One of my favorite games to play during a lull in conversation is ‘Zombie Apocalypse…RIGHT NOW.’ Yeah. You have to say it that way, just how you read it.

How do you play Zombie Apocalypse…RIGHT NOW, you ask? It’s simple. Imagine zombie apocalypse happening right here, right now, wherever you are. Let’s say you’re in a mall with your significant other chowing down on some lo mein. They’d say ‘Zombie Apocalypse…RIGHT NOW.’ Then you’d do your best to explain what you’d do if the zombie apocalypse began right at that very moment. The other people at the table play devil’s advocate and try to throw a wrench into your plans. You choose to go that way? “Nope, zombie in the doorway.” That kind of thing.

Of course, you make it what you want it to be. That’s what makes it fun. You set up parameters to the scenario that would make it more or less difficult. Let’s go back to the mall example. You’d say something like ‘That dude over there in the red hat. He hasn’t been feeling good all day, and he just dies and turns into a zombie right now. He’s the only one.’

But instead of keeping it simple, you can up the ante a bit. Say, the zombie apocalypse started…two miles away as soon as you got to the mall and you hadn’t heard about it. By now, it’s had time to grow in size, there are at least 150 zombies running rampant in the surrounding area. You look over and sure enough, one runs in the door to the mall and bites its first victim.

There are other things to take into account, too. What kind of zombies are we talking about? Fast zombies? Slow zombies? Shambling zombies that have broken ankles? Zombies that can climb on top of each other and make huge pyramids to scale 100-foot-high walls? Or my personal favorite from the Japanese zombie anime High School of the Dead: the blind zombies that can only find you by sound.

It might sound simple, and depending on your imagination, it might be, but there’s a lot to think about. Do you have any weapons around you? Should you hole up where you’re at, or try to get away? Do you have enough supplies to last for a while? Where will you go if you do leave?

Kelsey and I always have the same end game – we’re trying to end up at her grandma’s house in Missouri. The middle of nowhere (and I do mean the middle of nowhere) is a great spot to be for the zombie apocalypse. It’s getting there that’s the trick. We’ll have to go through quite a few somewheres to get to nowhere. It takes about 13 hours to get from here to there, but a lot can happen in 13 hours, especially going through some of the most heavily populated cities in the middle US. Oklahoma City, Austin, Dallas, St. Louis…they’d all prove to be pretty difficult, depending on how bad the outbreak had gotten while we were on the road.

That’s if we can even get on the road. I mean, we don’t live downtown, but there would be quite a bit of traffic, even living on the outskirts of the city. So we’d either have to stay where we are (she’s near the Med Center, not the most ideal place to be during a zombie apocalypse), or try to make it back to our apartment, a virtually undefendable first-floor joint with a forest behind it. But we’ve got plans. WE’VE GOT PLANS.

We’re by no means crazy preppers that have legit written out plans for every scenario imaginable. We don’t horde food and water in preparation for the end of days. I know zombies aren’t real and that the dead will never walk the earth…but it’s still a fun game to play.

So next time you’re bored with a big group of friends, or even just with you and your SO, go ahead and give ‘Zombie Apocalypse…RIGHT NOW’ a try. Make it your own, change up scenarios, and see what happens. Let me know what happens and what kind of crazy stuff happens during your game.