Games: Zombie Dice & Cthulhu Dice

We stopped in a comic shop recently (because I needed sleeves for my Buckaroo Banzai comics - the originals sleeves were a little dingy and I want those comics to stay pristine) and spent some time looking through the game section.

We didn't buy anything else that day, because the prices seemed a tad high, but after we got home, my husband looked up one of the games online and found that they were available for a much better price directly through the company (Zombie Dice, at the comic store: $24.99; direct from Steve Jackson games: $13.13, plus shipping). I'm all for buying locally, when it's sane. The local shop's price, however, was not sane.

What we got, for around $20: Zombie Dice and Cthulhu Dice, directly from Steve Jackson Games. Pictured above is the die from the Cthulhu set (more on that in a bit). Both games are fun, fairly quick to play, and very portable.

Zombie Dice
With just two people playing, this game went pretty quickly; like all games of this type, it's certainly more fun with three or more players.

In this game, you're the zombie. Each die represents a potential human victim, color-coded to indicate the strength of your opponent. (The green dice have more brains, the red have more shotgun blasts.) You roll three dice at a time, hoping for brains (obviously, since you're a zombie). Setting aside the brains and the shotgun blasts (feet = escape), you keep rolling three at a time until you have three shotgun blasts, then tally up how many brains you got. The first player to get thirteen brains wins the round.

Cthulhu Dice
Technically, it's just Cthulhu Die, because there is only one 12-sided die, but that sounds a little funny. (You can also get extra dice.) This game went crazy-fast.

For about $5 plus shipping, this was a great buy. The game comes with the custom die, instructions and a handful of sanity tokens* (flat glass marbles). It went way too fast with just two people -- you would need at least three for it to be a challenge -- but it's meant to be a fast game.

Your goal in this game is to stay sane. Depending on the results of the roll, you can take a token from your target, take one from the center (if there are any) or force one or all players to put a token in the center. After you run out of tokens, you've gone mad, but you can still finish another round and hope for a chance to steal a sanity token from Cthulhu and stay in the game. The winner is the last sane player (the only one with at least one token left).

*The mat pictured here does not come with the game. It's a one-of-a-kind piece, put together by my hubby, because we're geeks that way. He printed it onto the same Printable Fabric from Avery that I used for the skull pillow, and I ironed it onto the back of the shaded green fabric pictured above. I think I have just enough fabric left to make a small bag for the die and sanity tokens.