Zombie RV: Game 3, "Trial By Fire"

 I had to take today off work to take Gina to a doctor's appointment out in Rochester, and we got home early enough for me to set up the table and get another game of Zombie RV in, in preparation for putting on a table at Wargames Among the Warplanes in just under two weeks. When we last left our heroes, Dave and Dudikoff, the mysterious ninja warrior, had escaped from the zombie horde with their lives, but without their former companions. This time, they've picked up a pair of new recruits, Bobby and Larry, who are armed with pistols. Both figures are from Brigade Games' "Drug War Z" line. 

 

There were supply caches to check inside the Urgent Care, in the apartments above the Dispensary, inside the Pawn Shop and on the roof of the Off-Track Betting parlor. Five zombies were clustered around the burning dumpster at the beginning of the game; on subsequent turns, I rolled a die to determine if more zombies would spawn at the dumpster or at one of the table edges. 

Dudikoff snuck around to the back door of the Urgent Care, while Dave, Larry and Bobby crossed the intersection, aiming for the pawn shop and the back door of the Dispensary. 

 Bobby, the stealthiest of the group, peeled off and turned up the street, intent on heading towards the Off-Track Betting. Unfortunately, he sneezed and drew the attention of the milling zombies.

 Meanwhile, Dudikoff found the cache in the Urgent Care but nothing registered to him as useful. And some zombies, drawn by the sound of him rummaging, were beginning to enter the building.

 Zombies spawned along the table edge between the Dispensary and the Pawn Shop, right in Dave and Larry. 

 Dave darted past them, throwing himself through the doorway into the Pawn Shop. Larry skedaddled into the Dispensary and headed upstairs. The zombies followed Dave, and once they began to push their way through the door he opened up with his shotgun.

 Dudikoff kept up a fighting retreat as he headed back towards the rear exit of the Urgent Care. Bobby, meanwhile, reflected on the fact that he'd always assumed it'd be his bookie or one of his ex-baby mamas killing him in front of the dispensary. 

 Larry found nothing of value in the dispensary and headed back down, while Dave found supplies in the pawn shop. As the zombies kept coming, Dave made a mad dash for the front door to leave them behind. Seeing Dave running, Larry took off running in the same direction. 

 

Dudikoff ran from the pursuing zombies, but the Nasty Zombie managed to catch up to him; a slash of his katana pushed the Nasty Zombie back, allowing him to duck through the back door of the Donut Shop. 

 Bobby was wounded and knocked down, but the zombies, distracted by the stench of stale beer, sweat and the cheapest cigarettes on the market emanating from Bobby's undershirt, failed to finish him off.

 Larry climbed on to the roof of the video store and started firing his pistol into the air, distracting the growing zombie horde. As the undead clustered around the video store, Bobby managed to get to his feet and begin making his way towards the RV. Dudikoff had the same idea.

 

Meanwhile, Dave made it on to the roof of the OTB and found... nothing! Even with his Scavenger skill, he came away empty-handed.

I didn't take a picture of Dave on the OTB roof. Oh well. He climbed down the drainpipe and started to make his way towards the RV, all of the zombies' attention focused on Larry's gunfire.

And then... click!

Larry ran out of ammo.

 And suddenly Dave was the noisiest thing on the street.

 Fortunately, he was carrying a shotgun into this target-rich environment, and was able to clear a path. Larry leapt across the gap between the video store and the pawn shop to avoid the zombies still pressing against the rear of the video store. He quickly made his way down to ground level and took of running. Zombies began to pursue.

 Fortunately, Bobby and Dudikoff made it to the RV, revved it up and threw it into gear. They were able to pick up both Dave and Larry, meaning the entire team survived, even if they didn't find much of value. 

***

All in all, a good game! I think I've got a good handle now on what combination of the core rules, and the house-rules written by Mike over at Lead Legionaries, I want to bring to Wargames Among the Warplanes. I also think I'm just going to recreate this layout there to make things easy on myself. I managed to fit almost all the scatter terrain inside the buildings, and I can stack those in a plastic tote so I'm not lugging five boxes' worth of terrain from my car to the venue like I did last year. 

So the one remaining question...

Do I want to allow the players at Wargames Among the Warplanes to fight among themselves over supplies? Or should I be firm about "it's all of you against the zombies"? 

Even More Zombies!

 When I took possession of the decade-plus old Wargames Factory zombies that had been sitting in my friend Dave's Closet of Shame, it was at our regular Monday Night Paint & Chat, which Dave hosts. So I sat down and assembled two sprues' worth of male zombies while I was there. Over the next two days, I got them primed, and sat down to start painting.

 And discovered I was not having a great time with them.

The level of detail is... not what I'm used to. It's very shallow, especially on the faces - to the point where applying a wash of Army Painter Strong Tone was obscuring it, instead of making it more clear. Some of the faces I was left guessing if there was a beard present or not. 

 

So I pushed through, and painted them to be "good enough" for mixing into hordes of zombies. I didn't bother trying to paint eyes or teeth or anything like that (couldn't find them!) and didn't apply as many highlights as I did with the previous 34. 

On the plus side, that does raise the total number of zombies I've got painted to 46. I've got five zombie dogs primed and ready to go and that should put me in good standing for Wargames Among the Warplanes. 

 

Miniatures Acquired: 204

Miniatures Painted: 210

Terrain Acquired: 3

Terrain Painted: 9

Scatter Acquired: 8

Scatter Painted: 12

 

Zombie RV: Game 2 "Enter the Ninja"

Following Sandra's death at the cabin, Hector, Mark and Dave soon picked up a new survivor. A man dressed in a white ninja outfit with a sword slung across his back. The man refused to speak, communicating his needs solely through gestures. Mark soon gave him the name "Dudikoff" in reference to the ninja gear. Dudikoff's silence soon proved frustrating however, and before long Mark was shouting at the ninja to say something, anything. 

As the crew pulled on to a city street that looked promising for supplies, Mark and Dudikoff were keeping their distance from one another.

 

The group began to fan out, with Mark scaling the OTB and Dudikoff entering and climbing the stairs to the roof of the dispensary. Dave lined up a few lingering zombies and squeezed the trigger on his shotgun - and discovered he was out of ammo.

 More zombies were soon congregating, and Dave and Hector were in the middle of it - at least until Dave ducked into the dispensary and out the back door, leaving Hector to fend his way down the street alone.

 Mark and Dudikoff investigated two possible supply caches and came up empty, while Dave worked his way around and up on to the roof of the liquor store, finding a small cache of supplies there. 

 As Hector fought his way towards the last supply cache (in the bed of a crashed pickup truck), Dudikoff leapt across rooftops and jumped down, katana at the ready, on to one of the zombies that threatened him.

 Not to be outdone, Mark jumped down to start swinging his wrench at zombies as well.

 Leaping over a crashed car, Hector checked the pickup truck and found...nothing! 

"Let's get out of here," he said, eyeing the growing zombie horde. Dudikoff nodded, cutting his way free from a swarm of the undead.

 Dave was already running for the RV.

 Dudikoff jumped over zombies, and Mark and Hector tried to make it, but the swarm was just too densely packed; for every zombie they killed, two more shambled in.

The two survivors ducked into the RV and threw it into gear. "Looks like it's just you and me, Dudikoff," Dave said.

"You know, Michael Dudikoff wore a black ninja suit in the American Ninja movies," the ninja replied gruffly. "The white ninja look comes from Franco Nero in the movie Enter the Ninja."

"You could talk this whole time?" 

"Hai." 

"Should... I start calling you Franco?"

"No, Dudikoff is fine." 

More Zombies!

 I've completed another 14 zombies, all from Recreational Conflict, bringing the completed total up to 34. Let's take a look:

 

 Not quite so many in this batch form a themed group as in the last batch I did, but we do have some clergy in here:

 A mix of fairly tall figures, including one that's intended as a zombified basketball player:

My favorite of this quarter is the biker with the giant beard and the pickelhaube helmet. 

Then some ladies:

 The one missing both legs and one arm won't be categorized as a "Fast" Zombie, I'd just like to note. 

And a couple miscellaneous:
 

 The middle one is my favorite zombie out of all 34 I've painted so far, because it's clearly based on the poster art for my favorite zombie movie, THE RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD:

 That's all the (human) zombies I have at the moment; I've got a couple of Zombie Dogs that I'm going to paint up to use as Fast Zombies in Zombie RV, but otherwise I'm all out... Until my friend Dave gets back after GenCon. He's been digging around in his Pile of Shame, and found some old plastic Wargames Factory Zombies still on sprue that he bought a decade ago and forgot about. Once our Monday Night paint hangouts resume on August 3rd, he's going to hand them over to me. 

I initially thought it was going to be, like, one box of 20 zombies. Which, awesome, my initial target was 50 zombies so that's perfect. 

Oh no. See, after I confirmed that I wanted them, he sent pictures.

 That's one box of Zombie Vixens, a bag containing one box's worth of male Zombies, and another bag containing another box's worth of Zombie Vixens. Each of these three packs contains *30* zombies. 

I'm taking home *90* zombies, not *20*. 

You hear that sound? That's the sound of my acquired to painted ratio screeching off a cliff. I'm not going to add these to the tracker yet - I may refuse the second box of Zombie Vixens - but this is a looming zombie wave. Thankfully I've got assembly line painting them pretty well down pat. 

Do you know what title RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD was released under in Germany?

The Germans called the film VERDAMMT! DIE ZOMBIES KOMMEN, or "Damn it! Here Come the Zombies!" and I might be feeling that a little bite.

 

 Let's enjoy the progress I've made on getting figures painted while I can: 

 

Miniatures Acquired: 184

Miniatures Painted: 182

Terrain Acquired: 2

Terrain Painted: 8

Scatter Acquired: 8

Scatter Painted: 10

 

Zombie RV, First Playthrough - "A Cabin in the Woods"

 It has been a hell of a week here at Casa De Adcock, with an emergency trip to the veterinary hospital on Tuesday for my cat Poppy overwhelming my brain and my ability to do anything painting- or game-related for several days. Poppy is home and doing well and it's time to burn off some of this nervous energy with a game. 

Time to take Zombie RV for a test-spin. I used Mike Demana's unofficial campaign supplement to give my survivors a bit more differentiation as well. Recognizing that I had everything exactly called for, terrain-wise, I laid things out for the second scenario in the rulebook, "Cabin in the Woods." Our survivors are paying a visit to Uncle Bob's survivalist cabin in the woods to see how he's holding up and maybe see if he's got some spare gear for them.

Left to Right: Mark, Hector (in back, with rifle), Dave, and Sandra

 There were four search tokens (the cabin itself, the port-a-john, the broken-down car and the boat) and two zombie spawn points, in the northwest and southeast corners. Our crew cautiously fanned out, no zombies in sight, and began to make their approach, with Dave reaching the broken-down car, though not having time to search it before the zombies began to wander in.

 Dave pulled an old bug-out bag from the car and started sneaking towards the boat to see if there was anything to find there. Mark opened the door to the port-a-john and closed it just as quick. "What died in there?" He asked. 

 Things started to go to hell when Hector kicked in the cabin's door, finding four zombies milling around - including Uncle Bob.

 The four zombies converged, but managed to do little more than get in each other's way, with Hector managing to wriggle out of any sort of meaningful injury from this encounter. Instead, he managed to drive his knife deep into Uncle Bob's forehead and make a run for it.

 Mark started swinging at the zombies shambling his way, while Dave came up empty with the rowboat.

 As the zombies began to shamble out of the cabin in pursuit of Hector, Sandra started shooting them as they appeared in the doorway. 

 Unfortunately, as more and more zombies converged on the scene, she was overwhelmed.

 Dave fired a shotgun blast into a cluster of zombies, as Hector signaled for the survivors to retreat towards the RV. He looked glumly at the cabin; he'd seen the floor safe but the zombie swarm was swelling by the minute and he didn't expect they'd survive opening it. Meanwhile, Sandra rose as a Nasty Zombie and quickly shambled towards him. 

 Dave ducked and rolled into the cabin, opening the safe and pulling another bug-out bag from inside. With both bags over his shoulders he stepped out on to the porch. There were a LOT of zombies between him and the RV.

 The RV engine roared to life. Mark was behind the wheel with Hector riding "shotgun." The mechanic floored it, splattering five zombies including the risen Sandra beneath its wheels, stopping in front of the cabin long enough for Dave to jump in before high-tailing it out of there.

 

***

 My big takeaway from this game is I need to get more zombies painted. I had every painted zombie I've got on the table towards the end and had to stop rolling for reinforcements because I had nothing left to reinforce with! 

It's a game that does exactly what it sets out to do - it's a beer and pretzels zombie apocalypse game, your crew rolls in, tries to find what they can before the zombies overwhelm them, and get out. With the rulebook being 10 pages (four of which are scenarios), there's plenty of room to customize as well; I 100% winged it on "running zombies down with the RV" at the end of the game there. I also fudged a bit on zombie movement - rules as written it seems if there isn't a survivor making noise within 9" the zombies just stand still, and that left a corridor that the survivors could move in without the zombies noticing them at all. On a 2'x2' board, I was fine letting the zombies hear any major noise on the table and moving in that direction. 

It played out fairly quickly - I think about an hour, maybe hour and a half at the most? - and I feel like I got the mechanics down fast. It definitely held some surprises for me - At the end of turn 1 I was feeling pretty confident, by turn 4 I was looking at 4-5 zombies shambling towards each survivor. 

Making a note here, before I forget, that rolling on the loot table, the survivors came up with Extra Ammo and food (Supplies), so while they're sad to lose Sandra, they can continue on their journey.