Zombie Dice - Components
In Zombie dice, you play a hungry Zombie, looking to eat human brains without getting shot. Zombie dice is packaged in a small mailing tube filled with 13 special six-sided dice; these dice represent your human victims. The dice are six sided, with 3 kinds of faces: brains, feet, and shotgun blasts. The dice come in three colors: green, yellow, and red. The balance of sides is most favorable to the player on the green dice, and least favorable on the red dice. The dice are well-made. It would have been nice if the game came in a real dice cup rather than a mailing tube, but the tube seems serviceable. You need to keep score in this game with pen and paper, or add some scoring tokens. There is no game setup.
Zombie Dice - Gameplay
Play proceeds clockwise around the table. On her turn, the active player rolls 3 dice drawn at random for the tube. The player keeps all brains and shotgun blasts rolled, and decides whether to keep rolling. If she rolls again, picks up the feet dice from the previous roll and adds dice from the cup to make 3. If, after any roll, the player has 3 or more shotgun blasts her turn ends and she gets no points. She can end her turn voluntarily after any roll, and get all rolled brains as points. When a player reaches or passes 13 points, play continues back to the start player. The player with the most points wins.
This is a push your luck dice game, like a simplified version of Ten Thousand or Cosmic Wimpout. The three colors of dice do create a little bit of odds calculation when it is time to re-roll.
Cthulhu Dice - Components
In Cthulhu dice, you play one of a group of cultuists trying to drive each other insane with arcane knowedge. Its components are a special 12 sided die, with a skewed distribution of 5 action symbols, and 18 “sanity” tokens - green glass marbles. The 20 sided die is cool-looking, and comes in a wide choice of colors. The other components are disappointing. There is really no excuse for a professionally published game to use glass marbles as components, although I suppose they make “losing your marbles” jokes possible. Zombie dice comes in a banal ziplock bag; at a minimum this game should have come in its own cloth bag. Steve Jackson Games has done nothing to improve its reputation for using cheap components with this game. It is nice however that the whole game will fit in your pocket. Each player takes 3 sanity markers at the start of the game, and puts the leftover sanity markers aside.
Cthulhu Dice - Gameplay
Play proceeds clockwise around the table. Each turn the active player designates a “sane” opponent (one who still has one or more marbles) to attack and rolls the die. If the roll is “yellow sign” the target looses one marble to the center of the table (to Cthulhu). If the roll is “tentacle” the active player steals a marble from the target player. If the roll is “elder sign” the player gets a marble back from the center of the table. If the roll is “ Cthulhu”, all players loose 1 marble to the center of the table. The target player then rolls the die in retaliation against the attacker, following the same rules. Once a player looses all her marbles, she is “insane.’ Insane players continue to attack others on their turn, but cannot be attacked. They cannot get sanity from tentacle rolls, and can only gain sanity points by rolling the elder sign. When only one, or no players have sanity remaning, the game is over. The last player with sanity wins. If all players loose their sanity on the last turn, no one wins. In the 2 player variant, each player plays 2 cultists, each with its her own set of marbles.
This is an exceptionally simple “take that” game. Aside from the obvious priniciple of attack the player with the most sanity left, there are no real decisions to in Cthulhu dice. Even this choice is a little pointless, since the target player will always get to retaliate. It seems to me that with a little imagination some mechanism could have been added to give players more incentive to attack specific others.
Conclusions
Both Zombie Dice and Cthulhu dice are fun games to play with younger children. There is a nine year old I play with regularly, and he likes both these games. The games are intended to be silly fun for adult gamers, and for this purpose they work less well. Steve Jackson said he was out to capture the simple, silly fun of Le Bomb, while adding a more of a game to it. There is a little bit more to both these games than Le Bomb, but not enough. Of the two, Zombie Dice has marginally more decision making, while Cthuhu dice has more thematic appeal. If you just need a very fast game you can play until the rest of your games group shows up, or until your family’s food arrives at a restaurant, then either of these works decently for that purpose. At $13 for Zombie Dice and $5 for Cthulhu dice (MSRP) it is reasonable to pick them up for this limited purpose.
