Last Night on Earth - Burn It To The Ground!

Tonight I had a few good friends over to play some board games. I have a number or board gams on my shelf that we can choose from, so its always fun to change things up and play a different game. Tonight we returned to a game that we have not played in some time; Last Night on Earth (LNoE).

Last Night on Earth

The board game of the night is The Last Night on Earth (2007), with its expansion Growing Hunger (2009). If you have never tried this co-operative board game before, I recommend it. It's really fun to try to work together to come up with a plan, and then either succeed or fail together. There are several scenarios to choose from that change up the game each time. Depending on how many players you have, 1 or 2 people will control the zombies, while the rest of the players will control 1 or 2 heroes. The goal is usually similar to escape the town, survive the night, or take out all the zombies.

The scenario that we randomly selected tonight is "Burn It To The Ground!". In this scenario, the heroes have to find 4 cans of gas and then something to light the gas. They have to douse the Manor House in the middle of town with all 4 cans of gas, and then light it on fire to burn down the manor. Gas, Lighters, Weapons, and Events are all found by being inside a building, and then "Searching" it. That allows you to pull a card from the Hero deck. The one tricky thing is during your turn, you can move or search, but not both.


With the table set and plenty of snacks to be had, the game is afoot! With this scenario, 4 addition spawning pits are added to the Manor House in the middle. Those are what we need to pour the gas on. Since this scenario has the heroes searching for cards a lot, there are the green Free Search tokens put in every building of the game (besides those that have a hero).

From left to right, we have Derek playing the Billy, Josh playing Amanda, Thom playing Kenny, Jonathan playing the zombies, and then I am playing Jenny. Note: I am not shown in these images because I am taking them. Each of the Heroes has their own strengths and weaknesses.

Since we have to find 4 gas cans and a lighter, but of this game for most of us is spent sitting still in a building, and searching each turn. Thom is smarter than us and stays on the move, while Josh and I actually are in the same building and same square. This turns out to be a bad thing as Jonathan plays several cards that make us loose turns or roll less fight dice.

Jonathan seems to be having more fun than any of us. The zombie player gets to draw 4 cards every turn. If they use them all, then they get 4 new cards their next turn. They can even discard 1 card before they draw up each turn. Jonathan seemed to have no shortage of good cards played on us, like this Shamble card that lets a zombie move extra spaces.

Luckily the dice are still involved, and there was more than one time that he played a card, and then rolled a 1 on a D6. For this card, it means the zombie get's to move only 1 extra space, instead of up to 6.

I mentioned earlier that Josh and I were in the same space for much of the game. Due to this, we did have some cards played on us that hampered us a bit. There was one time where it actually helped us. With the "Back to Back" card, we couldn't be attacked unless an extra D6 was rolled successfully (4+). That saved us from fighting one round.

One of the most powerful Hero cards turned out to be the "Fence Post" that Derek picked up. It allowed him to make a free combat attack against any zombie adjacent to where he stopped moving. I didn't keep track, but I wouldn't be surprised if he took out over 10 zombies with that post.

It became clear as the game continued that it was going to be very difficult to get enough gas. We were over half way till the sun went down (and we all died), and we had only 1 gas can. We tried and tried, but could not find the needed gas. Where was it!!! To make matters worse, Jonathan had permanently removed one of the gas cans from the game with a special zombie card, so that hurt us a lot!

Near the end of the game, we had two of the Manor spawning pits doused, and one more gas can in possession and on its way to the pit. We were frantically searching for the last one. We already had the lighter, so if we were lucky we could still win this game. We got the 3rd spawning pit doused, and had only 1 turn left. Could we get lucky and pull the gas card? Another way to get the gas can is to pick up a "search" type card. This would let us take a scenario item from the discard pile.

With the heroes sitting on the edge of their seat, we took our last turn hoping for the best. We were sorely disappointed; we didn't get the last gas can, and our time was up. The sun set on the town and then the hordes of zombies were released, killing us all. Failure!!!  But, it was sure a fun time playing the game. Way to go Jonathan!

Happy Game Nights!