Tuesday 8 December 2009

Beaten by a 4 year old

The other evening I got a chance to play the board game Zombies! which I bought while I was at Dragonmeet in November. The game fulfilled an important function, saving the family from another evening of rubbish TV. So we all sat down to play the game, including my 4 year old daughter, Emily. Yes I know, maybe a game about zombies is a little 'scary' for a four year old, but she's a gamer in training... she can already name most of the monsters in the Monster Manual so a few Zombies are nothing to her.

Unfortunately, being a gamer in training means that games like Snakes and Ladders just don't cut it with her now. She may have needed help reading the cards but she's a canny tactician and definitely didn't need help figuring out a winning strategy for this game. Basically while the rest of us were fighting zombies and trying to collect bullets or health tokens (and getting mauled in the process) she just kept running. She didn't play a single action card or fight a single Zombie but instead concentrated on running away as fast as possible.

So when the Helipad card was revealed the rules said the player with the least number of zombie kills can decide where to place the location...and she placed it right next to her. So when she made a dash for the helipad she did so with three lives and three bullets in reserve. She easily cut through the two zombies in her direct path and won the game fair and square.

Emily had quickly learned that Humans are faster than Zombies and had thereby stumbled upon the unwritten rule of surviving a Zombie plague... never stop running.

2 comments:

  1. That's actually really interesting. Everyone who watches Zombie films always says "Why aren't they just running?!". And then when we get into a situation, for example the game you played or Left 4 Dead, we just do the same thing and fight. It's as if children are already aware of Occam's Razor from birth :P

    ReplyDelete
  2. Sounds like a pretty fun game; I've never heard of it before. My family was (and still is) very competitive so we rarely sat down to board games because there would always be some big dispute and family fall out.

    Can you recommend any other good board games?

    ReplyDelete

Thank you for leaving a comment. I always try to reply as soon as I can, so why not pop back later and continue the conversation. In the meantime, keep rolling high!