RE: Your Brains – The Card Game

All a zombie wants is a brain to munch.

Too bad the humans don’t want to give them up. We have all seen it before, the zombie hordes march against the panicked humans. The humans eventually entrench and rally then start blowing away the poor hungry masses of undead. But what if there was a different way? A more civilized way of resolving this tired old conflict? What if we could negotiate instead?

RE: Your Brains is based on the hit song by Jonathan Coulton.

Players take on the roles of the Zombie and the survivor negotiating the brain eating situation. The zombie just wants a hot meal and is trying to convince the survivor to open the door and be that meal, meanwhile the Survivor just wants to go about his life in peace and would love to convince the zombie to go bother some other poor fool, or better yet just stop shambling around all together. To do this players take turns making arguments based on a set of cards in their hands. The only limitation is the mood of the card played, the content is entirely up to the players.

RE: Your Brains is a fast playing two player game that is as much fun to watch as it is to play and you will often get help from the peanut gallery as you try to debate, cajole, and threaten your way to victory.

There are three aspects to playing RE: Your Brains.

1st is the rock, paper, scissors mechanic. There are three types of arguments to be made, Logical, Emotional, and Aggressive, ranging from values of 2-8. Logical arguments get a +2 bonus against Emotional arguments and -2 penalty against Aggressive, Emotional arguments get a +2 bonus against Aggressive and -2 against Logical, and Aggressive arguments get a +2 against Logical and -2 against Emotional. The bonus or penalty applies to the card being played, not the card on the stack. As long as the value is higher with the applied bonus or penalty (or neither if they're the same type of argument), you can play that card in response.

2nd is the roleplaying aspect. Every time you play a card, you must make an argument of the type of argument you played. Hence, if you're the zombie, you might make an 3 value Emotional plea of "We've always been such good friends, and I would hate to have you be ripped to shreds by some other zombies. Let me eat your brain, and I'll turn you into a zombie so we can be friends forever!" and as the survivor you might reply with a 2 value Logical argument which is actually a 4 against the previous 3 emotional and say something like "One would think if you were truly my friend you would defend me from these other zombies, or at the very least stop trying to eat my brain."

3rd is the trick-taking mechanic. To win the game, you must win 5 arguments Each player starts the argument with a hand of 5 cards and uses those cards to make their argument. When they can no longer beat the argument on the table (or if they choose not to), the last person to play a card wins that argument. You may play two cards of the same argument type to overcome an existing argument. If a player completely runs out of cards and has no more to respond to their opponent's argument, they lose.