It's O.K. father Joseph, it's the next world that matters (Last Night on Earth: The Zombie game x2, Pandemic)

I have to admit, if you had told me last year that it would take until now to play Last Night on Earth again, I would have been surprised. It's not the type of game that we usually play, but what it's trying to do it does it well. I'm glad Shemp was in the Halloween spirit and chose it this week.

We chose to play the online scenario "We have to go back!". It's an unusual setup that requires all 6 boards, where the heroes need to go into a village to look for two bio-canisters that are required to cure the zombie plague.

Shemp and Luch started as the zombies while Kozure played Father Joseph and Billy and I played Sheriff Anderson and Jake Cartwright.

Things didn't start off well as both Luch and Shemp rolled the maximum number of starting zombies AND they started with an "overrun" token on on of the buildings that potentially had a biocanister (overrun buildings can't be entered). We set about searching the other potential sites. Lucky for us, they were elsewhere and we managed to both find and escape with the two before sundown. I don't exactly recall, but I think we managed to do it without any casualties.

The game went quite quickly, so we played again. This time, Kozure and I played the zombies, Luch was Johnny and Becky and Shemp was Jenny and Sally.

As the zombies, we didn't start with nearly as many zombies as the Luch and Shemp did but we did have one major advantage... when we played the heroes THEY MOVED FASTER THAN THE ZOMBIES DID. It was very bizarre, but Luch and Shemp had the slowest moving heroes I've ever seen. Rolling higher than 1 or 2 was exceptional, it seemed. Oh, and then it rained, so they moved slower still. The zombies didn't shamble once, but they did manage to surround and then chomp on the heroes quite frequently. Becky ran around with an infection of some sort that would make her a zombie if she got hit again, and then Johnny and becky bit the dust and became zombie heroes. There was some fancy maneuvering on the part of team "Go Girl!", with a highly successful dynamite explosion being particularly effective, but ultimately they ran out of time and lost. Shemp was visibly perturbed when Luch's replacement hero Jake Cartwright spent a long time searching for items just as time was running out, but Jake did come out swinging and nearly saved the day (it came down to one roll against my zombie, and I got a 6). The zombies did not go hungry. There was no cure.

We closed the evening with a game of Pandemic. We decided that the black cubes were areas of zombie infestation, and that we were now witnessing on a macro scale the effect of the zombie plague we had just battled in Last Night on Earth (the micro scale).

We played at medium difficulty (5 epidemic cards) despite the fact that Shemp hadn't played before. We worked together pretty well, and things seemed very doable for most of the game. Our biggest problem was that we didn't have the medic, but I was playing the logistics character and discovered that the ability to move other players on my turn was very valuable indeed.

The early scares were zombie infestations, but yellow fever was equally problematic. A few turns in, scarlett fever showed up in spades throughout asia and much of our resources were consumed putting out that fire. We had discovered two of the cures, and had what we needed to cure the last two if the game could just get to me one last time (Luch had cure #3, and I had cure #4). As is often the case in Pandemic, the we ran out of time just before we could wrap it up. A final epidemic in Johannesburg finished us off.

Apparently, zombies should not have been our primary concern.