really do want tomorrow off, so I hope he doesn't think that I actually want to work tomorrow. And he texted back so your feelings won't be hurt. And I I just simply wrote back no, they won't be hurt, yeah. And then I'm like you can always count on me to enjoy a day off.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think that's why you got laid off 10 days early. Yeah, which was amazing, by the way. Yeah, we haven't announced it on the podcast yeah, we are.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I'm out of the work season I have been getting excellent lunches everybody.
Speaker 2:Today I got a grilled cheese, yeah, so good grilled ham and cheese.
Speaker 2:Yeah, grilled hammy cheese yeah, veggie, of both of those things. Just for clarity, because I know I don't want people to be like, oh, they're not, I am vegan and I'm not saying it because I am like being like you should be vegan too. I just want to not confuse the people to be like, oh, they're not, I am vegan and I'm not saying it because I am like being like you should be vegan too. I just want to not confuse the people and be like wait a second, what Vegans can eat?
Speaker 1:ham Anyhow it was a lot of fun.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'd like to do it more. You know, I think actually just like my final statement around the social anxiety thing is, this is actually how I felt about interacting with people online again for the first time. Like I remember watching your streams when we first got together and I'd like, I'd like want to comment in the chat, but I'd be like what's the right thing to say in the chat? Yeah, you know, like I had this and still like I was like what's the right thing to comment on this post that we posted?
Speaker 1:And now I. Now it's just become like a second nature thing because we do it so often, which I find hilarious, because my streams were like a practice in schottenfreude, which is the enjoyment that people would have from watching me suffer. So the correct thing to put in the in the chat would have been something horribly offensive to me. So like, but that's not who I am like, maybe, maybe if you were better at this game, you, you wouldn't be where you are right now. Take that loser, wow. And that would have been like a perfectly acceptable thing to say to me wow, that's a little bit masochistic, dan yeah it was.
Speaker 1:It was rough.
Speaker 2:Did you actually enjoy that?
Speaker 1:No, but people enjoyed doing it.
Speaker 2:That's what schadenfreude is.
Speaker 1:Interesting. It's them enjoying me suffering. Oh, okay, but you're not enjoying it, which is why I did that.
Speaker 2:So they're sadistic and you are not like willingly being.
Speaker 1:Which is why I did that stream where people could buy me a shot of whiskey and I ended up drinking a whole bottle.
Speaker 2:That felt masochistic, because I literally said to you that I was desperate for money. Speaking of games, it was they just have to pay you five dollars, right yeah, to drink a shot and your goal is to make one hundred dollars, and somehow Dan had not done the math on this and I said to Dan, before the stream started, I was like Daniel and you know I'm only. I'm only calling you Daniel when I'm serious. Daniel, you realize that that's 20 shots. Maybe you should increase the value. And, dan, you said what did.
Speaker 2:I say I don't remember, it will be fine. It was not fine. The stream suddenly went blank. I don't even know how it ended, so did my memory. Yeah, um, I thought you were dead briefly. This almost, uh, stopped our relationship before it started because we were just talking again. I was like, does this man have a problem? Turns out you were really just desperate for money. So you did have a problem, but it wasn't a drinking problem, it was a one-off thing. But yeah, I just, I had a money problem and a possible lapse of judgment.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I probably should have charged like ten dollars ten ten shots still would have been a lot, but, like you, absolutely have alcohol poisoning. Yeah, yeah, I don't recommend you ever do that again.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you know, simon made me some fries and I was right as rain after that simon's the best.
Speaker 2:Simon is the absolute best, I think it's like in general, like any kind of social setting games or otherwise. I feel like this is what our episode's turning into. For the latter half, I'm okay with it. I'll just say briefly it's like, um, like, as someone who is not good at humaning, it's like I have to figure out not only the rules of the game like this is how you do the job, or this is how you act appropriately in a theater, or this is how you show up to play a tabletop game. It's like I also need to learn the rules of humaning in that context, and I think that's the part that's like always a little stressful for me, because I have never. This is going to sound super weird, but I've never felt like a human. I felt like I'm role-playing, being human my whole life.
Speaker 1:It's weird in here. Well, we should play role-playing games and that way, when you're playing the game, you're also role-playing being a human.
Speaker 2:I mean, I'm doing that right now.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it'll take away a lot of the stress of it, because playing the game is playing the human, yeah, but then I'm going to be thinking about the social rules of role playing, the role playing Right. So like there's a point where I get comfortable with it, like when I was younger, I really had a very hard time socializing, like I did not understand it at all. Yeah, but I have improved. So, anyways, this is turning. Maybe it's because it's late on a Friday night and I'm tired, but thank you for the impromptu therapy session, everybody listening and how about to make me feel better. You share your deepest, darkest insecurity with us. I'm kidding, but I would be curious, like what is the thing that keeps you? Maybe this is the question. We'll put it into a reel or something. What is the thing that stops you from trying something new?
Speaker 2:Oh, being around people yeah, and for me it's anxiety of knowing how to be around, like, knowing what I'm like, what am I supposed to do, yeah, around people being human is weird. Yeah, yeah, but you know it's not weird, or you know what? Actually, it's very weird that some of my favorite people are officially people that I don't know in person and like to play games with now, and that tomorrow we're going to have a Discord watch party of zombie-vers with a lot of our zombie besties, and that makes me super happy.
Speaker 1:Yeah, by the time this comes out, it'll be yesterday.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and like the span of a year and a half that we've been doing this podcast. I think actually are we coming up on two years, dan, yeah, yeah, and the span of almost two years of doing this podcast. I think some of my favorite people are now internet friends to the point where I may be neglecting some of my other friendships, but they don't know that because they don't listen to the podcast. See, that's what I'm going to say to them. You want to be my friend? Still, you want to know what's going on with me.
Speaker 1:You got to listen to my podcast, them a podcast, yeah, and I haven't bothered to make friends in other any other way, so but we've met really cool people.
Speaker 2:I want to do an episode in the future and, like our zombie survival crew, if we had all the people that we know and love, um from the podcast, have what our roles would be, because I think we'd be a really badass group and I know that I've taken us completely off track yeah, but you know what I think, think, I think that's, that's a good, good place to, to uh, to end it. Yeah. Final thoughts.
Speaker 1:Yeah, um, last night on earth is a fun game. Um, it's fun to play. It's fun to play with friends. I don't know if you can play it by yourself, but it'd probably be fun to do that too, I mean if you can play chess by yourself, you can play this by yourself.
Speaker 1:Yeah, has some room for improvement, but I think if you're into zombies, I think this scratches the itch. You know, if you like a zombie movie, especially like an 80s zombie movie, this is going to be the thing that you are going to obsess about. Yeah, and I can't wait to play again, me too. Yeah, can we?
Speaker 2:do it tomorrow. I mean, I guess you and I could play it, yeah, but yeah, hopefully we'll play it with Oliver and JC again and then maybe some other people. Zeds how many Zeds would you give this game, Dan? Oh?
Speaker 1:I'm going to give it like nine out of 10.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I guess we should contextualize Zeds for anybody new listeners, because we haven't done this in a while. But if we're talking about a book, a movie, a game that we're reviewing, like we are in this case, we love to give it a 1 out of 10 Zeds.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I'm giving this 9 out of 10. That's really high. Yeah, I think there's some things that could change, but for the most part it moved along smoothly and it was fun.
Speaker 2:I'm going to give it an eight just because I'm not good at it yet.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I don't mind too much not being good at it. I feel like at the beginning we didn't know what we were doing and by the end we kind of knew what we were doing and I think that's a good sign.
Speaker 2:Some games that I play you've got to study for a month in order to know?
Speaker 1:oh, there's no everything and then you got to play like several sessions before you even start to get the hang of it. And it's just like this is just like you open up the box, you put it, you pull out the boards, you put some, you roll some dice and uh and and you're going, you're on your way to play in this game, really accessible, like, like I kind of joked that like I couldn't like pull out a D&D manual and be like you know, over Christmas, be like Mom, would you like to play a nice game of Dungeons Dragons? But we could pull this game out. We could pull this game out and people would probably have a good time.
Speaker 2:That would be fun. Yeah, we have to learn how to be zombies too.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:So I think that's all we've got for Last Night on Earth, at least for now, yeah. But we've got some other cool stuff coming up, dan. Yeah, some more books and some more book interviews. In two weeks, an episode with Polly Morphous Lee about their wonderful zombie erotica book, the Zombie Reerection. Only Sex Can Save Us, only sex can do it.
Speaker 1:Interview will be coming out Zombie re-erection.
Speaker 2:Only sex can save us. Only sex can do it. I'm really excited. We're talking to Polly in like three or four days and I have so many questions. It's a really fun read If you like smut, even if you don't. Just the intro itself, like the contextual history of how humbies, which is the type of zombie in this world, come to be, is hilarious. And if you need a humor and relief in your life from the real life humbies, the Ronald Humps of the world, then this is the book for you, and by book. It's 45 pages, you can read it over a coffee and it's well written, very.
Speaker 1:Yeah, like I've read erotic stories before and they these erotic stories were not well written.
Speaker 2:this is well written, yeah, and it's funny, it's really funny, yeah, and it's not gonna be for everybody, because it's definitely explicit, you know it has.
Speaker 1:Has some dicks, has some balls, has some vaginas?
Speaker 2:well, no, it has enormous green appendages right, yeah, um yeah they're. They're dick shaped it has tara, sara and lara.
Speaker 1:Yeah, those are the characters in the first in the first uh story. Yeah they're.
Speaker 2:I think they're in a band called ara ara ara yes, I don't know if they're in a we're not all the way done yet, but I think they're like in a band slash only fans, yeah, or yeah. There's definitely like um a webcam situation happening yeah, they're like they're a sex band a sex band. Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. They do sing and I've been reading it loud to dan, so I just sing the sing, the lyrics. I've been making up the songs.
Speaker 1:It's been fun yeah, it's pretty great. Yeah, I think we should sing it for polymorphously and see if it's close to what what she had in mind absolutely, we're gonna do that.
Speaker 2:The other book that's coming up, um, this one's not gonna come out till january because we know the holidays are coming and we want to make sure that people have a time to listen to interviews. Um, we're gonna have our next interview in january. Well, we'll be talking to them in a couple of weeks, but our next interview will come out in January and that's going to be with Z Martin Brown, the non-essentials.
Speaker 1:Yeah, which was one of our elevator pitches. Doesn't have any any vaginas or dicks in it? I don't think so. But you know what I'm going to keep my ears open.
Speaker 2:It's not erotica. Yeah, so that's, that's good. Yeah, you know, if, if, yeah, if you're not here for the erotica just wait for the episode with zach. Yeah, or zachary, I'm not sure you prefer to be called um, so z we'll call you for now can I call you zed? Z is rad. How would you feel to be called zed martin brown? That's what would that?
Speaker 1:that's gonna be one of my interview questions uh, you guys, you're part of our zombie horde. Now, I don't know if you know this, but you've been infected through your ears. Um, but you know, what we would love is if, if you, uh, if you connected with us yeah, we love it yeah, you know, send out your words into the, into the rest of the horde, like on social media and stuff.
Speaker 1:You could do a number of things to help the horde grow. We're the zombies in this game, yeah, we're. Yeah, we don't. We sometimes don't know for the survivors of the zombies, but right now we're the zombies I feel like it's a podcast.
Speaker 2:We're definitely the zombies like in terms of our community.
Speaker 1:We are the zombie horde yeah, but you can leave us a rating and a review, if you can, on the podcast platform that you use. Leave us a review. It helps us a a lot.
Speaker 2:I have a random request. Some people have asked me like, where do I leave a review? And unless you have Apple podcasts, there's not really like an obvious place to do that. But if you shared one of our pieces of content or just made a review, that was like a story we could-.
Speaker 1:Like on Instagram.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, yeah, we would love that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, we would love that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, speaking of which you could, you can follow us on Instagram at zombie book club podcast. We also have a link tree with a whole bunch of social media links, but you know, instagram, that's where it's at for us right now.
Speaker 2:It is. There's some exploration of blue sky.
Speaker 1:There is.
Speaker 2:I'm looking into it but for now it's all about Insta.
Speaker 1:Yeah, into it, but for now it's all about insta. Yeah, um, you could also, uh, join our discord. It's uh, it's actually ollie's discord, the brain munchers zombie collective, and uh, it's actually a pretty great place. We've got a number of people in there that we talk to like every day. Yeah, it's kind of become its like own own little zombie posse it's very fun.
Speaker 2:We like to make fun of each other there, we like to share our pictures of kittens, we like to show our zombie shirts and merch that we get, or just talk about random stuff. It's really fun.
Speaker 1:Speaking of merch, we have a merch store. We do. Yeah, if you want a zombie shirt or a sticker, we got some stuff coming soon, because now I'm off work, I can make some zombie shirts.
Speaker 2:I have a list of things I want to do because I have this next week off. I'm putting stickers on here. Yeah, we're going to make some stickers Just in time for the holidays.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's not too late to get yourself.
Speaker 2:This is a gift for yourself.
Speaker 1:Yeah, get yourself a zombie. Yeah, I would love it if we could make some wrapping paper. Yeah, I'm going to look into that. And yeah, and I am seriously thinking about making a calendar. And again, I don't care if anybody else buys it, I think I want to just make us a calendar. Yeah, um, you can also send us a message with your voice. We haven't had a voicemail in a while. Yeah, you can leave a voicemail up to three minutes at uh 614-699-0006. Uh, you know, you just call it and you go straight to voicemail and we'd love to hear your thoughts and your questions, your suggestions for future episodes. Or, if you're a writer, you can send us an elevator pitch about your book and we'll play that in one of our episodes.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we love to have that, so please feel free to share.
Speaker 1:They're always great. Polymorphous Lee was a that's right Amazing elevator pitch.
Speaker 2:Yes, I played it for Molly again when they were here this weekend, not again. I was like, oh, this is so funny. I forgot how explicit it was, though, and I think Molly and I are really open, but I think I might have crossed a boundary.
Speaker 1:You could also send us an email at a zombie book called podcast at gmailcom also. If, uh, if you don't want to send, leave a voicemail. You can send us a voice recording to that email yeah, basically our dms are open.
Speaker 2:Come, come, hang out. Yeah, by our dms we mean our email, a voicemail. It's not, it's a google number. So no, we're never going to answer yeah we got discord. You got the dms and instagram. We're so. No, we're never going to answer. We got Discord, you got the DMs and Instagram. We're easy to access. We are sometimes slow to respond. Depends on what's happening in our lives. But if we don't respond to you right away, it's not because we don't want to talk to you, it's just because life happens.
Speaker 1:Life does happen, but thanks everybody for listening. We really appreciate all the support that we've had this 71 episodes so far oh yeah, this is 71, I think I kept saying it was episode 70 and we'll see you in the next episode, everybody bye everybody, bye-bye, bye-bye, go infect someone yeah we love you, so give somebody a disease yeah, come play last night on earth with us yeah, play games bye.
