So you have this fun co-operative zombie survival horror game that gets harder the more zombies that you kill. You have everything for it (well almost everything), but it’s hard to get to the table. Not everyone shares your love for the game. Which means all that thematic plastic and cardboard is taking up valuable shelf space, calling you to play with it.

After a long overdue conversation last night with a great friend of mine that lives north of the border and who I often describe as the “Scottish version of me” (which isn’t really a compliment) I know have a rule book on it’s way through the crumbling UK postal service.

My friend told me about a rule book just released from the looks of it from Osprey Games called Last Days Zombie Apocalypse, a miniatures skirmish game that could use any old miniature. After our phone call in a blatant attempt to lure me in my friend shared a video about the rules via a tweet.
After watching the video I was very interested. Even more so when I saw that the rules were just under £14 with Prime on Amazon.

So what attracted me to click the purchase button for the rules to this miniatures skirmish game? I mean I often complain that the reason I don’t play any miniature type game like Age of Sigmar, Star Wars: Legion and Blood Bowl to name a handful is the cutting of sprues, gluing and painting before I can even play them. Which takes an age. My argument has been I want to be able to buy the game in a FLGS, open the game up, punch cardboard for 20 minutes and start playing or learning to play. Not spend hours/days constructing everything before I can start playing. Which is basically every miniatures game out there. How about that for a sweeping generalisation?

The reason I went for this rule set for my first miniatures skirmish game, (ok may not be my first if you include Star Wars: X-Wing and Star Wars: Imperial Assault skirmish mode) is because it is designed to be used with whatever models you have at hand. The designer even mentions various games and sources you can get models from to use in the video (and on the Facebook group for the rules). One of those games he mentions is Zombicide. Oh wait I have a lot of Zombicide stuff, I can use them! A miniature skirmish game where I can virtually start playing straight away using my Zombicide miniatures, count me in.

Now I know that my unpainted miniatures will be an abomination to the full blown, totally into the hobby, builds their own custom miniatures person. But stuff them. This all of a sudden makes the format accessible to some-one like me. And believe me there are an awful lot of people like me out there, where that cut/glue/paint bit switches them off totally. Until the likes of Games Workshop remove that part of their product they will never really make the miniatures hobby accessible to a wider audience.

But back to this rule set. As part of my due diligence I looked at some of the terrain options that were linked to by the designer. They look pretty cool, and a reasonable price. The game like X-Wing plays in a 3ft x 3ft area. Which is a nice size. Totally easily to get a playmat to cover the play area so it is easy to know the boundaries. There is also the fact that this rule set adds zombies into the mix too. So there is that extra element to the skirmish that you have to take into account. How this compares to the Walking Dead miniatures skirmish game I don’t know. Not sure I will get to know either, because I won’t be buying it because of the above reasons.

I’m pretty excited to look at this rule set and see about adding some of the Zombicide characters into this alternate zombie apocalypse. I want the Big Bang Theory Gang as my skirmish crew.