How to Play: Humans Vs. Zombies
A multi-day campus tag game of bandanas, foam darts and rolled-up socks. Its creators explain how a failed Assassins variant became an infection.
An infectious campus hit, Humans Vs. Zombies, or HVZ, is a giant multi-day tag game which pits a Human team against a Zombie team until the Humans are all turned—or the Zombies die out. This deeply strategic, sneaky, and stealthy game was created at Goucher College in 2005 by Chris Weed and Brad Sappington. Weed, moderator and designer Max Temkin, and developer and moderator Joe Sklover—who now run the game through their company, Gnarwhal Studios—agreed to share their insights.
“The original game we came up with was sort of like Assassins, where you had teams and you had to shoot the other players…[but] it was very subjective as to whether you’d actually snuck up on someone. By all accounts it was pretty much a failure. After that game we were talking about what to do next, and someone mentioned zombies.”—Chris Weed
