Zombie Trivia - A mini-game design

Edit: Ack! Fixed questions link

The weekly Escobedo game night has started having a pub quiz, where one person writes some questions and brings a prize, and everyone else tries to answer them. Angela took it up a notch by adding a bingo element, where the question numbers cooresponded to a bingo grid. After all the questions were read, the answers were read in random order, and if you got one right you could mark the appropriate spot on your bingo grid, trying to get a bingo. It was a nice twist, and worked really well.

The next week it was my turn, and I came up with 13 zombie-inspired questions for Halloween. The side game took place after players wrote down their answers, as follows:

- Each round, each person gets 2 zombies.
- An answer is read. If you get it right, kill 3 zombies of your choice.
- Each player gets one card off the top of a traditional deck of cards for each zombie they have left in front of them.
- Repeat.

Cards are face-down, but when a player gets 5 red cards they die. Dead players' zombies go away, but their future allotment of two zombies are split among their neighbors. So it can be in your best interest to kill adjacent players' zombies and keep them alive. Or just be sitting next to better trivia players :)

In my case, whoever survived the longest won the side prize, though the main, do-the-quiz-next-week winner was still whoever got the most questions right in the end.

Balancing it was tricky, since the whole game could be over in like 4 rounds if nobody got the first handful of questions, and I didn't want everyone to survive to the end - but I didn't know how tough my questions were going to be for people. But everyone died around question 9, which was acceptable, if a little bit too fast. Once the first person dies, things get out of control fast, but that seems about right. It might need tweaking to really work.

Anyway, you could theoretically play it with any old trivia cards, competitively or cooperatively, but I don't know if its really all that fun, execpt as a twist on just-trivia. It does sort of make me want to build a cooperative trivia game, somewhat in the spirit of the cooperative pictionary game. On some level, the basic premise is the same: each turn each player succeeds-or-not at some test, then outer game conditions get better or worse as a result.

As a bonus, here's my notes I jotted down, containing my questions and the answers - Robin was the winner with a score of 9 out of 13, beating Garik on the tiebreaker, though Garik got the last laugh by winning the Zombie portion by a nose. It seems like there should be a joke there, but there's not.

Questions - Answers