Some games are meant to be epic. Some games are expected to last the entire length of game night. Then there are the fillers, the games you play between games. They last 5-10 minutes and are so short that some people use them to determine who goes first in the next non-filler game. Zombie dice is one of those games. Also, it’s awesome.

Zombie dice is made up of a dice cup and 13 custom dice. Instead of numbers the dice have brains, shotgun blasts and footprints. The players take on the roll of the zombies and are trying to collect brains, avoid shotguns and deal with those pesky runners.

The dice come in three colors to represent how “hard” that particular human is to kill, with a different spread of icons around their six sides. Green ones are easy and have 4 brains, 1 shotgun and 1 footprints. Yellow have 2 of each and Red is the hardest and is the opposite of Green.

On your turn you shake up the dice cup and then grab three dice at random, then rolling them onto the table. The dice are sorted into brains, shotguns and footprints, with brains being worth one point. Then you decide if you’d like to press your luck and go again, rerolling any feet result dice and grabbing however many you need from the cup to have 3. So if you roll a yellow and red and they come up feet if you decide to press your luck you roll those 2 again and pull one from the cup. If you get 3 shotgun blasts you’re dead and lose all the points you got that turn, you need to stop and pass the cup to register those points. First player to 13 wins.

I covered the press your luck mechanic before when I talked about Incan Gold. In that game you’re exploring a cave with other players and need to leave and head safely back to camp before disaster strikes if you want to keep your gold. The goal is to push your luck just far enough without getting your hard stuck in the cookie jar.

Zombie dice does a great job of boiling this mechanic down to it’s bare bones, and serves it up in an uber short game that’s easy to play even while discussing what game you’d like to play that night. I recently played a game while waiting for one more player to show up to get our Dungeons and Dragons game started.

It’s way more fun than a cup of dice has any right to be, and I credit the fun custom icons on the dice. It’s cooler to collect brains and avoid shotguns than it is to chase a particular number, even though you’re essentially doing the same thing. It’s a simple game and is priced as such. It’s definitely worth picking up just to be able to break it out whenever the need for a quick game arises.

You can pick up Zombie Dice from FunagainGames.com or from your Friendly Local Game Store.