Zombology: The Final Straight?

It's been yet another very busy week, despite the Bank Holiday. The builders finished our new bathroom on Friday, so the house is slowly returning to normal and I can wash at home (which is awesome!).

Tuesday night was Newcastle Playtest, which again was fantastic. I've said before what a great bunch they are, but they've really had a transformative effect on Zombology and Vacuum and I'm sure the same will be true of the other games I work on in the future.

I took Zombology, Dragon Dance and Border Reivers on Tuesday, but I didn't really feel like playing any of them. Zombology was in a bit of a rut, I'd not really had time to properly update Border Reivers, and Dragon Dance hadn't changed since the end of last year. We all got a drink in (did I mention it's held in a pub? Genius!) and then started chatting about games. Alex had an idea he wanted to try out of a semi co-op game. Paul said that a semi co-op should be winnable by more than one player, unlike Zombology, where either someone won or everyone lost.

That's when the lightbulb above my head lit up.

Zombology has been in a weird place for a month or two. I came up with a new version a month or so back that fixed some problems with the previous version but the newer version was worst than the one it 'fixed'. I had no idea how to move on, and I didn't really want to roll back to the previous version, because bits of it were clearly broken.

The idea of more than one winner struck me as really interesting, so we discussed some things we could do and then sat down to try them out. Despite the changes being incredibly minor (just the scoring changed) the game felt completely different. People played co-operatively (and also aggressively!), there was table talk and strategising, some of the weaker cards were suddenly much more important and everyone seemed to enjoy it - even those people who previously had definitely not been fans. We played four games back to back and I was really happy with how it played.

For most of this year I've been thinking that Zombology would probably be the game that I would self-publish this year, but I wasn't happy with the game as it stood. Now I'm much happier. I need to play it a bunch more times (with different numbers of players and different people) but I've got a much better feeling about this version. I'm excited again.

I'll have to print a new version to tweak a couple of things, but we're definitely getting there!

In other news, with five plays this year I've managed to cross Galaxy Trucker off my list of games I own but that I've yet to play ten times. Four of the five plays have been on the excellent iPad app with my boss on the way to or from Manchester on the train. But they count in my book!