Zombicide Completion??

My previous post had me painting up some of the final models in my Zombicide board game, and this may prove to be the final post on the subject.  If you’re not up to date on the subject, I spent a few months in early 2016 (can it really have been that long ago?) painting up a few hundred models for a board game called Zombicide.  That included a great deal of Zombies, but also what appears to be about 72 character models as well.

Last post I explained that my goal here wasn’t to try to paint these to a super high standard, but rather to get a reasonable color match so that you could easily discern which figure was yours during the game.  This time around, I wound up painting up the Snipers & Handymen, and I think I kind of failed at my original goal.

Granted, I think with both sets of figures, you can tell who they’re supposed to be.  The colors are roughly matching, but rough is the right term.  It was really the greens that did me in, because I tried to paint their greens with a custom paint I had made before labeled as “ammo can.”  My thought was that it was reasonably close and it would work as a color for fatigues.  Clearly, it’s passable, but it’s not remotely close to the right shade of green from either picture.

Still, I think you can easily tell, based upon the hats and models’ stances, which models are which.

The eyes on the handymen give them a distinctly Anime vibe, but I’m not exactly sure why that is.  Anime figures have large eyes, so that makes sense–but I had even larger eyes on the gunmen, and they didn’t have that same feeling to me.

So yeah, they’re not perfect, but these are glorified equipment cards for a game that rarely see the table (though we do play Zombicide with some level of frequency, these particular cards are a bit of a rarity).  They also served as a little inspiration to get me into painting again–and maybe as a gateway to playing 40k one day.  I think in that regard, I can call these guys a success.

Zombicide Progress: Companions!

With the release of new models for Chaos Space Marines, my friend Simon has been incessantly texting us with unbridled excitement.  At first, it was cute.  We looked at him as a kid on Christmas morning: so excited for Santa; however, it never tampered down.

He’s since picked up quite a few of the models and is painting them like crazy.  Still, the endless wave of texts grinds on.  With these texts, I can feel my sheer hatred of painting wasting away.

Not completely, mind you–but enough that I thought I might dabble in a little painting again.  Recently I wound up playing Zombicide with the guys and got harangued for having eight unpainted models in my collection.  If you recall, I spent a good deal of time in 2016 painting up several boxed sets of figures, but I stopped short of completion when it came to figures I’d never used: companions.  So, what better way to dip my toe back in the waters than to start with them?

Of the eight models, there are four poses.  I toyed with the idea of painting them slightly different so that you could tell which belonged to which player, but then realized that was pointless because they’re identical in the game.  I started off with the gunmen and searchers, for no particular reason.  Actually, I wound up starting up a little bit of a base coat on all of them, but eventually stopped that and focused on these two guys.

Overall, I’m happy with how they came out.  My goal wasn’t to paint these to a super high standard, but to approximate the quality I’d accomplished with the rest of the set.  Originally, I’d set forth the game as a means of testing my ability to color match things, and while I’m a little off here and there, I think you can detect who the model is without too much trouble.

The gunman’s eyes are definitely on the cartoony side (my micron pen seems to have dried up during my painting hiatus), and the pants ont he searcher are a little too blocky.  He also looks a bit like George Lucas with a bouffant hairdo, but I think that’s actually somewhat intentional.

I haven’t figured out what color to paint the bases though.  Gray seems appropriate, but I want them to stand out at least a little bit from the characters.  I’d considered a hazard stripe theme, or maybe gray with a hazard stripe around the base–but that’s going to draw your attention to what’s essentially a glorified piece of wargear on the table.  Got any ideas about what I should do?

We’ll see if I come up with something before I finish the other four models.

 

 

Seafall Campaign: Games 12-15

It’s been a while since I’ve written about Seafall, and that’s largely to do with the fact that we just haven’t played it ages.

Part of that is because of the holidays at the end of last month and trying to schedule time with people on vacation proved difficult–but it also has to do with the notion that the game had fallen out of favor.

In truth, I’ve also omitted a complete playing session from the write-ups (so I’ll cram that into this post now).

The last time we played (sometime in the middle of December), we had come to grips with the thought that the campaign was rapidly coming to a close.  We had just barely discovered the final “wave” map, and had unlocked a variety of other options that would give us a chance at finding the end of the world, but even then, 30 successes seemed ridiculous.  If we loaded all of the upgrades onto a single player and let them try, we figured we could count on maybe 17 guaranteed successes.  That still meant you’d have enough dice (and successes) to muster 13 more.  Possible, sure, but not great odds.

Yeah, I know that you could potentially use multiple “wave” charts, but how realistic is it to achieve many of those during the course of a game?

So, I brought up the conversation that, given what we knew about the game, we would probably need to come up with a point in time to just end things.  After all, if one person had all of the ideal upgrades and then only had a chance to win the game, what would happen if we were all squabbling over the upgrades?  Surely, nobody would win.  I was fine with playing a few more games if they wanted, but I didn’t care to drag it on forever.  Let’s pick a goal, complete that, and then end the campaign.

Clearly, fatigue had set in with me.

I wasn’t the only one.  I was growing weary of having multiple people single me out as the threat and then assaulting me the entire game.  My thought was that it wasn’t fun for me to host the game, feed my friends, have them come over and just punch me in the face for the afternoon.  I just didn’t enjoy it enough.  I went along with it for a few weeks, and even suggested an alternative that I thought would be amicably accepted in the form of a penalty against me (hint: it wasn’t well received).

But others too were ready to end the campaign.  Sam was frustrated with the various rules we’d gotten wrong over the game, and figured that our misplays wound up giving an unfair advantage to some players.  He’s not wrong, for sure, but playing with different rules to me (as long as they were consistent) made for a fair game–if a different game than the designer intended.

So, we met again in January to wrap things up.  During our last December game, Sean managed to steal some charts from other players, which set him up to be the one to win the final game.  So, when we met at the table in January, I was in position to aid him in doing so.  He went first and bought all of the best upgrades, and I, over the course of the next few turns, managed to stack the adviser deck in his favor so he could get all of the ones he wanted.

Between those things, he managed to get to the point where he needed to only roll four successes on eight dice.  I don’t know how to easily calculate that, but my guess is that’s still about an 11% chance (as there’s about 11% chance of rolling zero successes on two dice).  I’m guessing that’s not remotely accurate, but I’m just underscoring there is a possibility.  It’s not a red endeavor though, and he had enough fortune tokens, so it’s really a moot point.

And that wound up ending the campaign.  Sorry for the anti-climactic ending, but there are too many spoilers to say much more than that.

Keep reading if you’re OK with spoilers.

Dungeon Run 2 – Character Design Ideas

For the Dungeon Run expansion I’ve been working on, I decided that I wanted to do at least four characters, and preferably 8–which would be enough for 1-2 of each class (war, prayer, magic, & talent).  I did, for a while, toy with the idea of making up a fifth class, but that seemed to fly in the face of their “Shiny New Toys” design rule:

Each hero will be able to use roughly 75% of all treasure, which will be especially appreciated when mixed with the treasure cards from Dungeon Run. Now instead of treasures being a rare treat, heroes can spend more time focusing on choosing which horrible new tool they can wield against the others.

Having two new classes might be fun, but it would make creation of items more difficult, and exclude the new class from using most of the items from the previous edition (ie. any item that wasn’t marked as avaible to “Any” class).  So, I stuck with the basic four.

Dungeon Run 2 – The Rooms

In continuing my design review of an expansion I’ve been making to Dungeon Run (for personal use, mind you, not intended for resale), we now come to the update on the rooms.  As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, I didn’t write these up in nice sequential orders, but rather brainstormed things and bounced back and forth whenever I came up with an idea.  It’s just easier to push content out in neatly divided sections.  Because of that, I’m stepping through each tab of my spreadsheet in order until I complete them all.

The only real advice I had when starting up was the designer’s hint at “the Vortex of Souls:”

The new Vortex of Souls tile is a great example of how players are encouraged to stay together. When the Vortex of Souls is revealed, all players place a discarded ability card on the tile. They can remove their card if they move onto the Vortex, but until they do so, they will receive a wound at the beginning of each of their turns. Ouch!