Playing the game!

Hello, after I had my roads built, I obviously had to play the game!

First, I picked supply run scenario, set it all up and quit playing it quite soon, way too complicated for my tired brains, lol. Then I went for "defend" scenario. Pretty basic, zombies came close to your stronghold, you have to kill them. Seems easy. I rolled to see how many zeds will attack the stronghold. Got 37 (no new would be generated), counted my zombies = 25. Yikes! I need to build more...badly. I just played with 25 then. I rolled random weapons for survivors, had a sniper, a rifle and two large caliber (Bad ass, whatever you want to call them) pistols.

Here is their last stand:
You can see surivors on top of the store and behind silver car on the parking lot:

 "Snipers" view...undead! So many! Oh my...

 Zacks closing in. You can see them clustering on the right, under the "rifle" girl...poor lost souls, unable to reach our heroes!

 Zombies reaching two survivors taking cover behind a car:

The horde, stretching arms towards some fresh braaaaains:

 

 The group two - only 1 zombie made it to the melee, sniper on the rooftop was of great assistance:

Got no more pictures, but the group on the ground ran around behind the store, climbed on truck and helped group on the rooftop kill the rest of the zeds - Mathyoo survived and won, yay!

I am slowly getting used to rules, acutally really simple once you get in. I need more survivors, here I rolled for weapons because all pistols becomes boring fast. REALLY need more zombies. So bad, I've ran and assembled some just after I've finished the game. And I need peace. I played on our dining table, which mean family members kept coming here mocking me about being a child...unaware of the fact, I am just training for the future, lol!

I will also leave my 6 zeds sculpts aside for now and will try to sculpt a fat and a strong guy from Mantic "left overs" (when you make a crawler you're left with legs and spine, which is much "meh", so I can use legs to build something else. Or something, considering my skills lol.

And I have to check Shelldrake's home rules again, twist them a bit and start using them to make zeds act as I think they should, being relentless and dumb....oh and attracted by gunfire, thats just too good to pass :P

Oh, talking about Shelldrake (I've written upper part of the post before I left this week)  - I found out I got unfollowed on your blog again...I am not sure what's the point, but I am following again now, lol.

I've also been to Vienna on "school trip" - I don't know how to call it to sound more mature, but we went to UN HQ Vienna and OSCE HQ...so that was all professional. Those were both okay, but the trip has payed itself back as I went checking the surroundings of hotel and found GK (or something) shop - I was hoping for some cheap cars (saw none...no cars at all), but I did got myself a shinny nice, big-potted X-27, or, the holy Tamiya Clear red. This big pot should last me for a while, so I've only picked one. Got to fix my zombie sextet tomorrow and should've paint moooooar! :D

The road to Hell is paved with good intentions...

Hello,

after I got rules on wednesday and played for first 10 minutes, I got this need to get the streets done as soon as possible. Paper was not enough!

So, I've decided it was enough of thinking (I was thinking if I should keep 2.5 cm spare on each side of the tiles or push road to one edge, thus giving me more space to make street parkings later on), and I had to do something. And I did.

I took out the tiles and started drawing the outlay. I've decided to divide 30x30 cm tiles like this: 2.5cm spare (mostly for fences to box in the parking lot, but also for flowers, or just random things), 5 cm sidewalk, 15 cm lanes (1 7.5 wide for each direction), 5 cm sidewalk, 2.5 cm spare.

Then I cut one tile on 6 straps for sidewalk. This gives me enough for 3 tiles, so I need 4 tiles of cork for 3 tiles of road.

I've put it on the board, to see how good I've cut it:
You can see I got sharp corners. I was planning on rounding them, but that would be pretty hard. And cutting round shapes with in cork...I was afraid I might do more damage than good. Nobody really drives on those roads, so there is no real problem, hehehe.

I went on with gluing, just used dilluted PVA. After I had all done, I put some intellectual weight on them, just to make sure bond is good. There was a little bit wrapping, but nothing really bad. I hope books didn't move any of the sidewalks, because that would end up bad.

I have left it to dry over night and went to apply sand next morning.

 After I managed to get the sand on (notes to self: apply in patches on bigger surfaces, let REALLY dry), I went on with painting blakc paint. I took three coats. Above is a picture of my workstatio nin my room. The thing is it started raining and I had to move inside. I strongly advise you keep things outside, all the sand that chipped from the tiles made my room my own little desert!

Picture below has just a (blurry) close up on the road tiles:

After the tiles were sufficiently black, I went on with grays. Sorry for the blurry pictures again, it was all messy and I had to take a pic and work on ASAP :P. So....the firs, I had sidewalks pretty dark. That wasn't good enough, so I went with ligher gray all over them. Here is before / now picture to see if I made a right decision:

 After a while, I saw I was drybrushing light grey too much over the roads. I gave roads a knock-back wash of dilluted black paint. Did same for the sidewalks, so you don't get blinded by all the brightness:

Next I went to paint some lines and such. I wanted to include some yelow paint in, just because I like it. Didn't want to do it too much, so I went for border lines only. Below you can see all nine tiles put together to form 90x90 cm square. That is 1.5cm short of 3x3 feet, but thats unnoticable. Here, you can see I didn't left any of the tiles blank. Those that don't have main street on them, have a strip, 7.5cm (so 1 lane) wide, of local roads. I am not happy with the rest of the free space painted. Its only greys and such, but I think I should go with green, could also use those as a rural roads then. Well, that's done is done, I only had black and grey paint (yup, 2 paints for all you see (minus white, red and yelow thingies), just mixed different amounts of grey in black and voila. 

 Here is a close up on a "detail". I've designated this square (otherwise identical to 4 others) for my box store, no-parking zone is there to give the space for loading docks. Check few posts back, where I've shown you the store - it has 2 openings on the back for storage. Don't mind my fabolous skills for making an even cross -.-

 Here is a close up on 3 tiles, two roads and a parking lot. I've played a bit, made one parking slot for disabled. Apart from color it is no different from others, all are 5 cm wide (because 7.5 seem too wide, nobody is going to park a bus here). Parking slots are 10 cm long, so you can see how I channeled the drive-in to allow for extra space needed. I now also reminded, I wanted to draw a disabled stickman on the parking slot, but will fix that some other day.

Well, that is it for now, those nine tiles allow for quite a variety of table set-ups. I will make curves one day, but for now, I think that is good enough. The bad side about mixing paints is, I have no clue how I will be able to make another tile just like those. To be honest, I was just slapping paints on, didn't think too much.

I wanted to seal it with matt varnish but it is raining outside and I am a chicken when it comes to spray paints. That varnish is my only can so far, I've even painted black by hand.

Overall I am pretty satisfied with how it turned out, but I'd change those areas of nothing to something nicer, marks are not the best etc...but it is my first board after all!

Now, while I wait I might as well go build some extra stuff, either zombies, "Joe's" fences ;), jersey barriers and some other junk to make the board look better than it is, heh.

Hope you've enjoyed!

Mathyoo

Iron Ivan Games - No More Room in Hell review

Hello guys,

today I got my copy of Iron Ivan Games' No more room in hell book. For those that don't know, it is a rulebook that (I copy) "allows you to create a group of characters amidst the end of the living world...and the start of the living-dead world."

Before I start anything, I would like to stat that I have never posted review of the rulebooks before, and I hope I won't mess anything up, regarding the copyrights.

The rulebook is 80 pages long soft-back book, A4 size, which I, guess, is pretty common. The pages are stapled together, so the book won't fall apart as easily as some of the other rulebooks I own. I will dress it in plastic "shirt", just to add to its protection.

To play the game, you'll need D10s (it says at least 20, which means I'd need more, hehe), some colured tokens, a scatter dice and, being a miniatures game, miniatures and some terrain.

I haven't read trough it all yet, but there are two thing that I've learned from start: a) it has some minor typing mistakes, like some parts not being bold that should, I found price for 1 weapon missing on one chart (but you can look it up in other, so there is nothing really wrong with it)...so general little mistakes that appear after someone has printed the book. Nothing too dramatic. The second thing is extensive use of humour. And I love it! Apart from random jokes, they have a funny way of naming phases. So, movement phase becomes Fearful footing and, for example, shooting phase is named "Gruesome gunplay".

Rulebook is somewhat short, as I said, it only has 80 pages, but it covers pretty much everything you'd come up with. It covers:

- Survivors
There are 3 kinds of them, the badass guys, the badass' friends guys and the walking diner types. The first type has the most wounds (called Survive! points, to keep up with the phases namings), can carry the best weapons and the most equipment. The latter, the poorest are there just to provide Zeds with someone else to eat but your hero!

-Weapons and equipment
There are rules for various melee and range weapons and equipment, ranging from pistols, shotguns, heavy machineguns  to rocket launchers, flamethrowers and molotovs. Melee ranges from "throwing starts" (shurikens if you're a ninja!), to brass knuckles and riot shield. Equipment ranges from walkie talkies, radios and such to ballistic armour and "anti bite" armour.

- Zombies
There are MANY varieties of zombies in the book. There are (using mostly my namings to keep it simple :P):
* The (I quote) "slow moving re-animated dead (what us diehards refer to as Romero Zombies, the one true Zombies if you aks me)" - so, ordinary shamblers that die only by destroying the brains.
* The fast zombies (that aren't really zombies, Ragers, or, in this game, Runners) - they move much faster, driven by hunger, but you can kill them as any other human, so they die faster. Like really die, not die-to-live-some-more die.
*The tongue zombie, that uses his tongue to pull poor souls to him. I can imagine myself converting this one right now! Those are such a badass zombies that they're uber rare.
*The fat zombies, whose only purpose is to get close, burst, cover you in their putrescine, efectively putting a spot light on the survivor for any other undead lurkers.
*The loud zombies, who's purpose is to call in more of his friends.
*The strong zombie, being just that - strong. A Hulk, you get the point.
*Crawler! My favorite since I bought Mantic zombies. Not because they'd be particulary interesting or anything, just because I have some, hehe.
*The brains guy. That is a specially smart zombie...hmm...think of him as of a student. Someone who act like he is the smartest guy around, but hes still just a zombie. He has some special rules, making other zombies get smarter and even use weapons.

-Psychology
 As we can all imagine, seeing a walking corpse is bad. Seeing walking corpse of a friend or loved ones, is even worse. The sight of your friend being a meal for the Zeds can get you to jump right in and let 'em have it or run away. Oh, your hero could alternatively wet himself...but that doesn't make him a hero anymore, does it?

-Vehicles
The book covers rules for vehicles, starting vehicles, using vehicles, shooting from vehicles, improving vehicles and so on. You can acutally use the book to play Mad Max games with leaving zombie part out.

-Campaign
My favorite part. It has various scenarios, tips and tables for story telling, limited ammo, limited food, limited nerves and so on. Campaign is written with 2 players versus zombies in mind, but you can just as well play alone.

I must say I am really happy I got this. Sure the book with its 80 pages doesn't cover all the thing that, for example, Two hour wargames' ATZ trilogy with around 300 does, but it still has pretty much everything. The positive side oh being shorter is price, I've got mine a bit cheaper from Maelstrom games store. Not that I am paid to advertise or anything, but they send the book with free shipping anywhere on the globe.

_____
Now that I got the rules, you can definately expect a post about getting all those various zombie types, by either conversion or buying particular models. And I will play some games shortly, to learn the rules. I will post one or two report in few days. If nothing else, so someone can check If I understand the rules correctly, hehe. And, last but not least, I can work with preparations for my campaign!

Hope you found informations helpful,
Mathyoo

The "horde" grows

I got to chill now, I am spoiling you! As discussed before, cutting time for video games really gets more done (if anyone had any doubts!). I haven't got my rulebook yesterday, so I hope it comes today. Unfortunately, today is the day in the week I am gone for whole day, so it might as well come tomorrow. I will post a review of the rules as I get them. Then you can expect some test AARs, plans for campaign and so on! I will be gone for whole month in May, but I expect my campaign to start some time mid summer.

/random blabbering off

Still not even "H" of a horde, but here are some shots of my new 3 zombies that I've painted:

To try new things, I went with "pale" compared to "rotten". Greenish zombies always looked kinda funny to me, but now, I prefer them over the "pale" ones. Will try mixing both colours with next batch, I guess.

So, to the pics:

 On the picture above are the newest 3 zeds. Still haven't came to painting the eyes, but I should at least leave them black next time. The scientist (and not a docotor!) on the left wears ugly "lucky" shirt. Seems it didn't work. I gave him black pants because I didn't want to give him any weird colur. Didn't come out too bad. I had to gave him extra blood stains as he didn't seem to have any wounds. The guy in the middle has bad blood stain on the face (I hoped it would turn out better), but he has quite nice yelow vest. I've build it from orange brown, started adding yellow, then a bit white for final highlight. The third guy is nothing special, random couch potato. He has a paper bag or something on his base, to add a little variation.

 Here is my unded sextet. Not much, but well, can you point me to 1 man, who had something before he got it? :P

 And the back side. Just to show you some of the stains. Doctor scientist has a head wound, but I guess it had to be a light one, if he still walks!

 HOOOORDE APPROACHING! Here you can see, side-by-side the pale and the rotting zombies.

 And again, this time, to also show you how two of the same torsos can look quite different with different paint, some conversion and other hand.

Down below are single shots of zombies for Shelldrake's campaign, if needed:

I must say I enjoy painting those zombies more and more. Especially because anything works! It can be pale, it can be rotten, it can be grey, it could be tanned...if you mess something you just put some blood over it and voila! The worse you paint it, the zombier it looks! :P
You can see I've add a little (too much) blood on the bases. I guess roads could get dirty with undead shambling around!

Thanks for checking!
Matevž

Zombie town needs a name!

Hello guys!

For starters, progress check:
- Yesterday I've started painting some zombies, now I am struggling with my motivation, after I finish the bases, I will DOUBLE the size of my "horde". Sounds like big stuff, eh? Well, not if you go from trio to sextet!
- I found out ordering Tamiya clear red costs much, considering the postage. Due to all that complications, I've mixed some red, black and gloss varnish. So far, varnish doesn't seem to show itself, so I might try and varnish over the "blood" to get that gory effect. I will show minies tomorrow or some other day.
- Got myself some dice, nothing spectacular, I hope rules will be here tomorrow, but probably on tuesday.
- No progress with the city, but hey, a man can't do it all over night!

The main reason I am writing is because I would like to hear your suggestions about naming my city. I don't like to think about it as a "city", it needs some personalisation, hehe.

There are no boundaries, but I would like it to be somewhat unique. Gravesend, Mayhem city and Outbreak city are thus ruled out. It would be nice to have something that is at least by far connected with zombie apocalypse. So no gaming in "Hamburg"! My campaign will be set in fictional country where they speak bad english, if that helps. If anyone has strong attack of imaginations and originality, we could work out the name for the country, too.

I, so far, only came to "Autumn", after listening to the podcast called (hold your breath!) (here it comes...) Autumn!

I like it because it has this idea of something bad aproaching...you know "Winter is coming!" simbolics. Not too original, I guess. And it is kind of neutral, I wouldn't like to name my city "Catastrophe" or "Doomity" :P

As for reward...unfortunately I can only offer you my eternal gratitude and warm feeling someone gets as he reminds himself there is a struggle of life and death going on in city he named.

I would also be more than happy, if there would be such wish, to include mini you, or mini-your-identity in campaign / city.

I have actually written all my plans for campaign, but I've decided to show that at latter date. After I will get the book and will see the limitations, I will post my idea of campaign. For now, let me just say that I am planning for something special ;).

Thanks for help in advance,

Matevž

More WIP buildings

Hello,

last two days I've been working on the exterior of my buildings, to get things moving somewhat.

Here are the pictures:

The picture below shows you all the buildings I currently have. There is 1 bigger, 1 story house with a garrage, two little twin houses, an apartment block and a box store I showed few days back.

All I was doing these two days was actually building roofs and sticking matches around the buildings.
Here you can see close up on front and behind of the little buildings. They're supposed to be identical. Right doorway, however, has a bit dented step, i cut a bit too short again, and figured some variety could be nice. 

 A close up on zombeighors, having a little mornin' chat.

The mighty apartment building from front. There is an apartment down bottom, on first floor and on top floor. Top one is a bit smaller but has a terrace that offers a nice view of the town. Needs fencing, we don't want anyone to fall off, do we?

 The side of the building:

 ...and all the components:
You can see top floor, with little "box" for staircase, ground and first floor are basically identical, except for the fron doors, of course. The thinner section is for staircase, which I might or might not build once. It would be "snail" type, a little 5x5 cm "cube" that starts low and grows , you get it :P

 I will do some "garage" doors for delivery section of my box store: That is the "top" section, with two openings. In the "store" part, there will be glass doors. Or none, but you know, a man can plan. Naturally, floor plan is smaller than expected, so once I get to building shelves, I have to rethink my strategy.

 And for the end, the building that still looks quite small, but way too big compared to others, the "suburbian queen". building from front. Blue zed is in a garrage.

 The little variety:

 Here is the 3x3 board, using paper "testers". It looks funilly largely-small. Mostly small. I've only used cars from poundland, didn't bother finding the others, hehe.

 Most of the cars are too big. Especially the police and bus. Here, each lane is 5cm wide, plus 5 cm for sidewalks + 5 cm spare (each side). If you add a sidewalk, two police cars can't meet, and don't get me started about the bus.
I was thinking I would add another centimeter to each lane, and another half centimeter for each of the sidewalks. That half would be on half of the sidewalk and I would "plant" hedgerows, dividing sidewalk on two sides - for bikes and for pedestrians - as its done here, in a town close to me. Still don't have the picture, but I guess you could imagine.

The problem is, I lose 5 extra centimeters on each side. It leaves me with 3.5, which is still something...but i lose the simetry of 5. Its not something really disturbing, to be honest. And on the plus side, I would really like to see my bus drive around normaly.  The thing is, 5 is enough for other vehicles. How wide are the roads you guys are using?  And I would love to hear your opinions on that, don't want to start building a board and end up with something that I don't like.

Oh, and I've ordered some hasslefree minies, but more on that when they arrive! :P

Cheers,
Matevž

Some more WIP!

Hello,

I have figured, I mostly show some work done on my weekend posts and I mostly just talk nonsense on my week posts. Thats mostly because I have more work to do the first few days in the week and theres practically nothing to show.

What I did since I posted last time, however is:
- Painted 2 AT rifles and one sniper for my FOW force. Sniper is actually a "dummy", because I didn't got around buying any. And that makes more sense. Herr sniper would never show himzelf in ze face of ze enemiez!
- Went shopping a bit. Got myself some wire for sculpting (Still planning on sculpting "team Zombie wargamers" :P), got myself some flowers, forgot to buy green static grass (got the arid one from my FOW desert project, but that isn't good enough), also got a sieve (will try to follow the guide Zombie Ad posted. Got my own sieve from a start, so his guide has already been helpful!). Last few things were some thick hardboard for the roofs of my buildings and some air-hardening clay for some random sculpting. I was thinking some furniture and such.

Oooh, and I got myself some cork tiles, for the city. Now that I got them, I am thinking 4mm thick (compared to 3.2 I got) would be better. But this way, I can mix it with the one I use for my buildings. If it will be all too fragile, I will probably go and get 1x1 meter wood board and will just make a frame to put those cork tiles in. The idea is, that I will get some "vampifanish" modularity out of the board.

Here is a little plan I made:

 Again, for those that don't know yet, I will be using cork tiles, 30x30 cm (a bit smaller than 1x1 feet). So, nine tiles = 3x3 and I could make table as large as I'd want. In theory, at least.
To the plans. You can see on picture above, I made some rough sketches. I made a check-board, one little square is 5x5 cm. Roads would be 5 cm wide for a lane, which is enough for an ordinary car, but a bit too small for my two big buses. I won't be adding any extra centimeter just for the buses, tho. Using 5 centimeter multiples gives me nice simetry and thats exactly 2 slotta bases wide, so I think it should work okay. The crossed areas are sidewalks.  On the picture above, we got road leading from bottom left corner, sticking to the left, ending at top right. If we say bottom left is number one, and top right is number nine, we got:
1 = road with a bus stop. Primarly, I wanted those to be parkings (like in the city close to me, should take some pictures next time Im there), but bus is 30 cm long, so that had to be a bus stop, hehe.  On square right to it, square two, we got apartment block I built. I would have to model some extra random stuff to fill the area around it, some vegetation of a sort. Square three has the two little apartment buildings I also made, with a one-lane road leading to them and some parking slots for the residents. On middle row, from left to right, we have road with parking area, parking space for apartment block / box store and the store itself. I need to build me some "LuckyJoe fences" to add to the enviroment. I couldnt find the mesh he uses anywhere as of yet, sadly.  On top row, we got a corner road, always useful, a road with drive in and drive out for parking lot and a T crossroads.

 What I did then (and before building pattern one), was grab all the papers and mix them, pulling out one by one and just putting them together - childish fun! So, now we got, from squares 1 to 9, again, road with parking slot, turn "up", apartment block, road, running across the board, with bus stop on the left and parking  drive-ins on the right. Top row, we got apartment block, box store and parking lot.

And another configuration, this time not using the drive-ins with parking lot,  just to make sure It can still make sense, haha. So, from 1 to 9: We got the drive ins turn around, leading on the board, we got parking lot for store / apartment block, road section, store itself (note the delivery road south of the store, connected to lane for residents of the little buildings), and some more road up top.






Seeing the plans, I've decided I will either make T-junction for access to parking lot, or put the in- and out-lanes further appart. So I will be able to put this next to 2 apartments as if those are private lanes each of the buildings. I will not make bus stop yet, but I will probably make some parking slots next to the roads, for sake of variety. Will draw that on my 30x30 cm paper to see how it looks in person, before I get to cutting cork. I also have to figure what I will do with one sided lanes and how many roads I will do with places to attach them to those lanes.



 After I will get basic nine tiles done, which should be good enough for a while, I will add grassed patches, a tile that will expand (or shrink) road to 4 lanes (two in each directions) and complementary, some 4 lanes roads. Don't know how I'd do that, to be honest. I'd still like to keep the sidewalks, but I think such a big road would need phisical barrier  between the two sides. Might as well drop the sidewalks and call it a highway, hehe.




Well, for the end, just a few pictures of my progress with sculpts. I wanted to call their bodies done, but I REALLY have to make them bulkier, as it irritates me.  Most of them are still only good to be zombified teenagers, I am afraid.

The three guys that kindly volunteered to let me sculpt them from scratch (except the little piece of sprue that  their limbs grow out from, but that doesn't really count!): And no, not looking towards sculpting heads and hands :(

The three guys that got their heads from WGF smallest heads. They were all bare, but I've decided they deserve better. The patient one is...should be a lady, the middle guy is nothing special, the third guy has a baseball hat, because you are not a man without one!

 

Girl's splendid pony tail, a true lady is always glamorous!

 

 A scale picture, just to show you how slim those guys are. Will try to fix that, but again, they will still end up smaller. You can see Mantic zed is pretty heroic. Got to orded that .50 cal when I get around to TAG's site, need mooooar firepower!

Oh, one more thing, I play games very rarely lately, just at nights, hehe. Good thing my computer is kinda slow and they're not much of a pleasure. I do read a lot for my diploma, as I've mentioned before. And I really want to play some trench raids....ah...eventually!

And another one! My rules have been sent! Still no sculpting tools, tho. I am waiting for 2 months now. That is what you get if you order "out of stock at supplier" item and don't think too much.

I also got to thank one more time to Lord Siwoc for sending me the dices. It may sound like a small thing, but It reaaaally helps, I hate city centre.  I am actually so moved, that I want to make you a great personality in the unnamed city (got to fix that, too -.-). We can put you on a billboard (running for the local elections or just being a movie star? X-factor winner, maybe? :P), name a business after you or something :P.

Well, let that finally be it for today.

Thanks for taking time to read,

Matevž