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!

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 :)

This Months Releases!

It seems like ages since I have posted anything here, but I guess it was only about 2 weeks ago!

I have a few announcements, so here I go:

1) All 4 interchangeable werewolves have now been released on the website. They retail at £7 each or £6 if all four are bought. They are priced so because they are 40-45mm in height and quite "bulky" in build. They are meant for 28mm scale, so in real life terms they are about 8 to 9 feet tall...so big and scary!

Bottom photo has a typo.. it should say "4" not "3".

2) 15mm Hospital and some roads have been released. I thought it was about time I got those all up on the site.

3) Major news... well it is in my opinion, today I finally received the production lot for "Bexi Warrior Princess", "The Tenderiser (Hammerman), and Aliwen Space Ranger and some more casts of the Grekwood mini!

I am pleased to finally announce that The Tenderiser will be released tomorrow (Monday 13th May). He will retail for £8.25 as he is the biggest figure (weight/metal wise) on my website!

Bexi and the Space Ranger will be up either later this month or early June. This is because I am going to paint up some of the Bexi character as commissions for some people who are not really into the hobby, but would like one as they know the person it is based on (so cosplayers).

4) Umm..what else... I have some 28mm scale resin/metal vehicles which I will also put online soon. So stay tuned for those. They are from a range called "28mm moderns". There will be a small tank, and a few people carrier ones with a few guns here and there. Here's one of them. It's a Pinzgauer. This particular one was painted by my brother Gareth. He also put transparent sheets onto it for windscreens. Oh and to the right is my poor attempt at painting the werewolves...and a base I made for one of them :)

Ok, think that's all for now........... yep, can't think!! As always, sorry for not getting around the blogs, I don't seem to come on here much any more as I tend to do a lot of updates through Facebook, but it's something I don't want to abandon as it's a great community here.

New Stuff: Zombies, Roads, Buildings and a Bust

It's been a while since I did a blog post, a week and 5 days in fact!

So new releases:

I have uploaded 2 new road packs to the website. This completes the "town" range. The two packs have single yellow lines, and double yellow lines, along with an extra minor side road which has either a cobble style road or smaller paving slabs.

Here are the large photos from the website, I decided to put a car on there for "scale".

Town Centre - Restricted Parking (Single yellow lines)

Town Centre - No Waiting (Double yellow lines)







I still haven't uploaded that snow flock I have... So I must get round to doing that.

Supermarket zombies and building
The supermarket range should be coming back from the painter next week, so my next blog post will hopefully be showing off them all painted.

I have decided to build a local store as well as a large superstore. I am part way through designing the local store. It will have a small staff room, store room (not warehouse) and an office. It will also be the first building that I will be fully furnishing with paper freezers, shelves, veg stands, counters and so forth. The local store will be 12" x 12" in size, perfect for use with our roads (or with other companies products of course!).

Bust
Here's the bust I have been working on. The image is a few days old so it is a bit different now. What do you think? Still early days... and she will have long hair (yes I decided to go with a female), so features are less dominant than what a males would be. If she turns out well I will cast her in resin. I'm going with a mini head wound, a cheek wound, wearing around the mouth, and a neck wound which hasn't been done yet).

Finally..

I think that is all for now... Apologies once again for not getting around all the blogs I usually go through, it's just been a very busy couple of week. January and so far February have been extremely busy with online orders and other shenanigans!

Thanks to all for reading!

Grekwood Minis Display in Detail

Apologies for not getting around the blogs as much, I have been extremely busy getting everything ready for our first ever show next week, and I have been running back and forth to the hospital as my wife Kate had an operation  about 5 days ago. She is doing better though and will hopefully be home on Monday or Tuesday!

So..Grek Minis news! It's just under a week until Crusade here in Cardiff (UK), the first ever trade show where Grekwood Miniatures will be selling! I have been working hard to put together a display which looks decent enough to "launch us", and I think I haven't done too bad. Here's a few WIP photos of the display which I set up on my pool table which rarely gets used for pool! The edges of the table made things not sit right, but its good enough for a tester.

There are a few things missing from the cabinets as I have them elsewhere for photos. But you should get a general idea in the next couple of photos...






At the front I have the scenery stuff to the left, which I have placed on raised display stands which I made.

To the right (at the front) I have displayed more scenery items including ball bearings, bases, steampunk parts and so forth. I still need to put labels all over it.







Next up, is the cabinet. The right cabinet is all zombies and hospital beds, and the left cabinet is the sci fi/fantasy cabinet, along with putties and glues (and the snow) at the bottom.

If you look closely the Grekwood Sculpt is in the left cabinet. I'm making a label so it'll say coming soon!






In the left cabinet I have put a road section with my new convertible mini (if only it was real!). It's to help give scale and to show that it's what the PDFs should look like.











Next up is the space next tot eh cabinet. This is a "mock up" design, and not the final one. It was just to give me an idea of what it would look like. As I can't take the PDFs with me, I thought it would be nice to alert people that we sell those too.

The Pro Arte brushes and the paints. Those are not the correct paints. They are my collection so they don't all match up. But they will be the proper things on the day. The brushes will also be taken out of their plastic wrappers.

 Finally, here's a little photo of the new design hospital bed undercarriage. They are mainly made because of casting reasons, but they are narrower, which allows figures to "tuck" under the bed more closely, to help with space.







Maybe next year we will get a 12ft table, and actually put the hospital building out on show with our road sections, which by the way, we have 10 different versions now, all of which will be online soon.

Thanks again for all your support!