Category Archives: zombicide

zombicide

Verses: Run,Fight or Die vs Zombicide

Head to Head, Matchup, run,fight or die, VS, zombicide

Continuing the  now regular series of verses that my match up engine is generating from my game collection. Today we have a clash of Zombie themed games with the push your luck Run,Fight or Die taking on the 800lb gorilla Zombicide.

I love both games. But which did I choose?

Run, Fight or Die is a nice push your luck dice game, that has miniatures, variable player powers. With the expansions can play up to 6 players, and even be played as a co-op instead of competitively. The Mutant Boss figures are brilliant for this game, but sadly hard to get hold of. Which means that those inflated internet prices kick in when you try and buy them of eBay or some other site. I think I have everything for this game, except a couple of promos. It’s a nice game if you like that push your luck mechanic. There isn’t much to do when it’s not your turn. Luckily a players turn doesn’t take that long. There is some interaction with other players with limited take that, when you can send zombies to other players boards from your own. Having various decks to represent followers, loot and locations is cool.

Zombicide, Zombicide. What a great miniatures based co-op game this is. Variable player abilities, lots and lots of characters to choose from (you could argue too many), tonnes of scenarios to play, plus you can make your own up. The difficulty of a game can be adjusted by removing/adding cards from the zombie spawn deck, or the item deck. It’s a simple game, however it gets real tense, real quick. You really do need to work together to complete the missions. With all the expansions, there is just so much replayability. I’d like the second compendium book that apparently came out last year, but I never saw it being sold. The original Zombicide and has been replaced in the limelight by the wrongly themed Zombicide Black Plague. Which is a shame, I’d love to get the 3D doors for Zombicide. But they are unbelievably hard to get hold of. And I just don’t see Zombicide getting any more love from CMoN.

The winner for me was Zombicide. I think it was it’s flexibility of being able to create my own scenarios (aka the Epic Zombicide I played last year using literally everything I owned), and it has been more tense, piling on the pressure a lot while playing. Both great zombie games though.

On social media I don’t think this was a popular match up at all. Two responses. The first was Jonathan who said neither because he doesn’t like zombie themed games. Well he did like one, Hit Z Road. The other reply I had was siding with me and chose Zombicide.

There you have it, Zombicide is the winner both on here and in the court of popular opinion.

 

Verses: Tokaido vs Zombicide

Head to Head, Matchup, VS, zombicide

Today it’s like we have chalk and cheese duking it out. Talk about two completely different games.

On the right we have Tokaido, on the left Zombicide.

Tokaido is just such a beautiful looking game. It doesn’t feel competitive. But it is. That serene journey from Edo to Kyoto (or is it the opposite direction), stopping off to experience hot springs, visiting shrines, painting the amazing vistas, buying gifts, encountering interesting strangers, and enjoying heavenly meals, although zen like, has you squabbling with fellow travelers for those exclusive spots.

Zombicide on the other hand has you working with your fellow survivors of the zombie apocalypse to kill zombies, gather food and weapons, and hopefully make it to the end of the day! And boy does this pile up the pressure. The better you get at killing the zombies the more of them appear.

Pimped out with the collectors box, you can replace the cardboard money in Tokaido with satisfying metal coins, and replace the wooden player counters with minis. Whilst listening to the games soundtrack!

Zombicide is just a minifest. It has so many minis, especially if you have all of the expansions and kickstarter exclusives (I have some of these, not all of them). And because of this be a bit of a pig to set up.

I called this one a draw. I couldn’t decide. It sounds like a cop out and it feels like one. But I love them both. They both offer a completely different gaming experience. Which one I would chose at any time really would come down to how I feel at the time.

I had a couple of comments on Instagram:


And the following from Facebook:


Which I think if my counting is correct gives the slight edge to Tokaido. The public have spoken.

Red Line

zombicide

The weekend started off with a whimper when the dreaded lurgy hit some of those due to play Mechs vs Minions Friday evening. Which meant the game session never happened. I could have played a two player game with Jonathan, but lurgy plus a bad back from moving tables earlier in the day, meant Jonathan wasn’t firing on all cylinders. I might have taken advantage of this fact if we were playing a competitive game. But I’m not that cruel. We had a quick drink and chat about boardgames, before heading off into the weekend.

I’m pretty lucky when it comes down to it with who I get to play games with. We have a great bunch of folks in Fenland Gamers. I met up with three members Saturday afternoon in an attempt to survive in a zombie apocalypse world.

The morning had been spent making a couple of foam core card holders. I now only have to organise the player characters and I’m there. I need to get my head around the best way to do this. Research and brainstorming are in my future. 

We were playing the Game Night Kit #2 – Black Friday scenario two, Fortress Mall.

It was going to be the first scenario but it required the same tile twice! Well both sides of it. I may have to look into which box that tile was in and buy the tile pack. 

The nice thing about the Fortress Mall scenario is it’s four tiles. 

Yep Dawn of the Dead in four tiles! This is why I don’t want Black Plague. Zombie hordes are modern, not fantasy. I want to recreate the classic Romero films or The Walking Dead. Not pretend to be Gandalf fighting the zombie horde. If I want to be Gandalf, I want to be taking on Mordor and shit loads of orcs. 

The scenario starts off with zombies at the spawn points in the four corners of the map. We had to collect all the objective markers and make it to the exit. The exit was in the same space as a spawn point.

I was playing Spencer the not Breaking Bad character Walter White. Diego was playing the not The Big Bang Theory Raj character Kabir. Whilst Will and Lucia played the not The Big Lebowski characters The Dude and Walter, Gary and Ross.

Luckily for us one of the spawn points meant the zombies got trapped in a building. I say lucky. In reality it was a ticking time bomb. We had to get in that building to recover three objective tokens. So the longer we left them building up there, the harder it was going to be to get those objective tokens.

In the end we left the zombies building up in side the building. We reasoned we’d best try and find the ingredients to make a Molotov cocktail to take them out. 

By the time we were ready to take on the horde that had built up inside the building, I had the ability to get two Molotov cocktails instead of one when I had the ingredients. We had lucked out and had indeed built our petrol bombs.

The photo below shows on the right how the horde looked on the board. The photo on the left is how I imagined it.


Lucia opened the door into the building. She was the only one left that was able to open doors at this stage. I then did my part and tossed the Molotov into the jam packed room. 

BOOM! Burning zombie flesh, and 29 experience points (Diego totalled the corpses). I was well and truly into the red zone. This was a first for me. I’d never survived that long to even get close. 

In the end I think we were all in the red. We were zombie killing machines.

After wave after wave of regular zombies, toxic zombies, brute zombies, skinner zombies, zombie dogs, and murder of crows. We had finally collected all the objective tokens, and made a dash for the exit. We had survived and escaped. We were winners.

A great afternoon of killing the walking and running dead. We got fortunate no abominations appeared. But we did get plenty of fatties.

I must try and get Game Night kits 3 – 5. 
 

Ramble on

Fenland Gamers, Game day, game night, zombicide

Oh wow I’ve managed to write a second post that has a title of a Led Zep song title! 

We really are lucky at the Fenland Gamers in the locations we play at. 

Thanks to the kindness of The White Lion Hotel we had use of the lovely big table to play on yesterday. We get to use this fantastic table 99% of the time we game there. And I think I speak for all the members in our appreciation and gratitude for being allowed to game there, and the warm welcome we get.

Yesterday Jeff and I met up lunchtime to play War of the Ring (First Edition) before the evenings entertainment of Epic Zombicide.

I’d never played War of the Ring before, but it was on my list of games to play, along with Battle of the Five Armies. Plus being a Tolkien fan who wouldn’t want to play it? 

I chose being the Fellowship over the forces of Mordor.

The turn order isn’t too bad to learn, from there its specifics.

My overall tactic of using my armies to draw out the armies of darkness, giving the ring bearer a clear path to Mordor, was confusing to Jeff.

It meant the ring bearer was sitting in Rivendell for a few turns. Even separated from the fellowship. 

The main flaw with my plan? Apart from poor implementation? It left too many easy points for Jeff to pick up undefended.

I enjoyed the game a lot. I liked the ability to pass when taking actions. It meant that I could choose which actions by Jeff to react to. Which is handy when he has more actions to take on most turns (unless he’s ultra unlucky with his dice rolls).

This is a long game to play and set up. However when playing the time flies. There is little downtime. 

This is definitely a game I want to play more of. There is a lot to this game, and it does need multiple plays. And my words above should really be considered initial thoughts, and only scratch the surface of the game.

With Sauron enjoying his comprehensive victory, it was time to see what the zombie horde could do.

Yep it was time for Epic Zombicide. That’s right day two of back to back Epic Zombicide. How insane is that?

So today’s Epic Zombicide was a three by six map that Jeff and I put together.

By the time Debbie had arrived after finishing work, we had setup and were ready to fight for our survival.

In this Epic! scenario we once again had to make it to one of the two exits at the other end of the board. However we also on the way stop in one of the buildings to find a map we needed before leaving.

With that tweak I felt that the game was more balanced and a little more challenging than the previous days initial trial of Epic Zombicide.

Naturally tweaking the draw deck for zombies is another way to increase the difficulty level. Like I could include cards that spawn out of the sewers, tweak the search deck with more aargh cards etc.

I really do like how this plays for introducing noobs to the game. And it’s nice having a location games of this scale can be played. Plus as one of the photos above shows we can get nachos! 


I just need to finish off my inserts now for the final two boxes. Which is basically the tokens, cards, and characters.

Yesterday really was a great afternoon and evening of gaming. I had a totally enjoyable time. Oh and we out ran the zombie horde! 

Song Remains the Same

Fenland Gamers, formula d, Game day, game night, zombicide

Yesterday at my place of employment on our day off, my colleague and I met up to take on the zombie horde in Epic Zombicide!

I set up a six by five city map, with our soul objective of getting from our start position to one of the two exit points.

I’d tailored the search deck with a mixture of weapons, and useful stuff (no food basically). We were up against regular zombies, brutes, skinners and toxic zombies. Plus those crowz. 

Throughout the map were randomly placed cars to be searched and driven. In the car search pile I did have one aargh card shuffled in. Just to give it a little tension while searching.

We managed to get everyone out. And that’s despite whenever we thought we would investigate a building it only made things worse. The building I was going to look in revealed a fattie. While the one my colleague was going to go into introduced an abomination onto the map! Luckily it was a regular abomination with three hit points, and I had a weapon that did three damage.

For me this randomly thrown together scenario and objective was easy. Maybe too easy. But for introducing a noob to the game like my colleague, I think this was pitched nicely at the right level.

Tomorrow it’s more Epic Zombicide. I may step it up by putting an objective that forces us into a building to achieve before making a dash to the exit point.

Last night saw the start of season two of our Formula D League.


Spoiler alert, the Formula D machine that is Katie continued off where she left off from the inaugural season of our league, with a win.

Katie won the first season with a clean sweep of victories.

For our second season we upped our game and moved on to the advanced rules. We haven’t gone “complete” advanced and started using weather and deciding our own wear points. That will be season three. 

In the meantime we are still wondering what exactly we have to do to beat Katie.

During both laps there were brief moments when I was in front. But on both occasions that lead was squandered somehow. Most of the time I was battling it out with Jonathan for second place. 

Somehow in the last third of the final lap  I went from second place to fourth! Debbie did amazing to come up and take third from me on the final two corners.

In fact I’m still in shock.

Wow the advanced rules! Having all those   different wear points. It makes decisions like over shooting, collisions, dropping gears far more “interesting”. They all have different impacts on the various aspects of your wear points. And severly  limit the number of times you do any of them. 

The overshoot spin out rule on corners is cool, and adds even more consequences to the action.

Jonathan particularly liked the changes to the pit stop rule. Which made it more realistic. And I did like it too. Like a real pit stop the only thing that gets repaired are the tires, plus you have to roll for how quick the tire change was done. Brilliant.

Plus we now get debris on the track from collisions etc. Cool!

Yeah the advanced rules are fun, forcing you to be more thoughtful in your driving! Love them.

But who will dethrone Katie?

Epic Planning

zombicide

I’m not going to finish my little project in time. I think I’m going to be a box short.

What am I talking about?

Oh this week Zombicide is hitting the table again!

But having so much stuff for it, like Season 1, Season 2 – Prison Outbreak, Toxic Mall, Season 3 – Rue Morgue, and Angry Neighbours. So that’s all the big boxes. Plus I have a few of the expansions adding more survivors, crows!, zombie dogs and companion dogs, extra zombies.

It’s not everything but getting there.

So I decided this stack of stuff needed organising.

I’m trying to get everything into the five boxes. Well that’s the ideal.

Which means I’ve been making inserts from foam core.

At the moment I’ve got three boxes done, which covers tiles, and zombies. I’ve just started on the counters and cards inserts for one of the remaining boxes. Which leaves the final box for survivors and their zombie version, plus character cards. And I need to squeeze rule books in too!

I was hoping to have this all done before I roll out Epic Zombicide.

What’s Epic Zombicide? 

Well since discovering the amazingly large table we are allowed to play on at The White Lion Hotel, it struck me this would be amazing to play Zombicide on.

In fact I thought I bet I could build a massive map with all my tiles on the table.

And thus the idea of Epic Zombicide was born.

So this isn’t one of the amazing scenarios or campaigns that come in the rule books or compendium. No this will basically be start at one end of the map, and fight your way to other. There will be spawn points all over the place, abandoned cars, waves and waves of zombies. 

I have a dry run of Epic Zombicide planned on Wednesday at work! Which will then with any tweaks needed return to the table that started this path the next day.

But the secret to success is going to be organisation. Hence my little project in foam core.

Once I’ve finished the project I’ll do a little video showing it all off!

I only have one regret for this insane idea of mine. That is I didn’t get the pack of 3D doors and barricades on the season three Kickstarter. They would make this super epic looking on the table.

Sadly can’t find them anywhere. Oh I can find the ones for Zombicide 2.0 or Black Plague as it’s known officially. But they have that medieval look to them that is out of place in a modern setting.

I wish CMoN (not my favourite company in the world, in fact I hate them) would do an “upgrade” kit for original Zombicide. Giving us the improved player boards of the 2.0 version. Plus give us a single sheet rule change that matches the 2.0 ranged weapon targeting rule (I talk about house ruling it here).

For me zombies are modern, not something for a fantasy medieval setting. It’s why I haven’t bought Black Plague. It’s what I have but with a fantasy theme! Why would I want to buy everything again!!!

Anyway I digress. I can’t get the 3D stuff anywhere. That’s such a shame. Hopefully I’ll stumble across them in the future.

Right I’ll love you and leave you it’s nearly my bedtime as I finish writing this! Yes I’m that sad and old!!

House ruling Zombicide Ranged Attacks

zombicide

One of the critisms of Zombicide, if not the main one, was the ranged weapon rule below:

What is so bad about that rule? It's that survivors get shot first when you fire with a ranged weapon into a zone with zombies and survivors in. And that held true unless you had the scope on the rifle. I played it as it was, but I know others chose to ignore it. It certainly for some detracted from the game.
In the later half of last year Cool Mini Or Not ran a rather successful Kickstarter for a spin off Zombicide game called Zombicide: Black Plaque. This took Zombicide from its modern day zombie apocalypse setting and placed it smack damn into a medieval setting.
Now I didn't back this new version of Zombicide, which I think would be fair to call it Zombicide 2.0. Mainly because I had a lot of the original version and was happy with the modern setting. Which for me why I like it. I love the way it invokes the Romero zombie movies, like Dawn of the Dead. One of the expansions Toxic City Mall is set in a mall. While Prison Outbreak you could pretend you are the Walking Dead survivors holed up in the prison they hole up in. I just love that theming.
However in my travels on the interweb I did come across that in Black Plague the ranged weapon rule had been modified. It “fixed” the main complaint players had of the original game. Not only that, but some players were using this new rule in their games instead of the original rule.

The ruling had been changed that if you rolled a hit, you hit the zombies and not the survivors in your target zone. If however you rolled a miss, you hit the survivor. That to me is a brilliant fix. It gives a bit of tension to the roll of the dice, and doesn't break the theme. Missing has repercussions, brilliant. I can hear the banter now about if only a survivor was a better shot.

I'd like to think that we will see Cool Mini Or Not update the rules both online and in the physical copy of the game to take this “fix” into account.

In the meantime let me know how you have handled this issue with the game, have you tried playing it with this rule change?

 

Sleeve that survivor

netrunner, new arrivals, zombicide

The theme of Android:Netrunner is incredibly awesome, the game is amazing, and boy oh boy is the art on the cards out of this world.

Now to sleeve all of the cards in Netrunner would be a tad on the expensive side. Especially if I was to use the official sleeves. A pack of sleeves is usually made up of fifty sleeves and costs between a fiver and eight quid. With a card count that must easily be over two thousand by now if you have everything, you can quickly do the maths, and have a minor heart attack from the shock.

There is a cheaper solution. Just sleeve the cards that make up your current decks for corporate and runner. For my Noise deck I have been using the beautiful looking Snare sleeves from FFG (below right).

Doesn't the art work for Snare look amazing? I love the whole venus flytrap look of it. It captures the theme of the card perfectly. This card is the Android:Netrunner version of a venus flytrap, it sits there waiting for the runner to “fly” into its cunning trap looking for those oh oh so sweet agendas. But just as the runner realises something is wrong it snaps shut.

However this morning I had two more packs of official FFG sleeves arrive. The amazing looking pop up (above middle) and the equally amazing looking Posted Bounty.
What really impresses me is that there are some really abstract ideas within the game, and some how the artists manage to capture that theme/idea in such a beautiful way. Pop up window and Snare manage to do this so so well.
The pop up window sleeves I'll be using with my NBN corp deck that I am building. If I build a third deck I'll use the Posted Bounty for that.
The exciting thing is I think from what I have seen of Ashes Rise of the Pheonix Born that the art in that game may surpass the art of Netrunner!!!!

The dudes a survivor

Finally the Gary character for Zombicide also arrived today.

As you can see the Gary Zombicide character bares a remarkable resemblance to a certain Jeff Lebowski character played by Jeff Bridges from the cult/hip/classic (think that covers all the bases) movie The Big Lebowski.

I got this character for one friend (the same one I did the hipster minifig for) only to play with. He's a big fan of the movie (although I debate that because he hasn't seen the porn parody version) and when we next play Zombicide (we are long over due for a game or two) I'm sure this will be the only character he will want to play with.

I have to say that I think they have captured the character really really well in the sculpt.

Now I just need to track down the Ross survivor which is the John Goodman character from the movie.

 

More Survivors

zombicide

Continuing on from yesterday's Zombicide survivor fest I've made a visit to the top secret location to get more pictures of the Zombicide survivors that are in the witness protection program.

Seth or Mr Liam “I only play the one role these days” Nilson. A great looking sculpt, that for me captures Liam's character from Taken. Sadly it also captures every bloody role he has had in a movie since also. Not sure I could play Seth, the pain of having to think of all those derivitive roles deluting the memory of a good movie. It's just too painful. Seth will stay in the witness protection program.

I was a House fan, although that final season was a bit of a slog to get through. Now I'd like to say that this sculpt captures the House character really well. But that would be a lie, in my opinion it captures the over the edge, lost his mind with anger side amazingly well. You can definitely see House going a bit insane with a baseball bat busting zombie heads.

Yes I would consider myself a Big Bang Theory fan despite its stereotyping of geeks for comedic effect. Kabir below is the Zombicide characture of Raj. There are other Big Bang Theory characters charactured in Zombicide, and those that I have will be covered in another post. Ok I admit it I will be playing scenarios where the Big Bang Theory gang have to fight for survival.

What red blooded teenage boy didn't have a crush on Daisy Duke from the Dukes of Hazard during the late seventies early eighties? Not sure I'd play Cat that much but it sure was great bringing back those teen memories.

I know at least one friend who will love playing this character. Spencer is the sculpt representing Walter White from the Breaking Bad TV series. A very cool looking sculpt. I'll have to look what other characters they do and see if there is a themed team I can put together.

Finally we have Yuri who is meant to be Keither Sutherland as Jack Bauer from 24 I think. I like this sculpt a lot, and I think Yuri will be used a few times.

So there we have it for this witness protection update. I hope you have enjoyed this look at some of the figures I got with the third kickstarter. Sadly the kickstarter is usually the only place these can be picked up at a normal price. Otherwise it's paying the inflated and they are very inflated prices of eBay.

 

Clones and Survivors

zombicide

After suffering that mauling by Loki, Raoul was beyond saving. Surgeons tried for hours, working in shifts to save him. But alas their epic struggle through oceans of blood and tissue was to no avail. Raoul was declared legally dead on the operating table and his remains immediately handed over to some shadow cybernetics skunk team trying to develop cyborg soldiers.

Luckily with advances in medical technology thanks to the imagination of science fiction writers cloning has come far enough for Raoul to be cloned. Yesterday straight from the cloning vats the new clone Raoul arrived.

Clone Raoul has been placed in a secure secret location to protect him from any future attempts on his life by the diabolical Loki.

I thought that while I was talking about the new clone for Zombicide that I was forced to get after Loki decided he wanted a plastic snack! I'd belatedly go through some of the figures from the Zombicide Season 3 kickstarter I got. These figures aren't from the actual episode 3 boxes but stretch goal figures and add-ons.

The attraction of these figures is that they are charactures of well known celebrity figures. Naturally the publisher hasn't licensed anything so they can't call the figure the actual name of the person it is of. However you can make an educated guess who they are meant to be.

These figures just add another bit of fun to the game.

First up is Bastian. I had to look this one up for who was a parody of. Apparently it's Ben Stiller from Zoolander. The character looks cool with the double Uzi guns and double axes in his zombivore version. But and this may be blasphemy to some but I'm not a big Ben Stiller fan so unless a friend really wants to play this character in a game he won't be seeing much game play.

The potty mouth, no holds barred, tell it as it is, Gordan Ramsey is the next to be parodied as Jesse. I love the art work and sculpt, they really do capture Gordan Ramsey so well. I wonder if he is aware of this characture? Not sure I'd play him much but I can see myself doing so on the odd occasion.

Finally for this post for fans of the Luc Besson film Leon we have Lucius as the parody of Leon the professional. This sculpt just oozes cool. I know a couple of friends that might play this character.

These figures have also joined Raoul in the top secret safe house in a witness protection program so they can escape the clutches of Lord Evil himself Loki.