Irwin's Big Day Out

So I decided to give Irwin a shot. He teamed up with Fozzy to check out a crash scene at a little truck stop outside of town.

I have a little 2'x2' game board that has been sitting in my closet unused for over a year now. So I figured I would bust it out and get some use out of it.
To adjust for the smaller game board, I converted all distances to centimeters. It's the same thing I do for games when I use 15mm figures, which just so happen to use the same sized pennies for bases that these guys are using. It seemed to work out fine. I may continue to use centimeters for all my ATZ games, as my normal table is just 3'x4' anyways.

Okay, so on with the show.

As I said, they are here to check out the crashed bus and semi. Just what they are looking for... I don't know. But Fozzy feels that it is his duty to look into it.

Right off to start the boys are in trouble. A zed suddenly appeared out of the woods and grabbed Irwin. Mean while little does Fozzy know, but a couple more zeds are following him down the lane.

Irwin has little trouble taking down his ambusher. But Fozzy just can't do anything about the zombie who grabbed him from behind.

While Irwin catches his breath, another zombie piles onto Fozzy. He manages to take out his original attacker, but goes down to the new threat.

Irwin, hearing Fozzy's screams turns to see the zombie take a bite out of Fozzy's belly. Irwin just couldn't handle it. He ran over and puked next to the car.

Taking a moment to pull himself back together, Irwin psychs up to avenge his fallen friend.

Irwin jumped up and unloaded his shotgun on the still feasting zed. But the loud bang got the attention of another zombie.

This one Irwin decided to take out the old fashion way. He charged forward and smashed it a good one with the butt of his gun. But having lost his friend and the local area being clear of zeds, Irwin packed it in and left the crash site behind.

Wildlife Expert Irwin

So here is my second converted survivor. This is Irwin. He is a Wildlife Expert and nature show host... or was until the Zed Plague.
He survived the plague because he was lost in the woods at the time (those cuts and scrapes on his clothes were caused by a pack of rabid woodchucks, NOT the living dead).
Normally Irwin is opposed to guns, but for insurance purposes he aways kept this double barreled shotgun in his truck. Now he is glad he did.

Officer Fozzy's folly

So I decided to give the rookie a chance to run the gauntlet. But he had a bit further to go then the Doctor did. This time I had to get my guy from corner to corner.
Officer Fozzy is a Rep 3 "rookie" police (military) armed with a bolt action rifle.


Wanting to get an idea of what he is up against, Fozzy runs out to the intersection and gets a look around. (not pictured is another zombie moving along the building to Fozzy's left, missed him with the camera)

Fozzy takes a moment to gather his wits... while the Zeds take a moment to finish eating their last victim's wits. (double 6's, but the random event did not apply, something about running out of gas)

Then it strikes Fozzy as a great idea to run his way past the two Zeds he can see... but he got off to a bad start and didn't quite make the distance. In fact he was forced to give ground to a Zed that nearly grabbed him... As he escaped one's grasp, another came around the phonebooth. Fozzy shot at, but missed, the zed. But again jumped back in time to avoid being grabbed. (blue die is where he retired to from the first zombie and fired at the second one, before retiring again)

The gun shot gets all the Zeds on the table (plus a new arrival) all moving in Fozzy's direction. So in another stroke of brilliance, Fozzy takes off for a dark alley.



Of course, just because he took off down the alley, doesn't mean that they wouldn't follow him!

Never stop to catch your breath in a dark alley when you Zeds on your tail! And if for some reason you do? DON"T TURN YOUR BACK ON THE WAY YOU JUST CAME FROM!!!


So in the end it only took a single Zed grabbing the rookie after a fatal mistake. But even if Fozzy had made it past this one, well...


So Fozzy came to a grizzly end this time. Maybe next time out he will find some bait err... I mean a partner to help him out.

Officer Fozzy

So here is a couple shots of my first figure. This is Officer Fozzy. He is a rookie cop with just a week on the force before the Zed Plague hit.
He is armed with an old hunting rifle he found in a wrecked pick-up truck after his police issue sidearm ran out of bullets.

This was my first zombie converted back to be a survivor. As you can see, painting is not one of my strong points. I am more confortable painting armored sci-fi troops. But we all have to stretch our horizons sometime.

A test run of the ATZ rules

I played through my first ATZ game just a few minutes ago. It was just a simple "get a lone rep 3 civ from one table edge to the other".

Here is a quick and dirty of what happened.

Turn 1:
Dr. Teeth (Rep 3 Civ, BA Pistol (single shot) moved onto the board.
Three zombies were rolled and placed (two off to the left, one towards the bottom that had to shift quite a ways to get placed).

Turn 2: Zombies activate, but Dr. Teeth does not.
zombie #1 to the left has LOS of the Dr. and moves towards him.
zombie #2 to the left had to shift slightly during placement and ended up on the far side of a phonebooth so did not have LOS, but moved roughly towards the Dr.
The final zombie (#3) moved stright ahead and contacted a wall, he then moved randomly to the right (this just happened to be the right direction to bring it into LOS of the Dr.'s backside, but still a few inches away)

Turn 3: Zombies activate first, then the Dr.
Zombie #1 charges the Dr, who fires and knocks it down.
Zombie #2 comes into the Dr's LOS. Dr rolls In Sight, but missed. Zombie finishes moving, but still out of melee of the Dr.
Zombie #3 comes just shy of the Dr's rear end.
Dr. fast moves (only 12") towards where zed #1 started from.
Two zombies are rolled for, one appears (#4) 12" towards the top of the board and a second (#5) appears from the same spot zed #3 had started at. But this put it in LOS of where the Dr had ran to.

Turn 4: Dr activates, but zeds do not.
Dr. Teeth fast moves (16") around some vehicles, the phonebooth and the corner of a building. During this run he passed an alley way that zed #4 happened to be looking down.

Turn 5: Zed active, Dr not!
Zombie #1 gets up from being knocked down.
Zombies #2 & #3 move toward the phonebooth area, where they last saw the Dr run towards.
Zombie #4 moves down the alley way it last saw the Dr move across and comes up just half an inch short of grabbing the Dr from behind.
Zombie #5 moves towards the corner of the building it last saw the Dr move around.

Turn 6: Dr. Teeth saves his bacon by activating first, then the Zeds.
Dr got his fast move of 16" and ran for his exit point, not quite there but close.
Zombie #1 moved forward 4" and moved into contact with a car. He turned to his left and moved the final 2". He then could see the Dr at the other end of the board.
Zombie #2 (having lost track of the Dr at this point) moved into contact with a semi-trailer, turned right and wandered into a alcove created by the jack-knifed semi-cab and a roadblock.
Zombie #3 had been shuffling along with #2, but went left instead at the trailer and started towards the table edge point it had started the game at. (weird huh?)
Zombie #4 followed after the Dr keeping him in sight but was well behind.
Zombie #5 walked into a wall and took off to his right. Reaching the corner of the wall, he spotted the Dr from behind, but was still half the table away.

Turn 7 had the Zeds go, but not the Dr.
Zombies #1, 4, & 5 all moved towards the Dr. But none were close enough to get him.
Zombie #2 bounced around his alcove a couple times but ended facing the right direction to get out next time.
Zombie #3 hit the table edge and wander off to his right taking him even farther from any action.

Turn 8 had the Dr go first, but it was all he needed to get off the table for
the "win".

Repeatedly I thought my Dr was going to get bit from behind and not be able to do anything about it. But he certainly was a lucky S.O.B. and made it out of there.

Next time I will have them painted up and will take pictures.

So I jumped the gun a bit

Okay, that e-mail must have gone out a day late or so. My zombies came in the mail today.

They are great little figures. Already I have clipped two sprues and made some dudes. I have tossed together four zeds and four survivors.

Pictures, before painting shots, will be coming hopefully this weekend.

And the wait continues

I received the e-mail last night saying that my zombies had shipped. That was a bit depressing. I had hoped that they would have arrived by now, instead it will be another few days. Lame!

But I got a few more of the cars put together. I will post pictures once all the zoo pictures have been cleared from my camera, maybe sometime this weekend.

Also I have put together a few more buildings. Two are bars, you can never have too many bars when the dead have risen. The third is a two story "office building". But I think I will put a sign on it saying Clinic or Hospital instead. Again I will have pictures soon.

Oh it burns!

I didn't get anything done this weekend other then build a test model of the Microtactix's cardstock cars. That was Saturday evening.

On Sunday my mom took my daughter and I on a bit of a trip out of town to visit a tourist trap animal safari and zoo. It was very entertaining and a nice way to waste the day. But I of course forgot to bring along any sun screen.
Now I am lobster red and it hurts just to think about moving.

But hopefully I will have more to report on the gaming side of things as the sunburn fades.
Oh and I am still waiting for my zombies, maybe by the end of the week?

Now I have something to read.

My print copies of All Things Zombie and Haven arrived today. Yay!

I have not yet started to read them, but I did flip through them. The print quality seems very nice. Bold lettering thats easy to read. But this does make the pictures very, very!, dark and some are hard to make out.
Sadly my mail carrier decided to do her best to jam the large envelope into the mail box rather then bring it to my door, or even honk to get me to come out to her (which she did yesterday so I could sign for some letters, she is lazier then I am). So my copies were a bit bent and not the ones I would have selected off the shelf if I was buying from a shop.

Before I go, here are a couple shots of a sample table I laid out this morning. I printed out some cars and trucks this morning too. That will give a bit more clutter to the tabletop.

Its a dangerous place, a dead place, it's Zed City

Welcome to Zed City. A place for me to record the on going zombie gaming projects I have just begun.
Also I plan to post after action reports about the games played in Zed City.

So first off here is what I have started.

I have printed off a small selection of the nice paper buildings provided by Germy's World. They have a slight cartoon like quality to them, I think it might be the colors, but thats fine with me. I really like these. They don't take much effort to build (though getting the corners to line up right is something I have problems with). I have at this point about a dozen or so built.




I still have a few more waiting to be built, but I decided I wanted to take a stab at making some roads.
So the other day I found some free paper road tiles. I printed them out on heavy cardstock but they were just too light to keep from curling. So this morning I took some spray glue and a second sheet of cardstock and gave them some extra backing. This has not stopped the curling completely, but they are now stiff enough that they can be pressed flat and will stay that way for a couple hours or so. Certainly long enough for a game.



So that is my project so far.

The other night I placed my first order for Wargames Factory's nice looking plastic zombie kits. I went a tad over board and ordered two of their Super Zombie Horde deals, so thats four hundred and eighty zombie figures. But based on some pictures posted on their forums by a creative fellow going by the name Sagh, I am planning to convert some of these zombies back into living survivors. Should make for an interesting collection of zombie fighters, and of course a matching zombie figure of the surivior after they have been turned.

I also have a copy of the highly recommended All Things Zombie and Haven ordered an on the way. These rules should provide me with endless hours of zombie fighting fun.

Well thats it for now. I will post more when I have more to post.
Good luck and remember the rules of zombie survival.