Friday night - ZOMBICIDE!

 This week it was just John and me at Jules' place, so he wheeled out the boardgame Zombicide, which has the dual advantages of being a cooperative game where all the players work to beat the "system" AND being designed to more or less ensure the players overcome the hordes of Zombies eventually!

The game also has the advantage of some very nice hard plastic figures, which our host has painted up to enhance the whole experience! He has also recently purchased a batch of "doors" to add another element of 3d to the printed boards the game is played on - although these are yet to be pigmented!

As regular readers will probably recall, two of the "survivor" figures are female, a nun called Anne and a barmaid called Nelly and of course, these were assigned to my control - not that I am complaining, you understand!

The scenario - our band had to search all the dwellings in the village to rescue villagers who had survived the zombie apocalypse - but a couple of the markers would turn out to actually be zombies!

Game boards set up

Anne and Nelly

Julians figures - Sampson the dwarf above and a magician whose name escapes me below!

For some reason, John did not take close up pics of his two figures!

We are all off on an adventure!

Behind every door was the possibility of zombies and other assorted baddies - this one is called a "brute" (in the original game, the character was called a "fatty" - I can leave you to work out why that name was dispensed with.....!)

The Brutes require two hits to be killed and at this early stage, only the dwarf Sampson had a hammer that is capable of inflicting two hits - so the rest of us made a tactical withdrawal!

In the second turn, a Necromancer appeared - these have the potential to be a real nuisance, so Anne the nun rushed him as soon as he moved onto the table!

Anne dispensed with the Necromancer but unfortunately got embroiled with two "runners" (as opposed to "walkers") and ended up with three points of damage, the maximum allowed, and one being caused by a blue-on-blue missile fire from one of Johns figures - ouch!

More "walker" zombies shuffled onto the board each turn!

Searching the room for extra weapons, armour and other useful stuff, John instead found another zombie!

On about the third turn, the routine generation of the undead brought an "abomination" onto the board!

To kill an abomination, we need something that will inflict THREE hits in one go - basically, Dragon Bile and a torch (Dragon Bile is apparently very similar in effect to Napalm!)

We were also still frantically searching for a magic potion that could be used to heal Anne the nuns three wounds! In the meantime, she just hid in a cellar, making lots of noise to attract all the undead to that end of the board (a trick we learned in a previous game!)

Zombies to left of them, Zombies to right of them.....

The effect of Ann the nuns' efforts - a mass of undead creatures congregated at one end of the playing area - and yes, we made a schoolboy joke about a nun banging away in the cellar!

By this stage (after two hours play) Nelly the barmaid had not only equipped herself with a long sword that allowed her to roll 5 D6 for each action, causing a hit on a 5 or 6 - she had also found a pot of Dragon Bile AND a torch

On her next turn, she smashed down the intervening door with one action, threw the dragon bile with the second and added the torch with the third and - KABOOM - no more abomination, nor half his mates!

BUT there were still plenty of lower-level undead creatures to deal with!

The wizard cast's a spell

Anne, fully recovered thanks to Nelly also finding a healing potion, (never underestimate a red-haired barmaid!) is back in the fight and dispatches a fatty, sorry, I mean a brute!

One of Johns figures had a cloak of invisibility spell that allowed him to move through groups of zombies undetected (hence the image above!) The spell would cease its effects if he killed anything though......

With Julian and Johns characters distracting the remaining undead - there were A LOT of them still! - Nelly got into position then breached the last door and "released" the final batch of hiding villagers (the red X) - mission accomplished and the game won - HURRAH!

Not everyone's cup of tea, I am sure, but I quite enjoy this game, and it is nice occasionally for all the players to be on the same side, taking on a common enemy! I am off to a more traditional ACW game at Barrys on Sunday (tomorrow) so an AAR on that encounter will be posted in a day or two - hopefully, in the meantime, a few of you lovely people will leave a comment on this post!