Review of Last One Alive

Blurb from the publisher: 'Arm and barricade yourself, use that chainsaw, perform heroic feats, try to get the zombies to kill the others before they kill you!

Last One Alive is fast paced: the rhythm of the game increases turn by turn, as the number of zombies in play grows and they become more and more deadly for the players using the "Zombie Apocalypse" rules.'

What you get: Your EUR 19,95 or equivalent will buy you Last One Alive, a dice game that accommodates from two to five players in just over 15 minutes.

In addition to the 4-page small-sized rulebook the game contains the following: 10 (black) Zombie dice, 3 (red) Shot dice, 3 (white) Item dice, 3 (yellow) Barricade dice, 5 Character cards, 5 Reference cards, one token bag, 18 Item/Barricade tokens, 3 Zombie Apocalypse tokens, 5 Hero tokens, one Day token, one Night token, and 15 Life markers.

Gameplay: The title is rather forthcoming about what you try to achieve, namely, to be the last one alive. On his turn, a player takes at least one Zombie die (depicting one zombie (x2), two zombies (x2), an ambush, and a blank), and will roll it along with four other dice of his choice from the three different pools. Shoot dice shoot the zombies/ambushes in front of you (one shot (x2), two shots (x2), a one shot and roll again, and a blank), Item dice allow you to randomly draw an item (draw (x4), an ambush, a blank), while Barricade dice will send the zombies in front of you to other players (barricade (x4), an ambush, a blank). Once the dice are rolled, all zombies and ambushes are immediately assigned. Ambushes hurt the player that just rolled, i.e. he immediately takes them in front of him. Zombies however are assigned to the player on his left; they will not hurt the player that rolled them. Once this is done and the blank dice are removed, the remaining dice are resolved in order of Item, Shoot, and Barricade dice.

There are seven items like axes, flares, medikits etc. Some have a dual use, which is different if you play them before rolling or after rolling the dice on your turn. Others are more straightforward like the radio, which allows you to roll two additional dice. Once used, an item is out of the game; it never goes back into the bag. Three items bring the impending zombie apocalypse closer. When drawn, the amount of black dice that a player rolls at the beginning increases by one, up to an eye-watering four black dice, in addition to the other four dice that the player chooses. If the available black dice are not enough, the player simply rolls whatever remains available.

Shoots are obvious; they allow you to hit the zombies that other people brought in front of you, or the ambushes that you yourself were unlucky enough to roll. They only interact with the zombies and ambushes in front of you, not in front of your opponents. If in any turn you kill more than three zombies/ambushes, you receive the Hero token which allows you to reroll one of your dice rolls, fully or in part. You can only have one Hero token at a time, and you cannot reclaim it on the round you use it.

Barricades allow you to move the zombies in front of you to the player on your left. Barricades can never move ambushes; these you can only eliminate through Shoots.

It is imperative that a player does not have any zombies/ambushes in front of him once he has finished implementing the results of his dice. If he does, game over for him.

The game offers three variants. In Day and Night the zombie apocalypse level can be temporarily increased by one. In The Survivors, a variant for two or three players, each player has three hit points. Thus, a player is not eliminated the first time he gets overrun by zombies, but the third time. In this variant the game also ends when the third zombie apocalypse token is drawn, and surviving players earn victory points depending on their hit points and the items they carry. The third variant increases the zombie apocalypse level every time a player gets eliminated, and allows him to roll a zombie dice when his normal turn would have come, in order to keep him participating.

The strong points: This is a 15-minute filler to kill time before your last player arrives. With four or five players it can last even less than 10 minutes, depending on how well or poorly they roll. There are no strategies, it's all about the easy-going dice rolls and which pools to choose dice from. There is some tactical choice when it comes to getting rid of zombies/ambushes in front of you; Shoots are substantially more efficient than Barricades, yet they only save you as opposed to making your left opponent's life harder. Ultimately, you want to do the latter; opponents on the defensive (i.e. those who need red and yellow dice) cannot roll as many black dice in order to make things more miserable for their opponents, even though at the beginning this doesn't trickle back to you; it is more evident in two player games. The Items and the Hero token provide some control over the dice results, but not that much; keep on reading about that.

The variants are good. I recommend the first two variants for two and three player games, and the last one for those addressed to four and five players. I do not recommend playing a four or five player game with hit points; it is likely to outstay its welcome. In fact, I enjoyed the brutality of the four and five player games. One bad call, one unlucky roll, and you are out.

As much as it deals with zombies, the artwork is cute. The cover has a cartoonish, non-threatening feel to it. The designs on the dice are easy to read and understand. Whoever thought of depicting Items drawn as garbage on the dice deserves a beer. Even the zombie faces on the dice are silly.

The weak points: The game plays differently depending on the number of opponents. The more there are the bigger the raucous; with two players it comes out as more tame when it comes to atmosphere, even with the hit point variant.

Last One Alive is unfortunately plagued by structural issues, and I am not talking about it being a luck-based, bring-your-own-fun filler.

First comes the player elimination. Even in a very short game like this, player elimination today is frowned upon for a reason. I strongly recommend the third variant that allows the player to at least roll a die, just to say that he does something (and add potential zombies to one opponent), while at the same time making the game harder by increasing the zombie apocalypse level. On the other hand, if you are the player on the left of an eliminated player you are at an advantage, because no living player can send you extra zombies, and the zombified character can only send you one or two at best. The rule needs a thorough rewrite for it to be both fun and useful.

The second issue is the mediocre result mitigation. Every single dice game out there today has rules in place that allow you to change the result. In Last One Alive this is done via the Items and the Hero token, yet it doesn't come out as adequate because it is neither as pervasive, nor as frequent. No problem with that, yet if the design aimed for a push-your-luck mechanic, I don't feel it achieved it. Yet the less push-your-luck there is, the less adrenaline a game like that is going to produce.

The third is the game's lack of focus. It tries to be a cutthroat, and very short, dice rolling fest. Yet the way ambushes and zombies interact, and the way the Items work, take the wind out of the game; they are way too complex for what the game tries to achieve, in order to bring it to an unsuspecting group, teach it within ten seconds, and start rolling. There's always a pause when someone grabs the dice, and what does this or that item do if I use it before or after I roll, and should I get white dice or yellow or red and how many, no I changed my mind, give me the other one. For such a game all this should have been a lot simpler. Dalek Dice is equally simple and as much of a filler, yet it stayed focused on simplicity.

The fourth is the fact that you are interacting with one player only, namely the player on your left. For an extremely light, take-that game that finishes in under a quarter of an hour, this is sub-optimal. Lunch Money showed the way decades ago. If anybody can be your opponent in that game, I don't understand why Last One Alive couldn't do the same, with some gameplay adjustments in order to make ganging up on someone a click harder. It isn't that fun harassing one player while he can't touch you, and get consequently harassed by another player whom you can't touch, at least until you two are the last standing.

The Reference cards address themselves to airplane pilots. Literally, this is a font size 6 or less. In most light conditions they are practically unreadable. That exacerbates the aforementioned third issue, since nobody can remember the Items by heart.

Conclusion: Last One Alive can be entertaining, especially if you and your friends can consistently roll gonzo, statistics-defying results in order to outdo the competition and create memorable moments. Its mechanics however are not of this decade. I won't dismiss playing it if someone else suggests it, subjectively however it is unlikely to be my first choice of a light 15-minute game, irrespective of the amount of opponents I have in front of me.

For more info on Last One Alive visit Ares Games at https://www.aresgames.eu.

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