Friday 17 March 2017

James

An enjoyable project and I wasn't sure how the man would turn out.

James
But here he is in all his glory. He is brimming over with annoyance and attitude. 'Here zombie, zombie. I've got a surprise for you' As he waves his torch into the dark recesses and brandishes his trusty axe ready to mutilate whatever scurrying mess happens to cross his path.

I can almost hear that Sean Connery, Scottish accent from here.

A welcome addition to the growing band of painted Survivors. I did consider giving him a liberal splattering of blood. His role in the last game seemed to warrant that but then the thought of the mess I might make if it went wrong deterred me. I have let a little blood dribble onto his robe and foot though ;-)

The Ambush

This week we had another game of Zombicide Black Plague. We played the next scenario - The Ambush. There are only six tiles and it all looked pretty straight forward. In fact there only needed to be two survivors remaining alive to win. Capture the four objectives and scoot off the board through the two towers. As we discussed things at the start I joked that it seemed really easy and I didn't understand why we only had to get two survivors off the board, when it is usually six. Over confident, we started the game.

We played the same rules with regards to survivors. We choose one each and then the rest were random. I took Recap Rodney and was dealt James and Lucas. James comes with an search function. I really like him and had considered him for one of my starting characters when the game first arrived. Lucas has Born Leader and we made great use of that in this game.

The Dark Templar choose Cadence and was dealt Mizar and Ostokar. Cadence has Marksman and can choose her target from range, which can be very handy. Mizar gets a free magic action, which I love and is the reason that I have him in my survivor groups. He is painted too which is always nice. Ostokar has Zombie link.

So the thing about this board is that it is small and therefore the distance to the survivors is small. Factor in opening a couple of doors and suddenly you are swamped. Also two of the spawn points are within 4 squares of one another so that can be real Necromancer trouble. A necromancer arrived and we had to send a poorly armed group to deal with him.

We got into immediate trouble. We just couldn't deal with everything and perform search actions to find better weapons.

A fatty and a few wolves really put us in a bad place and then Redcap Rodney was down - noooooooo!

Finally James got a couple of searches and began to hand out better weapons. We used Born Leader to give the best positioned and best armed survivor the max chance of dealing death. Cadence was in good form and Ostokar was fantastic. We picked the Speed spell which was cool.

But then poor old Lucas got isolated and things were not looking good for him. He had one more turn and then he would be toast. In fact we were struggling to identify a path to the final objective. Then we found an invisibility spell. Hurray! Lucas disappeared. Beautiful. And he snuck towards the final objective. It was just brilliant. There was light at the end of the tunnel.

Overall the game was tense. James became a hand to hand master and mowed down the zombies buying precious time. He became a legend in his own time, rushing into Orange level which just increased the volume of zombies descending on us.

James - 'I got this'
It was great fun and there was a huge sigh of relief when we finally crawled off the board. Whew!

The stars of the night were James and Ostokar and so they have pushed their way onto the painting table.

You have got to love this game.  It plays so differently depending on the items you find. You have to adjust your playing style to suit. Be wary of this scenario.



Wednesday 8 March 2017

Ablobination in da house

So last night saw the first game of Zombicide Black Plague using all the cards I have available. We had wolves, new bosses and lots of Necromancer options. We were really looking forward to it. We decided to play the Evil Twins scenario. There were four objectives and two of them are Abominations. The aim was to claim the objectives, kill the abominations and get off the board.

We decided that the two of us playing would have six survivors in total. We could choose one each and the remaining four were random. I choose Genevieve and the DT choose Morgan. This added something to the game as we had to alter our play style to the skills of the survivors and the weapons we discovered.

We also played the NCP's and as such we had a vault deck. Anyone killing all five types of zombie was entitled to a card from that deck.

There are two vaults in the scenario and each has a random vault weapon.

So the big question was - which, if any, of the big boys would turn up.

Actually the first thing that we discovered that with all the new Necromancer cards in the game there are lots and lots of free moves for the Necromancer. Its like they are sprinting. This took us by surprise and it wasn't long before one made it off the board. We now had five spawn points and the pressure was on.

We discovered one of the Evil Twins and killed him. Hurray. But then the Ablobination showed himself. He has a reach of one square and will make short work of any survivor. Montalbon (below) beat a fast retreat from the open door in front of him.

Blobination
The game proved to be great fun. All is good once you stay at Blue level. After that it all kicks off. We made a slow start but finally discovered some decent weapons. There were volumes of zombies by this stage and it wasn't long before we sailed through Yellow and into Orange level.

Magic was not a big factor as we didn't discover and good weaponry. We had Morgan and Milo. Both did very little damage, intact Morgan spent most of his time shooting his long bow.

Glynda proved to be great fun and did Gilbert. Genevieve did really well as she got a good bow early and Montalbon was using his Hit & Run ability to great effect.

We ran out winners in the end of what proved to be a fun evening. I felt that the Blob had earned some paint and so he will ooze his was in games in the future in full technicolour!

Some paint for the Blob
And from the back
The zombies are definitely more intimidating when they have got paint on them.

Tuesday 7 March 2017

Look out behind you

Mizar had been busy mowing down zombies with his magical spells. There had been rumours of huge zombies in the area but so far he had not seen any.

Look out behind you