Developer: Broken Bulb Studios
Popularity: High
Needs Download?: No.
Kid-friendly: As much as zombies can be. There’s no gore, and the zombies are emaciated rather than actually decayed, but you’ll see the occasional (bloodlessly) severed limb.
Need lots of friends: No, although having a few is well worth it for the minigames.
Spammy: No. You occasionally find items that you can post to your friends’ walls, and you can brag a fair bit and send gifts, but that’s it.
Need to buy in: As in almost every tournament-style game, spending cash will get you a substantial advantage. It’s easy to play without, but you will get outrageously facerolled from time to time by the folks who do.


Overview: Braaains is the latest dueling game from the makers of Ninja Warz and Office Wars. It’s very much the same game, just with a zombie theme – you can pretty much pick your poison between the three games and have a very similar experience.

Braaains has the same basic setup as Office Wars – build an army of dudes, equip them with weapons and clothes, select a few buffs, and send them into battle against other folks’ armies. The zombie theme is cute, but it’s essentially the exact same game. It’s not a bad game, mind – there are enough different variables between army size, four different stats, weapons, armor, and two kinds of buffs for a math nerd to have a blast figuring out how to min-max it, and there are plenty of achievements to shoot for. But Braaains is not a new game, except for the aesthetics.

Having friends gives you access to daily minigames. These may be the best part of Braaains. There’s a Breakout clone, a sort of Centipede-themed game where you are the centipede, and a matching game that’s surprisingly challenging. You can only play them once a day per friend, and which game is offered for each friend is random, but they’re definitely worth checking out. The XP and gold rewards at the low levels are also substantial, although they don’t seem to scale.

The one really substantial difference is that in Braaains, unlike Office Wars and Ninja Warz, you do not have the option to buy items that give you the real-money currency over time. This will have a very, very substantial long-term impact on the game. In, say, Ninja Warz, at level 15 you could save up some of your Karma to get an item that would give you a couple Karma per day. Then you could go away for a week, come back, train up all your ninja, and be substantially more powerful than before – without leveling at all. Office Wars has the same mechanic. In Braaains, the only way to get that kind of advantage will be to outright pay for Brains. It will be very interesting to see how this shakes out in the long term.

The heart of the matter is, if you like Ninja Warz or Office Wars, you’ll probably feel exactly the same way about Braaains. It’s probably the best game to start out with, due to the removal of the seriously unbalancing items mentioned above, and zombies are definitely trendy right now, too. It’s worth a look!