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.

Search options for Zombicide Black Plague

As any who play Zombicide will know, the Survivors start the game with a low amount of pretty poor gear. It is imperative to improve this situation as soon as possible. The way this is done is to perform a Search action in rooms. This provides you with random equipment. The main issue is that in order to get inside a building you have to open a door. When this is done it activates all the zombies in the building who then start to move in your direction. You can only Search an empty room. So the first Survivors need to clear an area so that the remaining Survivors can enter the room and Search.

Its a dilemma alright. At the very point in the game when are poorly equipped you just have to open a door. This makes early searching very important indeed. It is good to have at least one character with the Search ability. This is a free Search action. This Survivor can help with the killing and still Search.

Also if you are lucky enough to find a Torch the Survivor can take two cards instead of one for each search thereby improving the likelihood of finding decent weapons. The issue is that the Torch takes up one of your two equipment options when you really want to have a weapon in each hand.

There are two Survivors that seem to be tailored for Searching. Both start with a free Search action and have the option to hold a torch as their third piece of equipment. So ideal for what is needed. I give you James and Lord Arnaud.

James

Lord Arnaud

A quick comparison reveals distinctly different characters for later in the game.

James has the option of +1 max Range or Spellcaster for his orange upgrade and then has two combat abilities or Spellbook for the Red upgrade. I suppose that this makes him a Magician as the Range and Combat upgrades are not exactly complimentary. But not particularly potent.

Arnaud on the other hand has +1 die Melee or +1 free Move Action and this is supported by +1 free Combat Action, Iron Hide or Reaper Combat. I think this gives a good range of choices depending on what the game needs. It is easy to see his Melee potential but if the game requires a little more movement then that option is present. When in the red phase you might also need Iron Hide just to survive another turn. I like the balance of options so Arnaud is in!