Munchkin Zombies

Note: This is the rough draft of a review I wrote for BuyZombie.com. Please go ahead and see the final draft over there. It's a great website and resource for zombie news.


The Munchkin franchise by Steve Jackson Games is one of the most venerable in gaming today. It doesn't have the lengthy history of D&D or even Magic: the Gathering, but it wouldn't exist without them. The whole point of the game is that you are a munchkin... That is, you are a role-player who doesn't view RPGs as fun games and an exercise in improvisational acting, but rather as fun games where you kill monsters and take their stuff by maximizing your stats and dice rolls. There are quite a few versions of the game. The most well-known version is the original fantasy version, but there are versions for science fiction, kung-fu movies, the Cthulhu mythos, the Axe Cop webcomic, and more. However in all of those sets you play as the "heroes" killing monsters. Munchkin Zombies is a more recent set where instead of playing as a human survivor in the zombie apocalypse, you play as the zombies, hunting down humans so you can eat their brains.

Mall of Horror board game

Note: This is just the rough draft of a review that I wrote for buyzombie.com. Please check out the polished article here: http://www.buyzombie.com/2012/03/05/reviews-of-zombie-related-things/mall-of-horror-review/


If the Zombie Apocalypse has taught us anything, it’s that a shopping mall is just about the worst place to be in the event of the breakdown of society caused by hordes of the flesh-eating undead. Mall of Horrors wants to make sure it’s a lesson you never, ever forget.

Mall of horrors is a board game for 3 to 6 players where each player takes control of a group of survivors competing with the other groups of survivors for, well... survival. Eventually rescue will arrive, but not until only a small fraction of the starting survivors remain.

Night Zero (yet another webcomic)

Well, to top off April as Zombie Apocalypse Webcomic review month we have an interesting addition. Night Zero. Night Zero is a photo webcomic done by a group of people in Seattle. It's not as much of a continuous story as it is a series of related stories and vignettes that take place in the same post-apocalyptic Seattle. Part of the inner city has been walled off and survivors are safe there, but the New City is ruled by the mob. There are smaller oases called "speakeasies" outside of the new city, but they aren't necessarily much better. But then again, this is the zombie apocalypse, what were you expecting?

Last Blood (yet another webcomic)

So, sorry about the small review last week. Portal 2 had kind of taken over my life for a week.
So, to make up for it, I present to you Last Blood. This is another zombie apocalypse webcomic, though it's a bit different from the others I've reviewed so far this week.
It takes place about a month after a zombie walks out of the ocean and attacks the people there. (I might be wrong on the timeline... it's been a while since I've actually read the comic.) In that short amount of time, apparently a small group of people in nowhereville America has become the last group of humans on Earth. How do we know that they're the last humans? Some vampires show up and tell them so. You see, the vampires are trying to protect humanity, since if humanity dies out, vampires have no food supply. Oh, it wasn't all the zombies. Apparently there was also a nuclear war, which didn't help matters any, but the long and short of it is that they're a couple of dozen humans with a handful of vampires all holed up in a schoolhouse facing off against millions, if not billions, of zombies.

Zombie Waffe (also a webcomic)

Edited for corrections... Some explicitly pointed out, others not.

Continuing with the theme (that I hadn't originally intended to start but decided to run with anyway) of zombie apocalypse webcomics, this week's review is Zombie Waffe. Apparently "waffe" means "weapon" in German. No, I don't get it either. Apparently the author, Malin Falch, is Norwegian. Which brings me to the best part of the comic: the translation. This comic, though originally written in German, reads very natural in English. Keep in mind, I am a professional translator and editor, so I keep an eye out for these things, and the fact that Malin is either that good at English or hasn't skimped on getting a good editor for her translations means a lot to me. It's very impressive.
Correction: Apparently Malin does write the comic in English first. Though she does get an editor to help her out. Still, it's very impressive work for a non-native speaker.

As for the rest of the comic... well, there's not much there. The comic has a lot of potential from what I've seen so far, but there are fewer than 60 pages, and most of those have been for building up the background and introducing characters, so there's not much of the story yet.

Dead Winter (a webcomic)

This week, I have another zombie apocalypse webcomic for you. Dead Winter, by Dave Shabet. In many ways Dead Winter is both a counterpoint and a complement to The Zombie Hunters. It is far more stylistic in just about every way possible, yet it deals with many of the same themes of survival and human nature just as seriously.

The Zombie Hunters (a webcomic)

So, I'm a bit of a scholar of zombie apocalypse literature, games, and film. There's something fascinating about the genre. I think it's the very human nature of the storytelling. The problem is that most people misunderstand the genre of the zombie apocalypse and mistake it for any horror movie with zombies in it. Really, few things could be further from the truth... But I could go on and on about that. I actually wrote a 20-page paper on the subject that was presented at a symposium. But a discussion of what the zombie apocalypse is is not the purpose of this review.
Ahem. As I was saying, I enjoy me a good zombie apocalypse, and The Zombie Hunters provides. It's a webcomic started in 2006 by Jenny Romanchuk. It follows the story of a group of zombie hunters. Though the name is slightly misleading. These aren't people who go out and hunt zombies. Actually, they are semi-disposable, second-hand citizens who are used for salvage operations in the uncharted "wastes".

Lifeless The Series

Lifeless The Series is an independent miniseries that was produced as sort of pilot episode with the hopes that it would get picked up by a larger distribution company of some sort. It didn't pan out, which I feel is too bad since the people who made it were very resourceful, but it was also inevitable, since the series was pretty flawed.
Now, this was a miniseries, so it's only three episodes long, with each episode running between 15 and 20 minutes each. (They used to be available to watch on FearNet.com but they have since been taken down.)
I say that this series was flawed because... well, it was.