Axis & Allies & Zombies

As if World War II needed some extra violence and mayhem, Avalon Hill added zombies to their classic game. It’s for two to five players, controlling one of the same powers as the original game, with the wild card of zombies for good measure.

I’ve been playing the original version of this game for many years; I find it a fun, lengthy wargame and my 10 year old son enjoys it very much. He could see after a few games, and after playing some more recent kinds of wargames, that the combat mechanics, while involved, are fairly standard, and when he saw this version with monsters in it he wanted it badly.

We’ve played it a number of times now, and it is always fun. The story is that some sort of noxious smoke, unleashed by a Nazi archaeological dig, circulates around the globe creating zombies. The zombies can end up overtaking you before your opponent, which can be funny. You draw a zombie card before your turn, and add a zombie to a territory. You also have a chance to drive them out of your territories, but beware! If you lose, your soldiers end up zombified, which can be disastrous for your chances to win, even while being quite hilarious. You also have a chance to roll for tech advances that will help you fight the zombies, similar to your ability to advance your technology in the original game. Who doesn’t want a chainsaw tank or zombie mind control ray in their arsenal? No one, that’s who.

The pieces are high quality, and in line with what you would expect from an Axis & Allies game. It’s a worthy addition to this series. I have been thinking of picking up one of the other versions of the game, as there are now editions focused on WWI, the Pacific theater, and so on. But two games of this sort are enough for now. One of the fun things about these enormous wargames is the epic feel of them. It can sometimes take numerous sessions over several days to finish. We have a number of these types of big games in our collection, and adding to that seems unwise. The most disastrous thing that has happened while playing one of these occurred when our cat, in her nocturnal roamings, destroyed a game of War of the Ring after two solid days of play. We tried to soldier on, but the feline monster won the day.

If you like Axis and Allies, I’d rate this one 4.5 out of 5 stars. Highly recommended!

One Bite at a Time

I very much enjoyed ‘One Bite at a Time,’ a book with the subtitle “a collection of paintings and two sentence horrors,” by N.M. Scuri, and illustrations by Byron Rempel. This book was enormous fun to look at and pore over, with some really chilling and darkly funny tales that I had a great time reading.

“Hell is a Library” was one tale that cracked me up. As a librarian and twilight zone aficianado, I loved this, which said simply “I’m the last man on Earth, and I can read all I want. Now where are my glasses?” The accompanying illustration is a man with his back to us, in a seemingly apocalyptic landscape. “A Dainty Dish” was another memorable entry, with a painting of a tentacled monstrosity beside the ominous words: “The Old One Cthulhu, baked in a pie.” And there are plenty of zombies here, too, of the human and animal variety, as in “Red Rover,” in which a canine pal keeps on killing even after he’s been dead a month.

Many of these stories sound like they could be the opening of a great short story or novel, the seeds are here for some fun stuff. Scuri has some precise, tightly controlled language to set the atmosphere for the really wonderful paintings, which reminded me of Ralph Steadman’s illustrations of Hunter Thompson’s books.

I highly recommend this engaging collection for fans of horror, comics, and poetic writing. It’s a unique book that is loads of fun. This was listed as “Volume One,” so hopefully there will be more installations to come.

In “Thirteen Stories and Paintings,” Scuri and Rempel take the idea a bit further. Here we have similar kinds of haunting illustrations, with flash fiction horror tales. “Hooked” is one such memorable story, about a night of scary storytelling that goes horribly wrong. “The Sad End of Perry Belmon” is a Joker-like tale of a lost soul, trying forever to win friends, yet always failing miserably. This is another fine, ghoulish collection of stories and art that I think would please horror fans, folks who like The Walking Dead, who enjoy Lovecraft and Poe and Stephen King and all the better things in life that make us uneasy.

Check these books out! They’re fun and engaging and I think you’ll like them as much as I did. You can find them on amazon.