Zombie Survival/Betting Game

I really like the central concept of a betting game with a card enhancement. This game could be to liar's dice what Nightmare Chess was to, well, chess.

I totally get that there should be some sort of indicator as to how many survivors you are committing to a particular action. You only have so many people and never enough to do everything 100% every night. My sticking point is the form those take. Do you need poker chips? nearly any token would do; glass beads, coins, etc.. I see your idea about the chips being zombies on one side and survivors on the other, but there are other (not necessarily better) ways of accomplishing that. If the "bank" of tokens always represents the zombies, and the tokens in front of players is always survivors, then the different icons on the chips becomes redundant. You could put something in the rules about how resolving combat requires stacking the zombie chips and the survivor chips side by side, and the bigger stack wins? That or something similar would make the poker chip part of the game mechanics.

Having a set number of zombies attack lessens the tension somewhat. The survivors know how many zombies to expect, which doesn't really gel with the fear of the unknown that zombies bring with them. Maybe keep the dice rolling, but adjust it in a way that randomizes how many zombies attack.

If you want to incorporate a cooperative+competitive aspect, one way of doing this would be to dedicate 2 central zones of play that represent rescue and scavenge, and a zone in front of each player for defense. Each player adds their chips to the central zones (each one would need their tokens to be colored i guess) and plays their face down cards. Then night falls and the zombies come out. A dice roll would indicate how many zombies attacked the rescue and scavenge pool, removing those tokens from that zone. The defense pool could help in some way to mitigate those totals. The dice could indicate how many survivors are lost that night. The ones left go back to their safe zone (the players) and they gather their winnings for the night; Item cards, more survivors, etc. The cooperative aspect would be in the total number of survivors in the pool; the more tokens in any single pool increases the chances of them all getting through the night. A player could play nice to help everyone survive and profit, or play dirty and cast few/no tokens in one pool and watch his opponents get torn apart. A card could even let you pull back some/all of your tokens from a single pool, betraying the other players, who thought they were safe due to the high population of the pool.

An alternative is to keep all three zones open to attack, and have the defense pool represent the players home base. How many survivors will you leave back to make sure the others have a safe zone to come back to? It's a bigger gamble this way to send out your survivors, as each one sent out means one less to defend the base. Some item cards could be base only, like non-portable offensive and defensive items. You could incorporate a rule that covers what happens if the base is overrun, maybe they lose half their pool of survivors. A dreidel rule incorporated into a zombie survival game is funny, but appropriate.

Face down cards could adjust how many of your survivors are lost/gained by the attack, or could throw another's players under the bus, as it were. They don't necessarily need to outrun the zombies, just the other players.