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!
