Zombicide - Game Review and first contact

Cover Picture of the Game Box

Last week a friend from my local gaming club got his kickstarter copy of Zombicide (official web) so we got not only the basic game but some other additional stuff such as a nice lithography of the cover picture, two extra heroes and an extra abomination zombie.
What it is in the box:
The basic game includes a lot of zombies of three different types:

• Walker: very slow zombies, have one action per zombie round and can be killed by any weapon which inflicts at least 1 damage.
• Runner: they have two actions per zombie round but can also be killed by 1 damage weapons.
• Fatty: slow as the walkers whit only one action but can only be killed by weapons which deals 2 damage.
• Abomination: a Fatty with steroids, also one action per zombie round but can be only killed by 3 damage weapons.

The miniatures for the first two types of zombie are not identical, so there are different walkers and runners, for the mechanics of the game makes no difference which walker you place on the board but it is nice form a esthetic point of view.

Zombies as in the box

The board is done by tiles which are to be arranged to build the different scenarios.

Some tiles of the game

The tiles include buildings with several rooms and street areas. Also included are some tokens which represent cars (police cars and pimp mobiles) which are required for some scenarios.
Other tokens are the EXIT token, the SPAWN tokens, the NOISE tokens and some yellos arrows to mark the skills of the heroes in the corresponding cards.

The heroes

The heroes are the survivors of a zombie apocalipse and have to fight for their lives in this very hostile environment. Each hero has a miniature in a different colour and a hero card where its special skills are indicated.
The heroes are based in the geek culture, for example one of them is Dr. Seldon Copper, other is Machete, another looks like Bruce Willis in Die Hard and so on...

Nick - The bad cop

How to play:

1st you choose a scenario, the rules book includes several, the first one with the number 00 is an easy tutorial, so my group decided to jump to the second one with the number 01, City Blocks.

Scenario 01, City Blocks

In this scenario the heroes start in the middle of the game board and have to collect the five objectives, search for some food and run away by the EXIT.
The players choose the heroes they would like to play, and randomly give to every one a weapon. The initial weapons are a Fireaxe, a Pistol, a Crowbar and as many Pans as needed to complete the number of heroes which would play. Yes, a placer can play with more than one hero, and yes it can be that your initial weapon is a Pan.
Afterwards every player checks the special skill of the heroes he is going to play, some have extra actions but other can have extra equipment, the hero get this equipment for free.
In our game I played with Wanda, which has the special ability of moving two zones pr movement action.

Wanda - the rollerskating waitress

At the beginning of the game each hero has zero experience points. Those point are recorded with a moving arrow on the upper part of the hero card. The colour of the experience bar of the hero with the higher amount of experience points determines the Danger Level. From zero to six experience point, the level is blue, the initial level.
The danger level is used to determine how many zombies and which kind of zombies spawn at the end of the zombie round. Obviously it is wise to keep the Danger Level to a minimum. Important to remember is that if one hero is in yellow and to other in blue, the Danger Level will be yellow as the Danger Level is the colour of the higher experience ion the game. If this hero is killed the Danger Level could decrease if the next high experienced hero is a level below :)
A first player is chosen and given the token of first player. This player acts with his heroes, each hero has three action (plus any extra action given by the hero card) and if the player controls more than one hero, first one hero act and when it has completed his/her actions, the next hero gets to act.

Part of a game

As Actions a hero can:

• Move: a zone can be moved per movement action. A zone is defined as a room inside a building or the space between two pedestrian crossings in the streets. In the picture above, the heroes in blue and lila are in one zone (bottom of the tile) and every one could move and joint the grey hero on the zone to their left (bottom, left corner) with one movement action. Special consideration is needed for the case that the zone wherein the heroes are is also occupied by zombies, for example, on the centre, top, Wanda (green colour) shares the room zone space with a zombie, to be able to left the room, she will need to make a movement action to move and expend another action due to the presence of the zombie, so in total she will need to pay TWO action to be able to move normally. So, for EVERY zombie in the zone the hero is, the hero needs to pay that amount of extra actions to move out of the zone. But, remember that every hero has only three actions, so be careful where you finish your movement.
• Search: one per turn, the hero can search a room zone or inside a car. Ned has an extra search action, but that only means that he can search for free and still have three OTHER actions, the limit of searching once for turn is absolut. Search allows you to take the upper card from the items deck. There is an item, the torch lamp, which allows you to take two cards ;)
• Opening a door: to open a door the hero needs a weapon/tool able to open the door. This is indicated in the item card by the corresponding icon. Some weapons make noise (like the fireaxe) other are silent (like the crowbar). Making noise will be indicated with the noise marker (in the picture above there is one in Wanda's room).
• Inventory: the player can reorganized the items in the inventory, you can equip only two items in your hands but you can carry another three in the backpack, by reorganizing the hero can give items to ONE other hero in the same zone, this other hero can reorganize immediately its own inventory for free.
• Taking an objective: in the upper picture, in the top, right corner, the red hero is in the same zone as one objective, so this could be taken by expending an action. Taking an objective gives the hero usually 5 experience points.
• Making noise: by doing so, a noise marker is put on the zone the hero is.
• Attack: using a weapon the hero can attack foes either in the zone the hero is (weapons with range zero) or in adjacent zones (weapons with range one or more). The game ignores diagonals for both movement and vision, so only orthogonal zones are considered. From the street into a building or inside a building the line of sight is limited to the next adjacent zone. On the streets the lini of vision is unlimited. Melee weapons allow the player to chose the target of the attack, so specific zombies can be targeted, for example the Fatties, whereas the ranged weapons (except if equipped with a scope) cannot chose freely target and MUST shot the possible tagets following this orden: other survivors, walkers, Fatties and runners. Yes, you read well; if you fire a ranged weapon on a zone where other survivors are, first you assign to the survivors as many hits as you can, once there are not more survivors to take any more hits (they are dead) any remaining hits are assigned to the walkers and so on. Therefore it is not a very good idea to fire in a zone where other friendly people are. Other consequence of this is that it is very difficult to hit a Runner who is sharing the zone with other zombies as first you need to clean the area of Walkers and Fatties  Curiously enough the Fatties require a weapon of 2 damage to be killed, the pistol for example is only 1 damage, so even if you score multiple hits with it, you will never be able to kill any runner in a zone wherein a Fatty is also present as the Fatty will take all those 1 damage hits BEFORE the runner takes any of them and being 1 damage hits, they are not going to kill it and therefore it would be as if nothing has happened at all. Nice, isn't it ?
• Cars: in certain scenarios you can move inside a car and with the car.

What Zombies do:

• The Walkers, Fatties and Abomination have one action each, so if they are in an empty zone (no heroes there) they will move towards the survivors they can see. If they cannot see any survivors they will move towards the noisiest group. Important to realize is that a survivor count as a noise token, so a group of three survivors amounts to three noise tokens and will be preferred over an alone survivor who used his gun and got one noise token.
• If they start their turn in a zone wherein survivors are present, they will attack the heroes in the zone they are. Their attacks are automatic success. The hero receives so many wounds as zombies attack him, but two wounds mean that the hero is dead. Also, being wounded by a zombie causes the automatic lost of an item the hero is carrying. So, if your hero is brand new and in a zone with a zombie at the beginning of the zombies turn, the hero will lost one item and get one wound, bad enough but still alive. If instead of one zombie, two happened to be there, well, bad news, you are dead. Zombie do overkill, so if there will be three zombies and one hero in one zoe, the hero is dead, the three zombies kill him and stay there.
• Runners have two actions, so they can move towards some survivors and if they reach them attack them, or kill ay hero in their zone and move to an adjacent zone.

How zombies move:

• They need one action per zone as the heroes, but if at any moment a group of zombies has two equally valid options, such as two identical long routes to a hero or group of heroes or is able to see two different zones with heroes on them, it will cause the group of zombies to split in equal numbers (!), which means that if the group has an odd number of a type of zombie, another one is add. So, if three Walkers has visual to heroes in two different zones, two groups of two Walkers will split and each one will move towards the one survivors group. Yes, zombies do replicate out of thin air, bad news, very bad news.

Spawn:

• At the end of the zombie's turn or when a building is open by the very first time, new zombies spawn. To do so, the first card from the zombie deck is revealed and the indicated amount of zombies corresponding to the current Danger Level is added to the board.

How was our game:

• Well, out of five players, only two have played it the day before, out fo the three new guys, two were dead pretty soon. One of them wandered alone to one corner of the board and was eventually surrounded by zombies coming form the street in the building were he was and eaten there. The second one was crowded by zombies in a crossing and died fighting there.
• I was the last one without previous experience, but got lucky a few times and survived the game. I was playing with Wanda and was wounded in the second round of the game, but later on managed to prepare a molotov cocktail and drop it just on time upon a group of zombies, including an abomination, which gave me 14 experience points, more than enough to put Wanda in the orange danger zone but also to give her the Slippery ability which combined with her extra movement capacities muted her into an unstoppable running machine :)

The best of the game? The molotov cocktail, without a doubt. It destroys everything in the zone you throw it, and by everything I mean it. Survivors and Zombies, but all zombies, also abominations are destroyed. Great, great thing :)

The more curious thing of the game? there are two, at least for me, the multiplication of zombies when they split odd numbers and the noise mechanics. It is possible to make noise and guide the zombies to one area so that other heroes can do something somewhere else. However, the game has so many zombies that this tactic can only be used at the beginning of the game or by precise synchronization of the players.

In the d6generation podcast someone commented an optional or variant rule wherein the players can only talk to other players if they heroes are in the same zone and that this produces noise tokens in that zone. We did not try this but I think it can awesome :) :)

The game is great and with nice mechanics however there are something in the rules which could have been better written, for example it is not said what happen when the item deck runs out or as now, it is perfectly legal for a group of survivors to make a hero to attack twice with one weapon and pass it to the next player on the line, so that a group can use the same weapon all the round.

But I do not think those points to be too serious, without doubt the FAQ and the forum will deal with them and with other similar issues in the future.

In short, a nice game, elegant and simple, based in scenarios, so some will be better than others and with a lot of zombies :) :)

La Abadia - restaurant review - Madrid

This nice local is located on the street called Ancora, a perpendicular to the Paseo de las Delicias. It has a semi-open terrace on the same street with plenty of space between the tables. The food is very good and not so pricy. The portions are generous even in the so called Menu del dia which at this moment cost 12€.
The service is friendly enough except for one waiter who looks like he is mourning someone.
In short, good food, not expensive, relax atmosphere.
Insider tip ;)

Priest - Film Review

It is difficult to descrive this movie without being negative. The actors are more or less well in their roles, but the story is quite pointless and looks more like a pilot episode of a TV series than a real film, maybe it was a pilot episode, well, not that I was aware of it when I decided to watch it.
The plot summary on IMDB has already a spoiler as at the beginning of the story it is told that the girl who has to be rescued is the daughter of the brother of the priest, later it turns out to be his daughter, but IMDB already tells you that.
This spoils one of the two not so big surprises of the movie. The second is quite obvious after 20 minutes of watching.
However, the combat scenes even if more or less forced into the story are quite fine and the post-apocalipse feeling of the movie is quite well done.
Not so bad, could have been worse but, well, not really a winner....

Battleship Galaxies - Review and Battle Report

You can find some info about this game in Board Game Geek (link) and a nice video review where you can see the components of the game in You Tube from the guys on the Dice Tower (link).
The video is great but there are some minor issues regarding the game. First, it is true that once you assemble the spaceships in the stand and in the base, there is no use for the plastic insert where they came except if you disassemble them after the game. We did so, it does not take so much time, the game stays always as new inside the box and does not seem to be a problem to assemble and disassemble the pieces every time. Maybe in the long term it could be some damage in the join point due to material wearing but I do not know for sure.
Also, the game comes with two board which are basically the same thing, a hexagonal grid over a background of the space. On the video it is suggested that they should have put the two board in one, using both sides of the board. Actually the idea is to allow to play with one or with two board. The game is scenario driven and some scenarios require two boards (and four players).
In the video, also, we can see how a transport ship is deployed, moved and then the ships inside are launched into the board. Actually this is not possible, deployment is the phase previous to movement and also includes launching ships from a transporter, so if you deploy your transporter and move, you are already in a different phase and you can not deploy further ships (including the ones inside the transporter).

The components of the game are great. Each faction comes with two motherships, two medium ships, and two squadrons of three ships each.
The miniatures are prepainted, with a good quality finish on them and they feel right on the hands. They are to be mounted on a stand which goes into a base.
There are two little screens, one for each faction, to hide your fleet from the opponent.
Also each faction has its own deck of cards, called Tactics cards, which include heroes, ship upgrades, additional weapons and maneuvers for the fleet.
For each miniature we have two cards with the statistics, actually there are three set of stats for each ship, one for the standard version, one for the seasoned version and one for the veteran version.
Each version has a different launch cost but also different, better skills as the crew becomes more experienced in combat.

Some of the ISN components used in the game from last Friday

As I already say the game is scenario driven. The rules book comes with several scenarios, and for a starting game they advise to use the scenario called Dead Zone.
In this scenario the initial fleets and the composition of the Tactic Cards decks are given for each player, only one board is used with three discovery tiles on it and the victory condition is to eliminate all the ships of the opponent from the board after the second round. The reason for this victory condition I will comment later.
First I would like to comment on the discovery tiles. The game comes with several tiles, some are called discovery tiles other are obstacle tiles and there is even a "One victory point" token. Those tiles are suppose to be used on the scenario as required by it.
In this basic scenario, the discovery token are shuffled, three are taken and placed face down on three pre-determined spots on the board. If a ship happens to end its movement on the tile, it is move face up and the effect of the tile takes place immediately. The Rules Book explain what each tile does.


How the game works? Well, let go with the battle report from the game last Friday.
The game was between two new players and even if I was supposed to explain them the game I must said that I only read the rules and that I never played it before. But the rules are so straight forward that I think that we didn't make too many mistakes :)
Both player get 15 points of energy, 5 tactics cards and their fleet (which goes behind the screen).
They also roll a dice to see who rolls the higher number, the player with the high roll decides who starts. In our game the ISN player won this roll but she decided to let the Wretcheridians start the game.
The starting player gets 5 more energy and 1 tactic card, so before he decided what to do he was having 20 energy and 6 cards. That is always the first phase, collect energy and one card. There is limit of 10 cards in the hand. If at the moment of drawing this one new cards, doing so will make that the limit of 10 is exceed, the player has to discard enough cards so that he can take the new one before drawing this new one. Each discarded card gives the player one energy extra.
If you are getting the idea that energy and no the cards are the critical part of the game, you are right :)
The second phase is deployment or launching ships. Every ship has a launch cost that you pay with energy to deploy it on your border of the battleboard or to launch it from a transporter.
The Wretcheridians decided to put all their fleet inside of the transporter and deploy it on their border of the board.
A transporter ship has a cargo capacity which can not be exceeded and can only transport ships that are smaller than itself. So a Large ship can transport Medium and Small ships, a Medium ship can only transport Small ships and Small ships cannot transport other ships.
The initial fleet of each player for this scenario were a Large transport ship, two Medium ships and one squadron of three Small ships, so all of them fitted inside the Large transport ship :)
The Wretcheridians end the deployment phase.
The final phase is activation, here the player can pay the energy to activate one ship which would be entitled to move and the after paying the charging cost of the weapons to fire with them.
The Wretcheridians activated the transporter ship and moved it towards the center of the board.
Now, the ISN turn started.
The ISN player got 10 energy points and one card. Only on the first round of the first player will the first player get 5 energy on the energy phase, after that each player gets 10 energy in the energy phase.
She also placed all her ships inside of the transport ship and deployed her on one corner of the board.
After paying the activation cost, she moved her along the left flank.
The victory condition activates only after the second round to avoid that a lucky hit from the opponent which destroy the only deployed ship on the board (or the few deployed ships) when you still have more ships behind the screen to be deployed (not the case here as both players put all their ships inside the transporter ships) in the 1st or 2nd round will end the game prematurely. So, you have 2 round to deploy your ships, after that if all the ship on the board get destroy, you loss, even if you still have more ships behind your screen awaiting to be deployed.
Anyway, now it is the second round of the Wretcheridians, they got 10 energy and one card. Instead of launching (deploying) any ships from inside the transporter, he decided to pay the activation energy and to move the ship closer to the centre of the board and onto the discovery tile there, which turned out to be an alien artifact which gave him 7 extra spaces range to the primary weapon of the ship placed over the tile, which was his transport ship. Actually this gave him almost infinite range as the primary weapon was having already a range of 4 hexagons.
With the extra range and a shield siphon card played on the transport ship, he decided to attack the ISN transport ship with pretty good result. The shield siphon gave him one extra shield for his ship from the attack.
How you count damage and shields in the game ? quite easy. The bases of the ships have holes to place counters. Blue counters represent shields, red counters represent damage. Each ship starts with a certain amount of blue shield counters and each damage removes one or more, depending on the strength of the weapon. Once you have no shields, the ship starts taking hull damage, if a certain value is taken, the ship is destroyed. Some weapons or cards can by-pass the shields and damage directly the hull.
How you hit enemy ships in the game?
You roll two dices for each attack. One dice is a d10 with letters instead of numbers the other one is a d8 with numbers and each ship has a matrix on her reference card with the blue print of the ship. If the coordinates of the attack are outside the blue print of the ship, there is no hit; if the coordinates indicate the red dot inside the ship, she will explode if the ship get damaged there (no shield or effect which ignores them); otherwise the ship will take damage as stated before.
Sounds confusing ? my fault. The game is actually simple and with very straightforward rules.
Next round: Due to the damage to her transport ship, the ISN player deployed the squadron of fighters and a medium vessel, attacking also the Wretcheridians transport ship with everything. This also included two nukes which however did nothing as they fail to impact the enemy.
The Wretcheridians kept on attacking the ISN transport ship, which moved away in the next round, approaching a discovery tile on the border of the battlefield and deploying the last medium ship she was carrying. Also one of the ISN figthers was destroyed.

The ISN transport ship took serius damage this round

Just right on time as the Wretcheridians destroyed the ISN transport ship in the next round.
However in a feat of amazing fire power, the remaining two medium ships managed to reduce the Wretcheridians transport ship into small, incandescent pieces, together with the medium ship and the squadron of fighters still inside of her.
Now, it was a dogfight between the remaining Wretcheridians medium ship and the ISN ships which approached a insane final when each site was having only one medium ship at 2 range from each other in a mortal barrage of fire.

This time, the Goddess of War was smiling on the Wretcheridians who remained as only survivors on the space.

Dust, Dust Tactics, Dust Warfare and Paolo Parente

I was reading the Forum about Dust Warfare and there were some fellows asking about the relationships in the Dust universe. I mean who is who and what is what.
I though that maybe a short overview from what it was explained there could be useful for every one with interest in the game.
The whole idea of Dust and the Dust Universe is responsibility or creation of a guy called Paolo Parente.
Parente not only created the Universe but also designs everything (as far as I known) related to the universe, from comics to story line and of course the line of miniatures (soldiers and walkers) which run amok in the world of Dust.
This takes place in the hands of Dust Studios at Dus-models.com, which are the designers of the models set in Paulo Parente's Dust universe.
Dust-models.com is Dust Studios web site, and a great place to scout upcoming models, buy Premium pre-painted versions, and get extra odds & ends like decals and dice.

The main confusion point arrives from the fact that there are more games than one based on the Dust Universe. like also happens to other Universes, such as Star Wars, where more than one game is based on them (also books, comics, etc.)

There is borad game called Dust, a kind of Risk game, which takes place in the Dust Universe. Obviously is thematically related to Dust Tactics and Dust Warfare but it is a different game and a game on its own. You buy the box, you play it, you do not need anything else.

The relationship between Dust Tactics and Dust Warfare is a bit stronger than mere thema or Universe.

We said that Dust Studios produces the miniatures.
Well, those miniatures are sold in boxes for a BOARD game called Dust Tactics, you have also a started set which contains the boards for the board game, the rules, the cards with the stats of the units for the board game, some terrain elements (antitanks and craters) and the miniatures for the board game (some soldiers and some walkers).
Dust Tactics is a Boardgame using the Dust miniatures.

FFG took over the Dust Tactics game from AEG, iirc, and is the official supplier of Dust and Dust Tactics.

Then, a wise guy called Andy Chambers and his sidekick Mack Martin of FFG wrote a miniature WARGAME set of rules in the same Universe which uses the same miniatures from Dust Tactics.

So, one guy (Parente) designs the miniatures and the universe, together with some other guys take care of board game which uses the miniatures of Parente and another group of guys create a wargame using the same miniatures (think about it a a form of game-recycling :D )

The main difference between then is the set of rules which even if somehow similar have a totally different principle in mind, the board game uses a square grid, you have boards with maps to play the mission and so on; the other one is a wargame, so no board, only a table, a lot of terrain elements, people measuring inches here and there, some arguments about which miniature "sees" which miniature, etc.

But, remember everything in the same Universe :)

One universe, One set of miniatures, but Two games using them.

Zombies !!! - Painting experiment

For sure you will remember or know the game Zombies!!! (Wiki) which cames with a lot of plastic zombies in grey (male),  the dog zombies, the soldier super zombies and the female green zombies from the expansions.

Well, I am listening now to a podcast called d6generation (Web) wherein one of the authors (Russ Rant) was talking about his video "how to paint a miniature in 10 min the 20 min video) (Russ's Blog) so that I decided to try something similar with one of my zombies.

It was not so easy and the final effect not so nice. Here some pictures.

Apart from the mastering of the skill of painting miniatures which Russ shows in his video, I did a lot of thing in the wrong way but I wanted to try to paint quick.

Frist thing that did not went as planned was the adherence of the paint to the miniature. The Dust Tactics miniatures which Russ was using are pre-primer, the ones in the Zombies game are not. You can see how the paint "slips" over the plastic surface and do not adheres to it so clearly and neatly as in the video.

Second I use a different paint, more viscose, actually it is normal hobby paint, barely undiluted, which makes the paint more thick.

Anyway, I started with a quick coat of blue on the body of the miniature to cover and paint the suit of the guy avoiding the spots where the body of the zombie or at least what remains of it is visible. I intended to paint those part with a brown red combination to suggest the insides of the body and the rotten flesh.

After the blue I wanted to give a bit of dry brush of grey to make the miniature look covered by dust and dervis. Well, as you can see I did not exactly achieved it. Parts of the arm are pure blue and the rest of the body is covered in grey with the blue almost invisible.

Not the best painting job in the universe and clearly not even table suitable.

But it was a beginning :)

Next time I will put a primer and mount the miniature on a stick to manipulate it a bit better. I only have grey primer in spray but also a black spray, so my intention is to apply the primer layer, the black paint layer and then play a bit with the blue and the grey and a bit of red.

But that is for the future :)

La Manga - Spain

I have never been before in this part of Spain (Wiki), but last two weeks of June we managed to get there and enjoy some fabulous time.
The weather is pleasant on that time of the year and by far not so hot as it will became in July and specially in August. Actually it was already quite warm and the sun was getting more agressive every day.
The place is a refugee for families with kids and people with a lot of time to spend doing nothing as due to it peculiar geography everything is far away. So, basically either you go nowhere or you use the car all the time.
There are some small shopping malls along La Manga and several supermarkets, so you will never run out of supplies. The idea is to go there to a rented apartment or to a hotel for a shorter stay and enjoy the beach and the sun.
Close by is the city of Cartagena (Wiki) which is a nice place to visit, full of history and naval tradition including the original submarine build by Isaac Peral y Caballero (Wiki), probably the first modern submarine.
However, one of the best discoveries for us was an Italian Ice Cream shop, owned by an Argentinian couple called New Bo (Web), which probably has one of the best Ice Creams in the area as the owner has been in Italy and has learned the traditional Ice Cream making there. Really worth a visit :)