Who here has played a full game of Chombie Cinema? How did it work? Tell me some tales of fighting against the chombies and how the mechanics facilitated chombie interaction.

Graham

Hey, I've played that one! I should have something...

OK, this happened really early on, something like a year and a half ago. Third game I played or something like that. It was "chombies in SPAAACEEE!!" as the basic premise: most of the characters belonged to this large Enterprise-type general purpose spaceship of a human space federation of some sort, who encountered a space station that had gone mysteriously silent.

(I should mention now: the details are probably a bit smudged, owing to how relatively long ago this was. This is still the one I want to tell, as it was one helluva impressive session. I don't think I misremember anything crucial, but if I do, anybody who was there is free to correct me.)

Now, because I never take the easy way out, my character was "the mysterious girl". (This was before the character cards, and I doubt we'd have used them in a space chombie story, anyway) The one who never has any lines, is ambiguously between childhood and adolescence, and is somehow involved in the dark secrets of the movie, you know. Must be familiar from Japanese cinema. The kicker was, when we were establishing our characters into position at the beginning of the story, I left mine in mystery.

"Is your character on the ship with us, Eero?"

"That's for me to know and you to find out. I might be on the space station, we'll see."

The other characters were this mix of military scifi and anime tropes - a teenage pilot ace, a grim veteran soldier, a female officer, a young sergeant and some politruck traitor or some such. They were all members of the ship crew, so they had an early string of scenes between them - lots of ordering each other around to determine how the authority positions worked out on the ship. I think I used my own first frame to put the teenage pilot and female officer into the same scene or something like that.

I'm not so brave as to have my character skip three rounds of play, though, so on my second frame I entered play. I don't quite off-hand remember which scene it was that I did first, but it was either "mysterious electronic malfunction loops some random footage from the space station into the briefing room AV system" or "your teenage pilot is starting to hear the voice of this girl about his age, and she's calling for help". Either way, I did my first couple of scenes of interaction (and conflicts) as this ghost in the machine (and the mind of the pilot boy), without anybody (me included) really knowing what my character was about, except that she was creepy, innocent and somehow involved with the chombies. As you can probably imagine, the majority of the players had a strong background in Japanese cinema, so that's what we riffed with - it wasn't just chombies in space, it was a Japanese horror movie in space, featuring chombies.

As the story progressed for a half dozen scenes we got into that spot in the game that's familiar to anybody who's played Universalis: we had all these elements like the officer and her second-in-command taking shots at each other, my character sending these unconscious messages for help and that sort of stuff. Then it all clicked into place in a quick sequence of scenes that established her, the female officer, as the clear protagonist of the piece: we did a flashback scene about her participation in the Hongkong Uprising and established that she'd actually had a romantic relationship with the sergeant despite her being capable of most amazing brutality. Later on, after everybody'd met each other and found the chombies, we also had more flashback scenes, and even conflicts in them: those two characters all but stole the show as we followed the development of their romance and heartbreak in Paris, while also having these intersped scenes with the chombies who tried to eat everybody at the space station. The romantic subplot peaked with the couple losing their child to custody due to their interpersonal breakdown.

But I'm getting out of order here. The ship sent this crew of people into the station to look for survivors, yes, and they found my character wandering out there. To be more specific, the female officer and her group found me, as the sergeant (her ex-husband, as we'd already found out) was securing the command bridge. There was quite a bit of tension at this point in the game, owing to the fact that all players are very much custodians of the story in this game - we all dropped hints that the officer somehow felt that my character was familiar, but nobody said anything outright. We were on fire that night, insofar as pacing a story goes.

What developed next was quite a helluva lot of desperation, actually, as the board position was starting to look very threatening for a number of characters. It was also revealed that my character did in fact have some sort of chombie connection - they followed her around and attacked the other characters relentlessly. Some of the characters escaped the space station to their ship, which gave me an opportunity for putting to use a specific scene I'd been treasuring ever since we started the game: a temporary calm, my character in a sightseeing room, large windows to space... and the station shakes as the torpedo hatches all open and shoot hundreds of chombies out to float slowly towards the ship out there. Remember, this was all in Japanese style, so we really didn't know whether my character was somehow causing all this to happen on a subconscious level, or perhaps she could be controlled by some external force... regardless, she was there to see it all when the chombies spat out to reach for the ship in the cold of space.

I played a full game of Djombie Cinema last year with Emily Care Boss, who did an on-the-fly translation of the original Finnish version. At first the aspect of moving play through inter-character conflict wasn’t too intuitive, but by the end of the game, things were just flying.

We went with the Love Boat as our theme, deciding that zombies on a cruise ship would be all kinds of awesome.

Emily’s character was a little boy named Johnny who came on the cruise with his grandfather.
My character was Millie, the hyper-enthusiastic cruise director.
There was another character named Matilda, who had just gone through a messy divorce and whose friends were trying to get her to have some fun.
Of course there was the sleazy middle aged guy trying to pick up younger women.
And lastly there was, I kid you not, Charu. (Played by a guy who looked a lot like Seth – huge, bald, goateed.)

Having a good mix of aggravating and sympathetic characters meant that we didn’t have to work to find conflicts. There were the obvious conflicts, like sleazy middle-aged guy trying to pick up Matilda for a one night stand, or like Millie the cruise director trying to get Charu to play shuffleboard. But then there were less obvious ones, like Johnny trying to get Matilda to make him a costume for the masquerade (“what about a scary ghost? Ooooo…” as Matilda waves a sheet).

Everyone went out of their way to try to make sure that Johnny kept moving away from the zombies, which made it extra tragic that Johnny was the first to get eaten, thanks to Emily’s bad rolling. Twice people sacrificed themselves to move closer to the zombies and get Johnny to safety, but in the end, he got munched.

I very much enjoyed how the zombie pawn advancing caused the zombies to get gradually more overt. I didn’t roll too well either, so Millie got munched while the zombies were still really low key. (She got eaten during the zombie conga line.)

Matilda lasted longer, but even she got eaten before people realized what all was going on. It was actually kind of tragic, because Matilda’s player narrated how she snapped out of her funk and decided that she was going to have some fun on this cruise. So she picked a cute young waiter, who happened to be a zombie, and took him to bed. Munch munch munch.

The interesting thing about having the sympathetic characters get eaten first is that it became a competition between the zombie players to get the character they hated more eaten. In the end, Charu was the only one who managed to escape the zombies – which was sad but pretty appropriate.

I haven't run this yet but fully expect to do an Alfred Hitchcock's "The Birds" hack of Chombie Zinema.

I just finished posting about our Zombie Cinema experience here. But you asked about mechanics. So, here goes....

I really wanted the other characters to survive. My guy wasn't really very nice, and I was much more impressed with the other two. However, due to some early conflicts, I had a fairly substantial lead on the other characters. So, in order to save them, I narrated my character leaping to safety up into a crawlspace in the ceiling and then trying to pull up the ladder after him. Bam! A conflict that the other two characters could oppose together, hopefully winning and therefore both advancing on the game board.

In other words, to be a helpful player, I attacked the other characters. Neat, huh?

Seth Ben-Ezra
Great Wolf

We played on Friday night, three of us (including my friend Jeremy Tidwell, whom some of you at GenCon met). After they turned down the "let's set it right here" idea, we picked a vast apartment/condo highrise on the East Coast. Then we did our character draw -- we made (PCs emphasized) a co-dependent husband with a mean paraplegic wife, a soccer mom with her son & daughter, and (inspired by the cards I go) Tyler Durden, post-Fight Club.

I started by framing a block party as it's getting dusk. We quickly got into a conflict where Tyler was giving out Homework Assignments to the kids in the neighborhood (as I was looking to play a character that was both necessary & initially unsympathetic), and the mom won, revealing him to be giving out assignments to steal from big stores like WalMart with an additional note that there isn't much time.

We had our initial scenes as the zombies were on space 1, and after that first round, things started getting heated up. I think we had one tie, but for the most part every conflict was against Tyler, with the third person supporting or allying against Tyler. And Tyler almost always lost conflicts, which pushed the other two well into Escapehood. That's what really gets me about the game, how well it supports (if the dice agree) the trope of the knowledgeable-but-unsympathetic person helping the others survive, to the point where he's eaten by zombies and they continue to use his survival knowledge without him. It's a lot like what Seth says, about attacking the others to save them. Freakin' fascinating.

That said, there were some tough spots where players started to frame conflicts against NPCs (and occasionally, zombies), and we had to remind ourselves that we needed to frame conflicts with each other if we wanted to escape. After the second time of missing that point as we push our characters towards external conflicts, I turned the "Tyler is an uncaring asshole" vibe up a notch to make sure we always had something to grab onto. I'm looking forward to playing again, now that we've seen how the dynamic works -- this time someone who is more sympathetic.

Also, I'm tempted to hack this for a more mundane, corporate farce game, where you're all employees at a large company, and they're doing layoffs. So, instead of zombies, you have consultants. Very Officespace.

That sounds wonderful. I must play the full thing.

(I am perversely amused to note that, in the tagline for Eero's Forge forum, Zombie Cinema is actually named "Chombie Cinema". Superb.)

Graham