Thursday, November 05, 2009
Halloween 2009 Game Report
Miniatures Games
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Every year near Halloween, I present a horror-themed extravaganza for my gaming group. Past games have featured Cowboys versus Victorian Horrors, Weird War II, Science Fiction Horrors, Victorian Werewolf and Vampire hunters, Dr. Frankenstein’s Monsters versus the Villagers and a Cthulhu Monster Hunt.
This year, I was inspired by Ambush Alley Games’ Ambush Z rules and the excellent 15mm Zombie figures from Rebel Minis, Khurasan, Splintered Light and 15mm.co.uk. In the end, I painted about 200 zombie figures—far more, it turned out, than I needed for the Ambush Z rules.
The scenario involved three squads of troops—Special Forces, Police and HazMat specialist charged with leading groups of survivors out of an infected town. The police began in town; the HazMat team just outside, and the Special Forces on the other side of a large stretch of fields and woods outside town.
The police and HazMat teams moved quickly to hook up—there was only a foot of heavily zombie infested tabletop between their initial positions. Once in support of each other, they were able to amass a large quantity of survivors from the buildings and quickly dispatch any zombie hordes that appeared. But a lucky roll for the Zombies increased their die quality from a d6 to d8, making them more difficult to kill. The zombies were, however, no more focused than before. Taking advantage of the angles between the buildings, the human teams were able for the most part to keep them out of the line of sight, and thus milling about aimlessly.
In the meantime, the Special Forces team was having a hard time crossing three feet of open terrain. Their player was too cautious, and that allowed the zombies to build up between his position and the police and Hazmat teams. The Special Forces killed Zombies by the dozens, but were unable to clear a comfortable path to town. We decided later that in this game, you just need to keep pushing forward, creating a pocket of safety around you with firepower.
But even as the Special Forces failed to make headway, the other two teams kept slugging forward, each losing but a single figure in getting out of the town. Finally, they managed to dash into the open terrain, leaving the confines behind.
Then disaster struck. The police unit had a run of extraordinarily bad luck, allowing a couple of zombie units to close and ultimately eat all of the police and the citizens they were escorting. The Hazmat team and its citizens, however, finally managed to settle under the covering fire of the Special Forces, who by this time had also lost a man to a zombie assault. Finally, they managed to beat off one last zombie attack and pull back off the exit end of the board
The Ambush Z rules played very well, and within a couple of turns we no longer had to reference the QRS. We did run into a couple of points of confusion, however, concerning how to proceed when multiple groups of zombies are close enough to react into contact with the living players. I’m still not sure we did it right. The rules were good enough, though, that I’m planning on painting some Rangers, Delta Force and Somalis and using the sister set of rules, Ambush Alley for a “Black Hawk Down” game . I also think they’d do well with a Colonial marines versus Alien Hordes game.
The buildings in town were created with the help of Evan Designs’ Model Builder software. While the software has a 15mm scale setting, I found that it looked too small, so the ones you see are in a 1/76 scale. The images were printed out on a HP inkjet on 110lb paper, then folded, glued and taped. I had thought about gluing the printed images to foam core frames, but ran out of time. The fieldstone walls and piles of debris are from Tactical Conflict Systems (which I believe are no longer in business).
The figures came from a variety of sources, including modern zombies from Rebel Minis, zombies of an indeterminate period from Khurasan, and fantasy zombies from Splintered Light and 15mm.co.uk. The Rebel minis were the best for my purposes, being clearly modern figures. They were smaller than the others, but had a nice amount of detail, considering that they are 15mm. My only regret is that there isn’t even more variety. The Khurasan minis were slightly larger, and reminded me of the sort of zombies you’d see on a Scooby Doo cartoon, with long hair, snarling faces and tattered, draped clothing. The Splintered Light zombies were designed for fantasy games, but at 15mm they worked well enough. At any rate, they were very nicely sculpted and cleanly cast. There were, however, several unusable figures, such as the “dwarf” zombie in a helmet. The zombies from 15mm.co.uk were the largest, and most crudely sculpted of the bunch. They also were clearly medieval, with period clothing and belt purses.
In addition to the metal 15mm figures, I also bought a bag of railroad figures on Ebay from a company in China. They were slightly smaller and thinnner than the 15mm figures, but painted up and based, looked nice enough. I used these for the civilians.
You can see more photos of the Zombie game here.
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