[Zombies at the Door]Love Boat Under Seige at GenCon

[Emily Care]

Hey there,

At GenCon I got to experience some of the Finnish madness that is Zombies at the Door. Eero Tuovinen debuted this game this summer at Ropecon, where I played it first with Eero, Gregor Hutton and other folks from the UK and Finnish Indie scenes. It is a merged board/role playing game with the theme of zombies. In my two experiences, I've found the game delivers hysterical all-against-all conflict in avoiding the zombies, as well as heart-wrenching moments when sympathetic characters get offed by the brain chompers. 

All Aboard
My fellow players were Willow, Anna, Tom and James.  For a setting, we picked a tropical cruise. Heading off into the Carribean with a payload of TOP SECRET US govt crates of radioactive material.  Anna played Millie, the middle aged cruise director who welcomed the rest of the cast in our first scenes. I played little Johnny, out on the cruise with just his Grandpa to look after him. Willow--who was suffering from some culture shock, not having grown up on the treacly sweetness of Love Boat--played Matilda, another middle aged woman who had just been dumped by her husband for a younger woman. This set us up for a great Pepe le Pew like romance plotline involving James Brown's character Rich, a wealthy but smarmy (also middle aged) man who set his cap for Matilda early on and pursued her to the (bitter) end.  Tom played the quintessential Love Boat guest: Charu, complete with her small, yippy dog and prima donna attitude. 

You don't have to run faster than the Bear...
So, Zombies at the Door uses a board to structure the narrative and crank on the tension in the story.  On the board, the Zombies start at one end of a line of spaces, with escape at the other end. Midway between are the characters who have to climb, scrape and crawl their way to the light at the end of the tunnel, by either pushing their fellow characters back toward the Zombies, or by sacrificing yourself to allow others to move one step closer to freedom.  Play consists of narrating scenes that involve other characters in disagreements and conflicts, but also involves positioning your character in ways to gain the sympathy of the other players.  Though it didn't help my poor little Johnny from getting scarfed up first by the Zombies.

When in Rome
The climax of the game came during a costume ball. Matilda has failed in her conflict with Johnny, in which he wanted her to help him find a pirate costume and she wanted to make him a "spooky ghost" (she didn't really like kids that much).  So Johnny got to be a pirate. However, in her attempts to make the ghost costume she cut holes in a bed sheet, which brought upon her the ire of the housekeeping crew that had already been turned into pirates (we had an early theme of classism that meant that the reason the guests didn't realize that zombies had invaded was because the radiation first affected those who were basically invisible to them--the minority staff and crew.  Brrr....  They got their revenge. The zombies all came dressed as spooky ghosts, betraying themselves by their lack of ability to join the conga line started by the life of the party, Millie.  Chaos ensued.

In the end, after Johnny got munched, Matilda got turned and took out all the rest: except for Charu, who motored away in her very own escape helicopter, leaving us all to our fates.  In a denoument scene we had Charu telling her harrowing story on the talk show circuit, only to be reunited with her beau, Grandpa, who was the other "survivor". 

Charu: Oo-la-la! How wondeful that you escaped!
Grandpa: uuuuuuurrrrrrrrrhhhhhhh

Thanks for the game, Eero! It's really fun. I'm going to play it with my local game group soon. When will it be available in English?

best,
Emily

[Eero Tuovinen]

Thanks for playing! I take it that you could decipher the awful-quick-and-dirty translation of the rules and board I sent? I've been much too worried about my game making a good impression on you, I'm glad it worked as advertised.

Did I understand this correctly: the cruise participants took forever to figure out what was going on because only servants and crew were affected at first? How awful a theme, yet very appropriate for a zombie story. Do tell, did you have any sacrifices in the story, or was everybody out only for themselves? Also, was there expectant tension over the explicit nature of the zombies before their first on-screen debut? It sounds like you established the radioactive cargo right at the beginning; in playtests something generic like a radioactive cargo usually only made an appearance if the zombies were established in the order of reason -> nature -> meaning. Whenever we declined to set up stuff in pre-play (going effectively in the order of nature -> reason -> meaning) the ultimate explanation ended up being much more outrageous and specific to the story.

Also, now that I'm asking questions: did the boardgame-side of the presentation carry it's weight? How long did it take to learn and explain the rules? How long did the game last? Did it feel like a boardgame at all, socially speaking?

(Yes, the game is finished. I'm just asking stuff because I'm proud of my game.)

The game will be available in English basically when I figure out how to produce it in quantity. The Finnish edition took horrid amounts of handicraft to make, so that's not feasible. I'll have to figure out how large a printing I can do, where I store it and how I'm going to get it marketed and so on. This is something I intend to write about at length on the Publishing forum when I get my projects in order after this post-convention hassle. I need to not only tell you all what I learned about making a boardgame, but also ask for some advice on the problems I've yet to solve.

Meanwhile, feel free to lug/loan it around and force people to play it It's a small and light game, but it does tragedy, too, when you get to it with a group comfortable with each other and with time to spare. I love the idea that somebody is going to the bother of playing my game in a foreign country, especially as nobody here was that interested when I was designing it.

[Blankshield]

Eero,

This was a blast to play, and we picked up on it very quickly, from Emily's rundown of the rules.  I'm not sure if she used the English version, or just her memory of the game in Finland, but either way it worked well.

Regarding position play on the board, I don't think anyone did any play to try and push someone else down; mostly we were concerned with getting ourselves on top, although when lending dice, or adding ourselves into a scene, roleplay considerations almost always took priority over strategy on the board; I suspect that will drift from group to group.

As far as tragedy goes, even in our outrageous cruise on the Dead Boat*, when we realized that the dice had poor little Johnny being the first one to get killed, we couldn't bring ourselves to show it "on screen" - just a trailing camera shot of little Johnny's pirate hat floating away.

It's a great little game, Eero.

thanks,

James

*The Dead Boat soon will be making another run
The Dead Boat, now serving brains for everyone
Set a course for adventure
your mind in a zombie trance

[Emily Care]

Hey Eero,

The questions I had about the game were some simple procedural stuff: when you sacrifice yourself by going one step closer to the zombies, who goes forward? Is it one, some or all of the other characters? Do you decide ahead of time?

When we were playing, I went by my recollection of play, and what I'd gleaned from reading over the English rules.  It's straightforward once you've done it a couple times.

And I forgot to talk about the popsicle sticks! I loved those when we played in Finland: each of them has a trait or motivation that you can choose randomly. They are, however, in Finnish, so we didn't use them at GenCon. It was easy to make up characters on the fly though, once we had chosen the setting.

And second to all James said. It was very fun!

best,
Em

[Eero Tuovinen]

The questions I had about the game were some simple procedural stuff: when you sacrifice yourself by going one step closer to the zombies, who goes forward? Is it one, some or all of the other characters? Do you decide ahead of time?

Well, these are easiest to answer: for each step you take backwards in a sacrifice you can move one of the other tokens forward one step. In other words, the exhange rate is 1:1, unlike in an argument, where you are very likely to get more people going up than going down. Technically you don't have to move others the full amount you go down, or at all, but that's relatively rare.

And I forgot to talk about the popsicle sticks! I loved those when we played in Finland: each of them has a trait or motivation that you can choose randomly. They are, however, in Finnish, so we didn't use them at GenCon. It was easy to make up characters on the fly though, once we had chosen the setting.

The popsicle sticks have the unfortunate tendency of promoting comedy, I've come to find. It's nothing in the sticks per se, but the way people react to having a "random" character creation seems to be to make outrageous characters that set the tone for the game. Or it might just be that everybody wants to play a comedy game as their first run and it has nothing to do with the sticks, I guess.

I could translate the sticks for you before the next time you play, though. Just remind me about it at some point.

[Anna Kreider]

Hey, Eero! I just wanted to say that this game rocked, and I will totally buy a copy when it's released in English. The abstraction of the subject matter was probably what appealed to me the most since I love the *idea* of zombies, but loathe zombie movies because they squick me out. I think the cool thing is that I could pimp this game to friends who like zombies but don't roleplay, or who are suspicious of "hippie" gaming.

It helped that we had a great group too. Not much beats a large man with a goatee playing Charu to the hilt.

So, Eero - thanks for writing it. And Emily - thanks for introducing us to it!

~Anna

[Eero Tuovinen]

Thanks for the kind words. The treatment is indeed very abstract, to the extent that it's pretty easy to swap the zombies out of the game - what the game is really about is a (micro-)society under pressure, so that pressure can be varied to taste. Not only can the zombies be pretty far from the stereotypical goremonsters, but you might not have zombies at all - an earthquake does the job just as well. Catastrophe movies are just like zombie movies in all the facets that my game considers.