🧟Zombie Sleepover

Controls

The stick and button 1 are enough to play. The rest add moves for the older kids.

How a round goes

Five nights, each a little longer than the last, from thirty seconds to forty, with a fourteen-second day between them. The house sits in the middle with the cake inside it; the horde comes from every edge, and there are more windows than children to stand at them. On your own you defend two windows, at two players three, otherwise four.

Night: the doors shut and you are inside. Each window has three boards. Zombies queue at the sill and chew through the top board; when the last board goes the window is breached and they climb in one at a time. The horde does not attack evenly — more than half of it leans on one wall, and that wall changes every few seconds. Button 1 hits a zombie in reach; with no zombie in reach it hammers the window you are standing at. At a window with nothing left, hammering wins: you slam a plank across the hole with zombies hanging off the sill and take the bites while you do it. A new board costs a plank; re-nailing a chewed one is free.

Inside, a zombie bites the cake. Ordinary bites are small — one zombie alone takes about half a minute to finish it — but the cake is shared, and when it is gone the run is over, whatever night it is. A kid out of hearts is out for the rest of that night, slumped by the couch; everybody comes back at dawn with full hearts, automatically.

Day: the light comes up, the doors open, and there are no zombies. Every fallen zombie dropped loot — scrap, planks or candy — and you pick it up by walking over it. Hammer boards back on, and spend scrap at the workbench on the patio: a bigger bat, an extra heart, more glowsticks, or tougher boards for the whole house. At dawn everyone also gets a plank and a glowstick.

The zombies are party guests who turned: round green blobs in party hats. Shamblers are slow and ordinary. Runners are fast and thin. Crawlers are low enough to slip through any window that has lost even one board, and they do not stop to chew. Brutes take two boards a swing and cannot be shoved. On night five the Big One walks in: it takes a whole window off in one hit, and your bat bounces off it until it is lured, winding up, or head-down in the cake.

Scoring and winning

Co-op: the whole table wins or loses together. Points are personal, and a board nailed on is worth more than any ordinary zombie, so the kid who spent the night repairing finishes level with the kid who spent it swinging. Surviving a night pays everyone.

Win by reaching the end of night five, or by bringing the Big One down, which ends the night on the spot. Lose when the cake is gone. The card names the top scorer and how much of the cake survived; alone, your score goes to the leaderboard.

Tips

• Standing still at one window is always the wrong plan. Listen for 'the east window is going!' and move.
• The shove buys seconds and never kills — often enough to save a window, rarely enough to replace the bat. It does nothing to a Brute.
• The glowstick is the co-op tool: zombies walk to it and stop chewing, which is how a team saves a collapsing window and the only honest answer to the Big One.
• Holding button 1 swings exactly as fast as mashing it. Timing beats mashing, and mashing never beats holding.
• Candy heals a heart; picked up on full hearts it is worth big points instead, so it is always worth the sprint.