The Shelf That Will Not Stay Dead
Something has been scratching at the archive door. The Keeper knows the sound — he has shelved enough of these to recognise the particular impatience of the recently buried. This cycle’s crate came sealed in barbed wire and smelling faintly of the lagoon, and when it was prised open the dead spilled out in every dialect the genre speaks: plastic hordes, wooden cubes, cardboard shamblers, and one necromantic dragon too large for any drawer.
This is the undead shelf, and it is a restless one. Here the survivors are always outnumbered and the night is always longer than the day. Some of these boxes hand you a whole town to fortify and a modular map to build it on; others sink a city into a monster’s back and give you three days to run. A few, the Keeper notes with a certain fondness, are honest about being more B-movie than masterpiece — pulp loot, trash-cinema encounters, and the cheerful understanding that surviving until dawn was never really the point.
A thread runs through the lot: the best of them are the ones you play against yourself, driving the shambling horde with a cunning it was never quite given on the box. Rescued that way, more than one of these came back to life on the Keeper’s own table.
Exhibit Catalogue — eleven dispatches from the long night, earliest first:
- Zombicide Black Plague: Friends and Foes and No Rest for the Wicked — a necromantic dragon that stomps tiles flat and vomits zombies onto your heroes.
- Let’s Objectify Some Plastic - featuring Zombicide Invader — a whole squad chosen for which movie each mini is secretly cosplaying.
- Zombicide Invader - Review — a fond farewell: a beautifully made game that was simply never his.
- One thing I love about this solo, zombie/survival RPG (The Walking Dead Universe RPG) — Free League’s take, held up for the single thing it does best.
- One thing I love about… The Walking Dead: Here’s Negan — a narrative skirmish that earns its place beside Last Night on Earth.
- Carnival Zombie Second Edition - A Low Effort Unboxing — Venice built on the back of a waking leviathan, one manageable box.
- Carnival Zombie 2nd Edition - Initial Thoughts on the agonizing choices! — a corpse-pile dexterity game where the dead you drop climb back out.
- Pandemonium - A few things I like about this flawed horror survival game — a love letter to trash cinema; superb decks, do not pay collector prices.
- Last Night on Earth - Soloing the Zombie Apocalypse! — the game his group rejected, resurrected as a superb solo delve.
- Last Night on Earth - the web-exclusive expansions — five overnight parcels of extra scenarios; Revenge of the Dead the pick.
- ZomBN1 - A Game all About Brighton, With Zombies! — the undead apocalypse, rendered lovingly in one English seaside town.
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– The Keeper
Observes that the survivors on this shelf never truly win — they merely last until morning — and suspects this is why the archivist, who has lasted a great many mornings himself, keeps such careful company with them.