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!