Testing Grekwood Zombie Rules PART 1

My last post showed how we roughly set up the table, so now we’re all ready to go into action. Using our FREE downloadable fast play rules (which will be online in the next few days), we mention that any zeds in the open on the playing surface would automatically be attracted to the survivors.  I’m not going to give a play by play account of what happened, so I won’t bore you with all the specifics, but you can get all those from the rules!  For ease of play we assumed all the starting zombies were walkers.

So we begin:

TURN 1:

Our four heroes: Adele, Ben, Gina and Xavier pulled up in their car, with their head count trophies neatly stored in the back. The actual street seemed quiet. Everything seemed clear but there was an almighty ruckus coming from the back alley behind the houses to their left. 

The group moved cautiously down the road. But unknown to them, there was a zombie in the house to their left. 

We rolled for priority using a 20 sided dice, and unfortunately the zombie was first to strike. This meant he caught the survivors by surprise (never good on your first move!). The house zombie therefore entered the street but luckily he was rubbish and failed to bite Ben [the closest survivor to him].

Ben “baseball bat”, alerted by the noise of the approaching zombie, manages to spin around and clobber him with his bat and lands a critical hit! The zombie is no more…  One down 7 billion to go whoo hooo!

Meanwhile…. the zombies in the back alley have sensed there are survivors near, and begin to pile into the back gardens and rear of the nearby houses (You can roll to see if doors are open/unlocked, or you can assume all are open).

The rest of the zombies on the playing surface now move towards the survivors, in as straight a line as possible. Since the survivors were taken by surprise by the first zombie, we needed to see how it affected their morale. So we rolled, and everyone failed!!!. The gang, now scared, automatically started to run away… well, that was a quick game!

Rather than running off the board or jumping back in their car [as would be normal], we decided to leg it down the road towards the petrol tanker (which appeared clear).

TURN 2:

Since our survivors are routing, they have to be dealt with first. Being startled they ran down the road at maximum speed towards the lorry which meant they are unable to shoot.

All the zombies therefore continue to head directly towards the survivors. The party zombies in the alley way continue to move towards the survivors previously known location as they can’t see them. This means they are now moving through the houses!

We now checked to see if more zombies appear on the board… but luck is on our side, and no new zeds appear!

Morale is tested once again at the end of the turn to check if the rout is stopped. One zed is within 8”, but there are obstacles in the way and nothing to “startle” them. No survivors are injured, so using the necessary modifiers (please see rules) every survivor manages to recover from the rout. Yay!

TURN 3:

Having recovered from the rout, the survivors get their bearings and become aware of the party zombies piling out of the house by their car. Nooo!! That’s the get-a-way vehicle is now compromised! (Photo left)

The gang of survivors decide to move forward at a normal pace [Each type of movement has it’s own modifier for combat].

Using the cars as a shield, they decide to shoot at the closest zombie to them, the “shopping lady zed” (image below). Adelle from Admin is quick to fire but misses, but Ben hits and wounds the zed. He turns to Adelle, smiles, and says “Yeaahh! That’s ‘ow it’s done”. Being wounded the shopping lady zed is now reduced from a walker to a stumbler as the shot didn’t kill her. Gina 2 guns attempts to finish the zed off but also misses!! Luckily Xavier shoots and kills. Yep… the men saved the day (the women had better stats on paper!) So that's two zeds down!! 

The zombies all move at a regular zombie pace and the new arrivals are calculated using the zombie reinforcement table. Zombies will enter the board at 5 locations, these being location 5, 1, 5, 3 and 3 again. Rolling a 6 sided dice, we determined how many turn up at each location. 12 new zombies appeared in total. They were as follows:

5 at location 5, 6 at location 3, and finally 1 lonely zombie at location 1.

TURN 4:

After the combined successful killing of the shopping lady, the survivors continued to walk cautiously up to the next car (the black one), where they were faced with more zombies coming from around the corner of the local store. Adelle decides to shoot first at the female zombie which is getting a little too close. She manages to wound her, and Ben quickly follows up with a killing shot. Xavier tries his luck and shoots at the other close zombie... He scores a critical hit! 

Gina “2 Guns”, with no zombies too close, decides to go for a long range shot, and unbelievably scores a hit which kills a zombie all the way in Dragon Park! Seems like the girls are getting their own back on the lads!!

The zombies all move closer again, with more zombies appearing on the table at 4 different locations, these being locations 1, 1, 4 and 3. A total of 11 new zombies appeared. 4 appeared at location 1, 4 at location 4, and finally 3 at location 3.

Turn 5:

The party zombie horde behind the survivors seems to be growing quickly, so the survivors decide that they desperately need to put some extra distance between them. They move to a  jogging pace which gives them a negative modifier when shooting. They see that there are zombies to their right coming around the side of the local store so they have 2 options:

1)      Attempt to kill the oncoming store zombies and get to the local store (plan B) with no idea what’s inside or,

2)      Head straight towards the lorry which looks clear, but they are not sure if there is anything on the other side.

After some quick thinking, they decide to head towards the clearer area by the left of the  lorry and take out some zombies. Since they are now jogging, they have a -1 modifier to their skill level. We rolled to see who gained priority and who was able to shoot first (this isn’t essential, but it can help if you are keeping score of zombie kills/ammo etc). Gina and Ben both shoot and miss by a mile! (Gina rolled a 20, and Ben rolled 19!). Xavier managed to kill the male zombie sporting the yellow tank top, and Adele managed to wound another. 

The zombies etch closer and their groans become louder and louder. Fresh zombies appear at 2 locations, bringing a total of 8 new zombies to the board.

TURN 6:

Adele decides to move cautiously to the corner of the houses to get a better look of what lurks around the corner. It’s not good…there are more zombies coming from the 5^th entry point.  Xavier slowly walks towards the lorry, with Gina closely following behind. Ben moves in-between both Adele and Xavier. 

Xavier and Ben both shoot but somehow miss!!! Noo!!!!!!! Luckily, Adele (with a + modifier since she’s moving slowly), and, Gina save the day and both score hits which kill. Another one for the girls!

The zombies all move again, but only 4 new zombies appear at 2 different locations.

Now with a large horde of zombies coming at them from behind, two smaller groups coming from either side, and a lorry blocking their view of the front...what will they do next?! ...Stay turned...

I don't want to make these posts too long, so in a day or two I will post another with the second half! I will leave you with a photo of the party horde coming up the road from the rear as you can see the side horde in the above photo.

Cheers  to everyone who has taken the time to read this so far. Any comments are welcome!

Setting up: Using Grekwood Zombie Rules

Some of you may know that we (Grekwood Minis) have created some zombie rules. So last week we tested them out and played a demo game. I will use this post to explain how the demo game went, and how we set everything up!

So here we go, (Click all images to zoom)

 

The first thing we did was lay out the game surface (right), then select the type of game we were going to play. This may sound a reverse way of doing things, but it actually stops you introducing preconceived ideas into your layout as you have no idea what scenario you’re going to play during set-up.

We wanted to keep things random, so we rolled to see which of the five game styles we would play. We got the Salvage and Scavenging scenario. Therefore the aim seemed quite simple. We had placed our hospital building PDF in the top right corner of the table so it seemed logical to mount a scavenger raid on it.

Our earlier helicopter recon showed the ‘Zed Zone’ to have a low level of activity and since the copter was low on fuel we’d have to go in by ground transport. Since we’ve played a couple of games before we knew that the chances of success for our Plan A was usually quite low (we like a challenge!), so we always do a back-up plan. So Plan B was to visit the local store “Greksco”, grab a few beers, toilet rolls, toothpaste and some tins of grub if we get blocked in!

Ok, so the next step was to decide how many player characters [survivors] we were going to have. We chose four, two men, two women (we wanted to keep things even!). So here's a photo of them: 

We did all the roles for skill level, health etc and we came up with the following: Rather than giving all their stats, I've summed it up:

Baseball Ben is the best fighter and most skilled but his health and morale are basically average.

Adele From Admin is probably the number two as she’s above average in almost all respects, being the fittest of the group with an above average morale.

Xavier is the ‘extrovert’ of the group. No-one knows his real name, and no-one cares to push the issue. He’s the third most skilful being a tad above average, but despite his flamboyant nature he’s suffering some chronic health issues which means he doesn't like to close on the ‘zeds’, preferring to fight at a distance, as a result he has the lowest morale of the group.

Gina ‘two guns’ is pretty much an average type but her ego is big, giving her the highest morale of all, she’s a girl with attitude and wants to prove she’s tougher than the rest. 

Now that was done, we needed to put the ‘team’ in place. Since the prime objective is to reach the hospital, we inserted the group on the left edge of the playing surface. Like I said, we wanted to make things difficult and that’s the furthest away from our objective. From looking at the table, we were able to identify four insertion points here – two roads [A & C] and two alleyways [B & D]. So we rolled the die and found they enter at C, allowing them to drive the vehicle onto the table (Cool vehicle shown below).

Our next problem was to work out where the ‘zeds’ are and how many. So we do our rolls and find we have 20 ‘zeds’ on the access/entry points and a further 28 on the ‘grid’ (rest of the playing surface). Luckily we got some really low rolls here which meant there weren't many ‘zeds’ on table at the start…always good news! The ‘zeds’ have five entry points [1-5], they can’t use alley B as it’s been fenced off and they won’t get through that way. Also they can’t use the PC insertion point either (aka C).

So rolling on the Zombie reinforcement table (in our rules) we rolled a 6 which means the ‘zeds’ appear at three separate entry locations. Rolling for these we find they are points 2, 4 and 4 again. With 20 ‘zeds’ we split these between the three entry points as best we could, giving 7 at point 2 and 13 at point 4… umm maybe there’s a party or something happening?! Here's a photo:

In the photo, entry point 4 shows 16 zombies... (it's a mistake, we removed 3 after this photo)

Next we have 28 ‘zeds’ to go on the ‘grid’. The grid is formed by the basic tile system we use [at Grekwood Minis]. These tiles form a visible grid on the playing surface and by using a ‘battleships or chess board’ type system where we letter or number the game area edges, we can identify any individual 6x6 tile.

Our table was 8 tiles by 13, but we ignored the far right column as it was far away from our entry point and makes rolls easier as most gamers probably have a 1d12 [if not a random number generator on the internet will do the roll for you]. We used a 1d8 for the depth (8 tiles) and 1d12 for the front edge of our area (12 tiles). Once we pinpointed a tile, we rolled a 1d6 [for the number of ‘zeds’ present per tile) and placed the resulting number on that tile. We did this until we used up all 28 zeds!

  

When a zombie appeared on a tile occupied by a building, we placed them on the roof to indicate their position [this is for illustrative purposes –in a game their positions would simply be noted by the games master].

Okie dokie, that’s the set up done. It sounds long but I wanted to explain it well as this might be used for reference if people used our rules.

My next post will have the game in it…so stay tuned!

Please vote for my small business!

It's been one month since my last blog post, so here's one!

VOTE FOR MY SMALL BUSINESS... please??
A friend of mine who runs a small illustration business entered a give-away the other day. It's for Small UK Businesses, and there are 10 prizes of £1000 and 1 grand prize of £5000. The 10 x £1000 prizes are being given out throughout November and December, with the final 3 and the "grand prize" being given out on December 11th.

So, being a very small business which is very much in need of help, I decided to enter. So please could you vote for my business?

The link to vote is here (it's not spam...despite looking weird... but it is safe I promise): http://bit.ly/1hJSoKW

You don't have to sign up to anything, or provide any details or do anything. You just load the page, scroll (if you need to) and click the button which says "vote for us". It's that simple!

You can vote everyday if you want. You don't have to, but it would help increase the chances :)

Oh and I uploaded an unedited photo...urgghh, and I can't change it...so that kinda annoys me, but it's my own fault for not paying attention!

It should look like this:

I painted both of those... it's some of my best paint work :D

If I Win?
I've pretty much assumed I won't win the £5000 grand prize. I think I'm unlikely to win the £1000, but it's more likely than the £5000. If I won anything, it would help fund some more miniatures, and I may venture into the whole digital "sculpting" thing which many companies seem to be doing... even though they don't really need to as they have plenty of real sculpting talent anyway. I personally don't class it as "sculpting", but more as "computer design" as you are not physically sculpting any more, but yeah, maybe i'll be good at that since I am a computer geek lol

PDF Houses
If you haven't already seen, I've been working on some pdf houses. They are small, and mainly for scenery, but the roof can be taken off if you want for figures to be places inside. But it's not big enough to play games inside, it's purely for show and reference.

Here's a photo

Ok, that's all for now, cheers for reading. ...and please vote for meee :)

Painted Zombies and Armour

I finally finished painting the new costume zombies. I decided to base them on clear bases/counters as they interfere less with the scenery and overall look of the gaming table.

CLICK TO ZOOM

Click to ZOOOM

Speaking of counters/bases, I decided to buy in some transparent coloured counters/bases, as I thought they might be useful as either coloured bases, or markers/identifiers in games. They can easily be painted on, or scenery can be glued to them, so they can be customised to whatever you want.

Personal Armour!

I have been busy building my Mass Effect armour. The frame for the mannequin was built using plastic tubes, and then a stand for it to "stand up".

Below are two photos showing the progress! I have made the 2 bicep pieces, chest piece and the cod piece. and the second photo shows the detailed back piece with spine detail which was difficult to cut out.

Apart from that nothing much is happening. I haven't really done much business stuff this week as it's been fun making the armour...

Anyway, that is all for today I think,

Hope you enjoy!

New Zombies, Painted Zombies, Armour, and a Manikin.

Hi everyone,

I've been a bit quiet around here so here's a large-ish blog for you :)

Miniature Stuff
The "Costume" zombies are now available on the website!! Yay! I was excited when sculpting these as they were kind of fun. I'm currently in the process of painting some up for the website, and here is a WIP photo of what I have done today :)

I have also been painting up all of the WGF zombies over the past few weeks (I haven't touched them in about a week or so), which were also fun to make up. Below are images of the male horde and then the zombie vixens. The male horde come with tiny bases, so they have been based on 30mm to in-keep with our zombies.

A nice colourful bunch I think you would agree!

Personal Stuff:
I have been building some Mass Effect Armour for fun using a combination of EVA foam tiles and "funky foam" sheets.

I found some templates, so I resized them, and cut them out. I then carved out some areas and covered them over with bits of funky foam (dark black parts) to give more detail.



Once everything was cut out, I used a soldering iron to burn lines into the abs area and chest pieces (the dark lines).

I then used a heat gun (purchased for £15 from Tesco), to heat the foam. It becomes "soft", so I was then able to press it against my body until it cooled down a little. It cools after about a minute.









Finally... Kate (my wife) helped wrap me up in duct tape. That is me in the photo, but I covered my head up with that of Commander Shepard from the Mass Effect games...as my face looked weird. However, I chose an equally weird face to cover mine up with (it's been comically morphed...not by me..).

This isn't some weird fetish, I am making an Mannequin/Manikin of my body so I can easily fit the armour onto it.

It's a simple process:
You wear old clothes, you wrap yourself (or get someone else to wrap you up) in duct tape. That person then cuts your clothes off and you struggle/slide out of the "duct tape skin".

You can see in the image that we cut from the ankle to the knee. and from the wrist to the elbow. We also cut along the spine down to the "tail bone" area.


Now I have to build a "skeleton" so that it can "stand up". Once that's done I can pack it full of stuff (newspaper, old clothes, whatever you want), until it is all "tough". I will make a blog of the next steps :P

Once this is done I can continue with the rest of the armour.

Alrighty then, that's all for now!

Cheers for reading as always :)

10% OFF Most Accessories

I have decided to give a 10% discount (through email order, not through the website) on most of the accessories I stock.

When you hover over "Accessories" on the menu, you will see sub sections called "Scenery", "Sculpting" and "Other". I have decided to give a 10% discount on everything under those 3 sections (apart from putty).

September 30th is the last day of the deal. You MUST email me with your order and I will send you a payment request, as it is not available through the website. Any website orders will NOT get the discount.

POSTAGE still applies to all orders.

Here's a little photo:

Click to ZOOOOOMMM

Cheers guys, spread the news with anyone you might think will be interested :)

Painting, Zombies/T-shirt, and Zulu Wars

 Hi Guys, I thought I would do a mini blog of something I haven't shown anywhere else.

Apart from sculpting the latest batch of zombies, I have been busy painting up the Wargames Factory Vixens and Male horde. In the photos below you can see the progress so far.

Hopefully they won't take too long to paint up since my dad and I plan to test out the rules he wrote, so we need tons of zombies!!

In the top photo, to the left of the photo, there is a female zombie about to "high five" a male zombie...










Apart from the zombies, I also have to paint up the survivors and the Dreamforge guys. I might leave the Dreamforge guys for a Christmas thing if I get bored lol







Zombie Range
I should have my new zombie range sorted this week, so off to the casters by the weekend. Hopefully they will be back in my hands around mid to late September, so in time for some Halloween gaming!!

ZULU Wars
If any of you guys are interested (or know of anyone who might be) I also decided to get in the Zulu wars range from WGF too. I have to order a certain amount of items each time I "re-order", so sometimes it's easier to buy a whole new range to make up the numbers. I do love the Zulu Wars though, so it worked out well, but that will be the last of the WGF stuff, as I don't want it taking over the website... like it's starting too!

Finally, someone mentioned T-shirts on Facebook today, which made be do this (Ignore the dotted line):

Kinda thought the zombie bust would make a cool zombie t shirt. I may be alone in that thought though!! haha Maybe I might do it... I dunno lol With a bit of photoshop i think it could work...

Anyway.. that's about it really, not much else going on. I've been a bit down today, staring at my bro's photo or into "space" for ages and not really getting much done :( ...Hopefully I'll "bounce back" tomorrow :)