Give Me The Brain! A Fast-Food Zombie Card Game

Imagine you and your friends all work at Friedey's, a fast-food restaurant. You have a bunch of tasks to do, but once you've finished your tasks, you can go home. There are just one catch.

You and your friends are all zombies. And there's only one brain between you.

That's the basic premise for the card game. Each player starts with a given number of cards, and there's a draw pile and a discard pile. Some of the cards are task cards, and some of the cards are bid cards (like the one pictured here). On your turn, you can do a task. But if the task requires the brain (as indicated on the card); you have to have the brain (represented by the die).

You get the brain by bidding on it with your bid cards. Each card has a value, and explains why you need the brain more than any other Zombie. When the brain is up for bids; the highest bid wins. The brain comes up for bids whenever it's dropped. Each time anyone does a task that requires the brain, he or she or it (we're talking about the Undead, after all) must roll the die to see if the brain gets "dropped," and can be picked up by the highest bidder. If you don't drop the brain, you get to keep it until your next turn....unless it's stolen. (Zombies are kind of an amoral lot.)

The first zombie to "complete all his tasks" by getting rid of all his cards wins. The game almost always takes under an hour, and often runs closer to 30 minutes.

Friedey's Fast Food, its undead staff, and all the associated games are the invention of James Ernest of Cheapass Games. James claims to be a 9-foot tall breakdancing aficionado, although his photograph provides no scale to guarantee this. What we can confirm about James is that he is the absolutely brilliant founder of the aforementioned Cheapass Games, launched in 1996 to great critical acclaim. The Cheapass principle was that most games require many identical things - i.e., markers, dice, money - and the only creative component that must be published and paid for is the rules and any game-specific board or cards. Original Cheapass Games were printed in black ink on colored cardstock (like the ones in my pictures), and sold in paper envelopes for under $10.00. Fans loved them, but shops did not - envelopes don't stand up well to sitting on a shelf and being handled, so the games weren't desirable to have in stock.

Cheapass Games folded after about 10 years, and James Ernest was forced to labor in zombie-like conditions in the computer industry. But like a salt lick for a zombie, a new indifference to personal wealth and comfort has allowed him to return to the independent gaming business, and revive Cheapass Games under a new model: Free Games! The serious part of the website explains: for a $25 game, the designer would receive about $1 in royalties. If you print the rules and board or cards yourself and make up the rest of the game from parts you already have, you can play it and see if you like it. If you do, send a donation to the designer, and keep the rest - everyone wins!

Give Me The Brain, however, has left James' tender care. It was far to well-loved to allow it to wallow as some out-of-print rarity while poor James was a computer guru, so Steve Jackson Games took over the publishing. They're the ones who make the full-color edition available through Amazon.

A game about zombies with only one brain has to be pretty simple to play. You can download the Give Me The Brain rules, if you'd like to check them out before you buy the game. I wouldn't recommend modifying the game much - it's pretty smooth to play as it is. If you have first-time players, it's nice to go over all the different cards, because there are some special cards in the pack that are pretty powerful.

Of course, it's not whether you win or lose, it's how you play the game that counts. That's especially true here. Your Friedey's experience will be much more fun if you set some standards for gameplay:
1. When bidding, everyone must read the reason for the bid out loud, in his/her best zombie voice.
2. When playing a task card, the player must read any accompanying text - again with the zombie voice.
3. If the "Brain Baseball" card is played, everyone must sing "Take Me Out To The Ball Game" until Brain Baseball is over.

Also, while the die represents the brain, and the Third Edition even comes with a nice brain-gray die; my friends and I really like to have something more brainy to indicate who has The Brain. See if you can find a squishy brain or something. Having a brain on the table makes card parties so much more elegant, don't you think?