Dungeon (2014) - New Year's Eve Game

 Hi All,

As usual I am running around like a chicken with its head cut off. I thought I was in a space between Cross Country and Track Seasons and could get my hobby together. Turns out I got myself elected to the Band Booster Board, say that five times fast, and am more or less designated photographer for the band moving forward.

I attended my first HS basketball game this week and it was pretty good. I forgot how fun it can be to watch a game played by athletes who know what they are doing. I've been watching too many years of really horrible elementary school lunch recess basketball.

Anyway, I just wanted to share with you a few pictures of a game we played of the 2014 reboot of Dungeon put out by Wizards of the Coast. We had had the game for years, but apparently had never opened the box.

It is pretty much the same game with updated art and they flip flopped you wanting to roll high for everything instead of wanting to roll low for some things.

The art is nicely updated and some of the tokens have been streamlined. For instance you now have a token to show whether your magic sword is +1 or +2.

They also updated the classes to be more in line with current D&D. You now have Rogue, Cleric, Fighter and Wizard. No more Elf as a class. They have also provided male and female playing pieces for each class. I thought it was a nice touch.

My wife chose to play the Rogue. I took Cleric, and the kids both wanted to be a Wizard. In the new game mechanic you roll to determine how many spells you start out with and then you pick cards for the spells you want. There are enough for two Wizards, it turns out. There is also a mechanic for replenishing d6 spells if the Wizard goes back to start.

We actually read the rules for once and more or less followed the suggested levels to go to for each class. The two Wizards went the same direction because they both need the big money.

The Wizards got bogged down in the 6th level. There was a Red Dragon in that chamber leading to most of the rooms. That is my wife in the Great Hall having to respawn after being killed while I win the game after plundering half of the 2nd and 3rd levels while making a daring escape back to the Great Hall through the 4th level.

All in all the game still holds up. It's frustrating, but fun.

Hope you are getting in games with friends and family.

Dungeon - The rematch

 Hi All,

So I teased the game of Dungeon we played last post. I ended up winning that game as the Hero, but of course I didn't take pictures. My son wanted to redeem himself after spending 4 turns in the previous game rolling 5's and 6's trying to get through a secret door on the 4th level. If you don't know, Elves discover secret doors on a 1-4 in this game. Everyone else is a 1-2.

This is the original 1980 version of the game.

The long edges of the box seem to be somewhat inclusive.

Murder hobos running around the dungeon.

This was the treasure I won after being killed by an Ogre and having to go back to the start. A +2 sword is nice, but too little too late.

My son made it back to the start with his requisite treasure. My kids wanted to argue with me that the green guy on the board was a zombie and not a troll. I told them to read the damn monster manual. Noobs!

This is my son's winning treasure. About half of it is what my hero dropped on the floor fighting that ogre.

I demand a rematch. ;)

Happy gaming everyone.

Boardgaming

Hi All,

One of the side effects of the covid-19 stay at home guidelines is that we've been playing a lot more games as a family.

It is also coinciding with a class my son is finishing at school called Game On!

He is assigned to play a few games each week and then write a review of sorts about them. This week is strategy week.

Here are a few of the games we've played over the last few weeks.

I played it once back in the day but never owned a copy until the re-release a few years ago. I never thought my wife and daughter would play, but I sold them on it as they would be able to gang up on me after I beat them at Risk earlier in the month. They beat me in about 6 turns. I think I yelled "Wolverines!" at least once.

I've only played this a couple of times before and never played the original. It's pretty fun. I think my son enjoyed this one because he legit beat me as the Union.

I've probably had this game since 1984 and I'm hard pressed to remember if I actually ever played this game with anybody before. I played it by myself quite a bit. My son especially likes the plastic coins.

Anybody else breaking out some classics?

Thanks for looking.

Battle Cry - Game 1 - Pea Ridge

Well I finally went and did it. I played my first game of the 10 games 10 times challenge. It was the second scenario from the rule book, Pea Ridge. The ccbattlecry.net version is here. It surprised me that I hadn't played Battle Cry since Oct 8th, 2012. That post did remind me of a bunch of links for playing the game solo. I ended up playing the way Barks did here. One thing I added, albeit midway through the game, was a rule for those cards that talk about ordering the number of units equal to the cards in your hand. Since this solo version only ever has you draw two cards at most, use the commanders rating (ie how many cards they can hold) for this number.

(Well shit. I wrote the rest of this post from here and then it wouldn't publish. Apparently it didn't save either. Thanks blogger.)

It took me a couple of days to put this together, my notes were lacking and memory faded so hopefully this makes sense. As always, it will take me a few tries to hit the sweet spot.

Welcome to Darcy Perry of Hits to Kill, who has some awesome Oldhammer chaos on the page right now. I love the Slaanesh champion. He also writes several music blogs, but I can barely keep up with the hobby stuff right now.

More to come soon.

10 games, 10 times. The 10 x 10 challenge.

Since I've been bed ridden the last two days with a bad back, I thought I'd take some time to think about the 10 x 10 challenge.

I believe I first read about it here on the Itinerant Gamer and then here on Tabletop Diversions.

I don't believe I'll bother with posting it to Board Game Geek, or worry about getting 100 games in over the next five months, but just try to select games that I want to play and play them. So while I was lying down and trying not to have a back spasm, I came up with the following list:

• Battle Cry
• X-Wing
• Death Angel
• Machinas
• Roman Seas
• Armor Grid
• Warhammer Fantasy Battle 3rd Ed.
• Squad Leader
• King Maker 
• Swordplay

So lets break these down a little.

Table top games:

X-Wing, Machinas, WFB 3rd Ed, and Swordplay all fall into this. Roman Seas and Armor Grid could also fall into this category or be their own category since they are both print and play.

Board Games:

Although Kingmaker and Squad Leader are what I would call "War Games" they are from the subset of games that were played on solid game boards with cardboard chits. As opposed to other games that had folded paper maps. Battle Cry has more of a parlor game feel to it, like Risk but is still fairly nuanced.

Card Games:

Death Angel was, surprisingly, the only card game on the list. We have played a fair amount of Munchkin around the house, so that may be why I didn't think to include it.

So I'm hoping to play some new games and break out some old ones that haven't seen the light of day in a long time.

And if you think to try this out for yourself, let me know how it goes.

I'll try to get the ball rolling this week.

Thoughts on Flags, ACW, Boer figures,Viking Swords and The War Game.

As you can see another post where I can't rein it in and go in depth into one topic. Perhaps I should spring for some ADD testing. My dad became convinced he has ADD, but he thought his doctor thought that he just wanted to be proscribed some kind of speed. But I digress.

Flags and or Banners

There are some great ones available on the internet, check out Ray's for example, but for some reason I have always balked because I'm not sure what size to make them. Well today I did something about it and printed out some flags from Warflag. In the printing section he gives some guides on how to print them out and scale them using various software, none of which I have of course. But what I came away with was we could take it that if 30mm is 1:60 and 25mm is 1:72 we can see that both figures give a size difference of 83%, or rather 1:72 is 83% the size of 1:60. (Hopefully this last sentence makes sense. I had a ten year old trying to get my attention the entire time I was try to write it.)

Original size and scaled with some measurement notes

Just wedged on to show scale, sorry for the anachronism.

 The space for wrapping around the banner pole is 3mm, which is fine for piano wire but I want to use tubing to slide over piano  wire so it needs to be more like 6 - 7mm. I think that will still work with the overall dimensions being 65mm across, both faces, and 24.5 mm high.

I was also bummed to see that the flags are gone from Dansk Figurspilsforening there were some good ones on there.

ACW

There's a new E-zine in town called ACW Gamer, I heard about it from Chris Stoesen here. I thought I'd give it a try. Looks good so far. I had already downloaded Pohick Church, now I have double incentive to get it ready and play it out using THW's Rifles and Rebels rule set. I'll be in touch Chris. I may also submit my two ancestors to the magazine. We'll see.

Boer figures

You ever have a set of figures you've been thinking about buying only to find that they are as rare as hens teeth now that you're ready to buy them? It was Sam in Cow-Boys Part 1 and Part 2 that showed how nice these figures work for the old west as well as colonial. But of course no one has them except this guy.

£5,000!? Not bloody likely!

Umm, you could have just said they were out of stock. FML.

Viking Swords

Watched the Nova special "Secrets of the Viking Sword" on Netflix the other day and it was pretty interesting. The PBS link is here if you want to buy it and I noticed that a few have put the whole thing up on youtube if you search for it. Aside from the guy who actually made one using what they thought were medieval techniques there were two things that interested me. First was that there were knock offs of these swords being produced and then there was an interesting demo by a swordsman who cut clean through a tatami mat, first with a samurai sword and then with an un-sharpened viking sword. Interesting. I did notice that he was cutting just the rolled up  mat, there was no dowel or bamboo in the center as there sometimes is. I wonder if that would have made a difference, I suspect so.

The War Game

I came across this game while looking at a site that carries Pegasus models and figures here in the US. You can see the game at Board Game Geek here. I think that someone said it was Axis & Allies on steroids. Has the distinction of being in the Guinness Book of World records as the largest board game ever.

A rash of good posts

"It's not herpes if it's all over!" - Peter Segel's character in Knocked Up.

I've just noticed a couple of trends in the blogs I follow that are worth taking a look at.

Ahoy matey, model ship building:

http://gowansmodelblog.blogspot.com/2012/11/how-to-build-wargaming-warship-part-1.html

http://gowansmodelblog.blogspot.com/2012/12/how-to-build-wargaming-warship-part-2.html

http://saxons-and-vikings.blogspot.com/2012/10/ship-building-1-getting-started.html

http://saxons-and-vikings.blogspot.com/2012/10/ship-building-2-ships-sides-preparation.html

http://saxons-and-vikings.blogspot.com/2012/10/ship-building-3-finishing-hulls.html

http://saxons-and-vikings.blogspot.com/2012/10/ship-building-4-viking-ship-complete.html

Boys do Battle Cry:

http://littlejohnslead.blogspot.com/2012/11/finally-got-up-steam.html

http://hordesofthethings.blogspot.com/2012/12/prairie-grove-refight.html

And of course an explosion of activity concerning the Portable Wargame et al:

http://wargamingmiscellany.blogspot.com/2012/12/lots-of-portable-wargame-action-but-not.html

Battle Cry - First impressions

So I managed to get in one game of Battle Cry over the weekend. My son, with the help of my wife, played the Confederate side while I played the Union for the 1st Bull Run scenario.

This is from the 150th anniversary edition.

From http://pawnderings.blogspot.com/2010/12/comparitive-replay-session-of-battle.html

Also from http://pawnderings.blogspot.com/2010/12/comparitive-replay-session-of-battle.html

It was an interesting battle in that I jumped out to an early 4 flag to 1 flag lead and then watched as my son tied it up with some hot dice rolling. I should have known from previous experience, when he needs to roll something he gets it.

Basically the battle played out like this. On the Confederate Left/ Union Right is where the early action started The Union cavalry was aggressive and blunted the Confederate attack. On the Confederate Right/ Union Left the infantry tenatively advanced and traded long range musket fire, with neither side gaining much advantage. In the center the Confederates under Jackson took the ridge and poured musket fire onto a line of Union infantry set up in line with Henry House. The union was taking the worst of the musket exchanges until they played the Fieldworks card, and then things evened out a bit. General Beauregard (my son and wife) was reluctant to reposition his artillery once he had gained the dog leg of the ridge, which did not offer a full view of the main Union force.

The union finally won the battle by holding in the center while wiping out opposition on the flanks. So it was fun and the command cards are interesting. I see where some might have a problem with troops effectively sitting the battle out because you couldn't get enough command cards to order them, but I think it is a nice mechanic to give you decisions to make on the field.

The one question that remains for me is battling a general, or more precisely killing a general since they can't really battle. In this game Stuart became isolated on the hill on the left flank and did not move from that position. After killing the unit he commanded I played it that he was killed by rolling the cavalry sybol on the dice. Was that wrong? I'm not sure.

In this 150th Anniversary you get 10 regular scenarios, three from the Jackson campaign and thirteen more for the special edition. But what if your like me and, after seeing all this, wonder why there is no scenario for the first day of Gettysburg you can look here for that and many more.  Also check out wargaming miscellany for Battle Cry musings.

Wanna play solo? Of course you do. Boardgame Geek has suggestions here and here as well as a pdf here (I haven't tried it yet). Bob Cordery also had this to say about using Coomand cards for solo play. Also check out Dale Hurt's blog on solo wargaming about hand management here

I'd write more but gotta run..

Battle Cry, Battle Lore and almost 10k hits.

I just pulled the trigger on Battle Cry and Battles of Westeros on Amazon. I don't know if it was specifically a sale or not, but $46.92 for Battle Cry and 29.99 for Battles of Westeros sounds like a good deal.

  Progress in modelling and gaming has taken a back seat to landscaping and bicycle maintenance. It is finally getting cool enough to be outdoors more and my drip irrigation and sprinklers have kindly decided to break on me.

[RANT WARNING, NOT ABOUT GAMING]

My bicycle broke about a month ago and I am now nearing the point in money and frustration where I should have bought a new bike. I just thought that throwing away a whole bike just because the pedal broke was assinine. The crank was some how cross threaded, so no pedal was going to fit in. You can't just buy a crank arm, you have to buy a whole crank set. Then you have to match the bottom bracket. Oh yeah and then you have to order the wrong tool, then the right tool then find out that your old bottom bracket is so seized up you can't get it off. Then you take it to another bike shop, because you're still pissed at the last bike shop and they barely even try to help you before telling you you should just buy a new bike.

GRRRR! And that's the nice way of putting it.

[/RANT]

Anyway Battle Cry should get here by the weekend. Should be fun.

And before I forget, I'm almost at 10K hits and am trying to think of some kind of giveaway. I'd like to give away a copy of All Things Zombie - Final Fade Out (ATZ-FFO) but I'm not sure when the release date is. Of course I could do a map or activation/event cards. We'll see, maybe I'll figure out how to do a poll.

Memoir Third Age 3019

My son was bugging me to play a game and I had just read Bob Cordery's post about his rainy day game here, and I thought why not give it a try.

I have never played Memoir 44 and am only vaguely familiar with it, Command and Colors, and Battle Lore which are all adaptions of the theme. Or at least that is how I understand it. I do have a copy of the game Lords & Levies, which I thought I first saw on Rudi Geudens site the Universal General but had to look on the internet archive for the files here. Here is the BGG page.

Anyhow I took Bob's rules and tried to figure out the dice from his AAR. After studying hi pictures I figured that I would "label" my d6 thus: 1-2: infantry, 3: grenade, 4: tank, 5: star, 6: flag.

Next I was going to use the games LotR Risk and Conquest of the Empire for board and pieces. I used the LotR board because I like fantasy. I then used the following pieces: Infantry as Infantry, Mounted as Tank and Monster as Artillery. I thought about using the Catapults from CotE but decided against it, I did use the galleys from CotE.

Ships cost 3 but only had 1 combat die. They could be defeated by two 5(star) results. I also chose to use the leader pieces from LotR and gave them for free with 1 combat die and defeated on three 5(star) results. I also decided that the named fortresses gave an added die on defense.

Next I determined that I would play the combined Mordor/ Harad side and my son elected to play Gondor. My daughter said she would play Rohan, but never even came to the table. I decided to do initial force points by the printed reinforcement bonus for holding a kingdom and the additional bonus for number of territories held. I did the three players as individuals, this decision made it harder for me the evil player. So we came out with Mordor 9pts, Gondor 10pts and Rohan 7 pts. I think I will do it differently next time an use the kingdom bonus and 1pt per province held. Then it would be more like Mordor 16pts, Gondor 17pts and Rohan 9pts (I'm not positive as I didn't write it down.)

I did not remember to take pictures until near the end. It got to be a terrible slog and it seemed that it was only a matter of time till Mordor lost. The good side had a lot of advantages, two reinforcement rolls to my one, two movement rolls to my one, so it was just a matter of time. Perhaps give them a d8 for movement and maybe just keep the reinforcement level based on provinces held.

I started getting a little loose with the division size.

Showing the killed units with dice next to them.

Decided that Gondor should retreat to South Ithilien rather than over stack.

I called it there because my son had lost interest and the kids kept on interrupting me and I couldn't keep it straight what I was doing. Fun but needs a few more tweaks. I'll try again another time.

Buyers anxiety

Or what would you do.

The other day while in town my brother and I went to two Comic Book/ Game stores. At the second I came across Conan Munchkin and the Original 1976 SPI version of Napoleon's Last Battles. (Boardgame Geek Link)

Now, apart from the difficulties of fitting it in the luggage and the ire it would engender in SWMBO, would you buy it for US$60?

The ebay sale link on BGG has the TSR version for $27US but they have trimmed the maps. I have no idea abut the condition of the one at the local store, I didn't open the box.

No clue if it is even still there, just one of those moments of wondering if I made the right choice in not snapping it up even though I don't really play or have much interest in Napoleonics.

I'm also too lazy to write up my rules analysis from my RRtK battle and I am running out of time for my 3.5 posts per week goal.

Games that define us.

Well, a day late as usual. But I thought that this was an interesting one to try. So, here goes.

1.Risk:
I played many, many games of this over the years, quite a few solo when I had mono in the 6th grade. I still love this game, but can't get my family to play it. I bought Lord of The Rings Risk when it came out and am tempted to buy Risk Legacy

2. Advanced Dungeons and Dragons:
What else can I say. Started playing this around 12 or 13. I had seen the basic boxed set when I was 10 but did not understand it at all. Played all through high school but drifted away as the group went their separate ways to college etc.

Not one, but two games of Elder Sign

I got a chance to play two games of Elder Sign today and it was fun but very tough. The first I played solo with one investigator at a time. I took some pictures, but of course I can't find the one cable I have for an upload.

Anyhow in the first game I drew our old friend Nyarlathotep, what are the odds? (They are 1/8 or 12.5%, but I digress.) I drew Ashcan Pete as my investigator. I'll spare you the details and just say that a combination of terrible dice rolls and forgetting special rules at key junctures led to Pete's demise. I then drew Harvey Walters and continued. Harvey's attribute of strong mind comes in very handy, allowing you to change a horror result to a scroll result, saves on nasty terror effects. It's of course hazy now but some miscalculation had me run out of stamina, perhaps it was a mythos card effect that I forgot to take into account. Suffice it to say, one investigator by themselves has a hard time making it.

Cue game two. My wife and daughter are off at some reward activity for selling a ton of Girl Scout cookies. So boys at home alone, my son wanted to play the game. He picked Monterey Jack and I shuffled the remaining deck and picked ... Ashcan Pete (^$#@^!). The ancient one was Yig. He takes only ten elder signs to seal, but has only eight spaces on his doom track, five of which are monsters.

We did pretty well, coming close to death a couple of times. My son got a little frustrated and bored when he wasn't rolling well and I had to finish the game for him, but he did pretty well for a six year old. We struggled a little bit with locked dice but also got an otherworld adventure card through a magic item. It took me quite a while to realize that we needed to be there to collect the Elder Signs to seal off Yig. I did have to take one mulligan for Monterey Jack, as I just wasn't paying attention and would have gotten him killed foolishly.

We started rolling hot and using the focus die a little bit more and got nine of the ten signs needed before the hammer dropped and Yig appeared. Among the many things I misread, we each needed a common item unique item and spell to not be devoured. Neither of us had any items. I also forgot to remove elder signs for each Cultist we killed, but i'm not sure if that came into play or not.

So great fun, but very hard. If any of you have played solo and have any tips, please let me know. JF on Solo Nexus has a review of Elder Sign that is good and I think fair. I totally agree that the fonts are way too small to read easily. You can find his review here.

Welcome to Matt, he has an interesting blog about desktop wallpapers. I think the cow is saying "nice udders".

I'll try and put up some pictures when I find that damn cable.

Mother's Day purchases

It's true, I have no shame. While we were out and about on Mother's Day I some how convinced my wife to let me take the kids to Barnes & Noble while she shopped for shoes.

So I came away with Conan: The Frost Giants Daughter

and Elder Sign

I decided to buy the Conan title mainly because it was the only one available. The story so far is good but I don't care for the art as much as in the other two of the series I have. (Born on the Battlefield and Free Companions). The coloring seems washed out, the line drawing a bit messy/ sketchy and the inking also light. Perhaps I'm just ruined by the Roy Thomas et al works where everything was very crisp marvel drawing.

I haven't had a chance to play Elder Sign yet, but the rules are only twelve pages and it seems pretty straight forward. Seems like it will work well for solo play.

I'll try to get in a few games and reports soon.

Elder Signs, Arkham Horror Lite?

Late to the party as usual, I came across Elder Signs at Barnes and Noble the other day.

Now aside from being a bad ass trailer, this game looks pretty interesting. As far as I can tell it has all the flavor of Arkham Horror without all the stuff. Therefore it doesn't take up quite so much space. I also kind of like the specialty dice and their mechanic for accomplishing tasks.

Another plus is they seem to say it can be played solo and best of all, it's half the price of Arkham Horror. I'm definitely putting this on my wishlist.

They also have an iOS Android OS version called Elder Signs: Omens. The review I read said it was worth it on a tablet. I'll stay away from that as I do not have a tablet and I oppose pay apps on principal.

Arkham Horror

Got in an actual game last night, Fantasy Flight Games Arkham Horror. My brother owns the game and so my son and I sat down to play it with him last night.

For those not familiar, Arkham Horror is based on the H.P. Lovecraft stories about Cthulu and the occult. Your investigator has been drawn to the New England town of Arkham where strange goings on have been on the rise. Gates to other dimensions start opening, releasing monsters and bad guys of various descriptions and abilities upon the town. The Investigators job is to ultimately seal the gates to stop the Elder Gods from coming into our dimension.

From the Wikipedia Entry

My brother hadn't played in awhile so it took him a little bit of time to re-acquaint himself with the rules. He did say that he learned a few new things and perhaps played the most correct game to date. The rule book is a little verbose and it seems hard to find examples when you have a rules question.

I played Monterey Jack (Archaeologist), my son played Joe Diamond (Private Eye), and my brother played Harvey Walters (Professor). You can find stats etc about them here.

So the game started out pretty simply. Not too many monsters gates seemed easy to close. I soon realized that I needed to focus more on sealing gates rather than just rushing around to close them and found my self struggling to gather the clue tokens necessary. The general gameplay went as usual when the three of us play. My son was mostly interested in combat and so used his guns to slay a lot of maniacs, zombies and cultists. He was powerful enough to dish it out to a few monsters, but struggled with ghosts and the like due to a lack of magic. My brother was the magic heavy hitter of our group and did most of the heavy lifting in sealing about half of the six gates needed to win. I floundered around trying to get clues and husbanding my low sanity (something that I shouldn't have worried about so much because I had a special healing item that I forgot about most of the game).

Anyhow we were sailing along, had three gates closed, and then all of a sudden things got tough. We started having Monster surges, a special event had monsters stacking up in Miskatonic square and the outskirts started filling up with excess monsters pushing up the terror track. We came within one space (out of 11 total) of having Nyarlathotep come on for the final battle.

Low lights: getting lost in space and time, my brother getting killed once and loosing both enchanted knives, loosing my blessing the first turn after getting it and then getting cursed. My brother rolling only one success out of 8 dice (he needed a 4-6 because he was blessed), when he needed three.

Highlights: Rolling three successes with the last three out of eight dice to kill a Nightgaunt! (In your face!) Closing and sealing the final gate to win the game. For my brother and son who knows.

It took us about three and a half hours, including a break for dinner, and was fun if not a little tense. I in particular had a hard time remembering all my stuff so I forgot modifiers and bonuses. We also had a few untimely ability shifts, miscalculating when we would need more luck or will.

All in all fun. Just make sure you have enough space and time to do it.

Welcome to RSpears192 of Lucky Joe's Place (it's not on your google friend connect). Zombies and survivors in 15 and 28mm. I'm really liking the paper buildings he has been making.

Zombies!!! review and AAR

So I played a game of Zombies!!! with my kids the other day and I have to say it was fun. I had seen reviews of it at Zombie Place, Board Game Geek, and The Man Cave; and I really wanted to try it out myself. I also wanted to have a look at the figures for possible use in an ATZ campaign.

I paid about $26 after taxes and a member discount from Barnes & Noble. The box is small, but it comes with a fair amount of stuff. Map tile cards, event cards, dice, counters and figures. The rules are fairly simple. Roll to move and kill zombies on a 4+ roll.

The tiles consist of streets and buildings, but you can only enter named buildings to search for lives or ammo. Your ultimate goal is to make it to the helicopter pad and safety. Each turn consists of drawing and placing a map tile, rolling to move, combating any zombies you share a square with, rolling for the number of zombies you can move. At any time during your turn you can play an event card, each player starts with and maintains a hand of three.

I played this game with my son (almost 6) and daughter (8) so we had to fudge a few things to keep the game moving. First off we displayed our event cards. My son can't really read yet and I knew that if I played any zombie attack or disadvantage type cards on him he would get upset. So the upshot was that my daughter was the only one who played event cards and she only really used the chainsaw. We also allowed players to keep their zombie kill total even if they got killed and had to return to the town square.

Being the youngest, my son went first. He immediately took off for the nearest building, intent on slaying zombies. My daughter sort of ambled around and I went for the ammo in the police station. I won't give you the blow by blow, partly because I can't remember it, but just the flavor of the game progress. My son basically just wanted to kill zombies. Being in his misogynistic phase (boys vs. girls) he wanted to kill female zombies so that dictated his movements somewhat. My daughter seemed to be wandering aimlessly around, but she did enter the lawn and garden shop with the express purpose of getting and using the chainsaw. I made quick work of the zombies in the police station and then headed toward the buildings in the upper left, mostly looking for more ammo. Zombie movement was not really an issue. I moved zombies out of my way, my son wanted to only move male zombies and it seemed completely random, and my daughter moved zombies in ways that baffled me but seemed to make sense to her.

So when the helicopter pad was finally played, wouldn't you know it, I was on the complete opposite side of the table. We all headed in that direction, me shuffling along like a zombie with a succession of 1's, my son getting killed because he wasted his ammo on crap rolls instead of losing a life, and my daughter pretty much unscathed all the way to the pad. The long and short of it is my daughter got killed fighting a zombie on the pad, my son had also been sent back to the main square a couple of times, and the old man got hot on the dice and strolled into the center square of the helicopter pad winning the game. There were a few tears, so we placed everyone at the pad and then commenced the body count. Daughter: 20, Son: 19, Me: 8.

Personally I think that zombie avoidance is the way to go. And lastly I broke out a scale comparison chart and put the zombie figures next to some IMEX WW2 figures from the Billy V set. As you can see the US Rifleman stands at 25mm and the zombies appear to be about 27mm. So apparently the zombie virus causes gigantism before it animates your corpse. So not perfect, but it'll do.

So I'd give the game overall a thumbs up. Easy rules, fairly quick to play and a decent value. You can get 100 zombies for $10 but I feel like the extra $15-$20 for the game is worth it. And the plus side is I don't have to play Monopoly ad nauseum with the kids.

Zombies Anyone?

I am on the Zombie bandwagon, watched "The Walking Dead" last season and the premier of Season 2 this past Sunday. Just did a search for Free Zombie Game Rules and came up with this post: http://www.zombieplace.com/7-free-zombie-board-games and it looks like there may be something to work with there. At the bottom of the post they have a link back to a review of Zombie games you can buy. I've also been considering buying Two Hour Wargames title "All things zombie". The Angry Lurker also pointed out that in addition to WW2 and Samurai (you should check those out) he played some zombie stuff using rules from Akula. I haven't had a chance to check them out yet, but the game TAL had looked pretty cool and it made me wonder if Shelldrake isn't using these rules for his Play By Blog game as well. Mainly due to the reference to Zombie Spawn points.

I also did some searchifiying yesterday for 20mm (1/72) zombies and it looks like Elhiem has the best stuff (or the only really). It turns out that 20mm is a better search term for figures than 1/72 which tends to be broader. I also found Stan Johansen Minatures when doing this search. The Road warrior figures and Road Rage rules, as well as kits for turning Hotwheels cars into wasteland death mobiles, all look neat. For me Post -Apocalypse and Zombie Apocalypse go hand in hand.

Enjoy.

Boardgame resource

Hi All,

I forget what I was initially searching for but http://www.headlesshollow.com/freebies_games.html has a ton of game reviews and cheat sheets for various board/ big box games. I snagged the Man O' War stuff as I actually have that game.

Welcome to Alanus of Dux Homunculorum lots of good DBA stuff in 1/72. I like the dice blessing ceremony.

Welcome to Damon of Everything you Need looks like a good film review site, ones that could be turned into some good THW skirmish scenarios. I don't see you in the public followers list, but no worries. Thanks for stopping by.