Friday Night Game at Julian's - Zombicide again!

 Through a miscommunication, John and I turned up at Julians expecting an ECW game - I even had 5 or 6 file boxes of figures with me - but when I walked in, Chris and Julain were sitting around a small table with the Zombicide board/figure game set up! Apparently, the ECW is scheduled for his cough cough-iest birthday bash next Sunday - so I unloaded the figures and left them there for future use!

Julian has been busy adding and painting up extra "baddies" for the game, including zombies with bows, zombie wolves and a creature called a Wolfabomination or something equally grammatically mangled! It's a giant werewolf type thing that takes a hit value of 3 to remove it from the game - handy!

We had a total of six character figures between the four of us, Julian had two, John and Chris had one each, and had the two female figures, as is traditional!

The mission was to search the board for two keys (marked by a red X token), one blue and one green, to open two similarly coloured doors - queue late middle-aged men attempting to sing the Shakin' Stevens 80's hit "Green Door"(you remember it if you are from a Commonwealth country?!)

Midnight, one more night without sleeping

Watching, 'til that morning comes creeping

Green Door, what's that secret your keeping?

There's an old piano and they play it hot behind the green door (Green door)

Don't know what they're doing but they laugh a lot behind the green door (Ooh, green door)

Wish they'd let me in so I could find out what's behind the green door (Green door)

Anyway, enough of that- we had to find the keys then get through first the Green Door (Green door!) and then the Blue to exit the board and move on to the next mission.

Here is how we got on:

The initial set up - we entered in the centre top and there were three zombie generation points, one where we entered, plus one each at the bottom left and right of the image - you can see the marker in the bottom left. The red X's are where we had to search for the keys, and the Blue and Green doors are pretty obvious in the centre of the board!

Nelly the barmaid - you don't want to argue with her when she rings last orders!

The crew at the start point

Nelly helpfully smashed down a door, stirred up a bunch of zombies, including brutes that she was unable to kill at this stage, then got out of the way and left it to other characters to sort them out - that's my girl!

Samson the dwarf (Chris) had to come help get the girls out of a tight spot as more zombies hemmed them in early in the game - Samson is the only character who starts the game with the ability to inflict two wounds, so he was in high demand to deal with random brutes that were appearing 

Nelly was able to return the favour when the Necromancer appeared - she sprinted around to the other side of the board and took him out, before he was able to focus his powers to direct the zombie hoards

Meanwhile Samson took on the first of the "new" enemies, a couple of rabid zombie wolves. 

These are another addition - zombie archers - I think they are called Deadeye Walkers or something like that - they were a bit of a nuisance, inflicting two hits on Samson the dwarf - three and you are DEAD!

Anne the nun and Nelly ready to chop up a few wolves and walkers

Nelly didnt get them all herself, but Ann helped out!

Samson takes out the two zombie archers, but he is now carrying two wounds, as are both Nelly and Ann!

And here come yet more undead enemies

Fortunately, Julians wizard managed to find a Vampire crossbow, which in addition to inflicting two kills per hit (thus good for taking out brutes) also transferred one point of life back to the figure firing it, for each zombie killed.

Over the next few turns, first Samson, then Nelly and finally Ann, were handed the crossbow, killing the requisite zombies to return all three characters to full health - hurrah!

Johns and Julians figures taking on a pack of snarling undead wolves!

Don't know who has the scarier snarl??

At about mid-point in the game, this card came up in the zombie activation phase (there is one at the end of each round of player turns...)

This beastie takes three hits to kill - fortunately by this stage, several characters had found special weapons or spells that could deal with it!

So far, we had checked more than half the red X tiles and not found either key! Zombies were still advancing on all fronts despite our best efforts too.

Nelly managed to locate the key to the green door in the furthest possible location - quelle surprise!

Large numbers of wolves were bounding towards us at three tiles per move

Things were starting to look decidedly dodgy again

Fortunately, by this stage Nelly had got her party-special spell from one of the cellars - which allows her to roll 4 dice per turn of combat, hitting on a 4 or better, and causing two wounds for each hit inflicted - so with five possible activations per turn, she could do a lot of damage, unless she rolled very poorly

But like the French at Waterloo, the Zombies kept coming on in the same old way....and then THIS guy turned up again!

However, we had gathered so many extra attributes by this point that inflicting three hits was not too hard, and John's figure dispatched the creature without much effort.

We had also found the second key, and without too much trouble, all our figures were able to move through the green door (green door!), deal with a few zombies lurking behind it, and then through the blue door to exit the board, ready for our next zombie fighting adventure, whenever Julian decides that will be!

Now, on to some more inspiring holiday snaps from the S Island of New Zealand

I think this was Monday - we headed west out of Christchurch, in the direction of Arthurs Pass

Some cracking scenery en route to our first stop for the day

The following descriptive information comes courtesy of the web!

Nestled among the eastern ranges of the Southern Alps, an hour’s drive from Christchurch, lies a gentle basin bulging with huge boul­ders and rock outcrops. The area, known as Castle Hill or Kura Tawhiti, is a Mecca for rock climbers and skiers, but long before Europeans and their sheep appeared, Māori appreciated that the place had a special magic—one that not even the snows of winter could shroud.

Upon first sighting the place, one 19th-century visitor, the Reverend Charles Clarke, described the outcrops as “grouped like the buildings of a Cyclopean city, or the circling seats of a vast amphitheatre; and further still huge groups and solitary masses like the gigantic monoliths of Stonehenge.”

SWMBO - my dear wife Ruth - despite the sunshine, it was not a particularly warm day

Hewn by eons of rain, wind and groundwater, Castle Hill is an archetypal karst landscape, a monument to an era long past. Thirty to 40 million years ago, during the period known as the Oligocene age, much of present-day New Zealand was covered by the sea, and sedimentary rock, especially limestone, was deposited over the submerged land.

 But hard on the heels of this quiet period came a round of tectonic restructuring which continues to the present. The land was buckled, uplifted and subsequently eroded. Eventually, most of the Oligocene limestone was stripped away, and today only small pockets remain, one of which is Castle Hill. Even here, the sheets of limestone have been reduced to isolated blocks, pillars and outcrops, confirming that, over eons, rock is no match for a relentless trickle of water

Not sure why I look like that - I think the sun was so bright, I had trouble actually seeing the picture I was taking of myself!

Interesting signs - we saw them several times - and not something my friends had ever seen in their travels - these are for the benefit of our thousands of visitors from Asia!

After spending around an hour at Castle Hill, we continued up the road to Arthurs Pass

The road was closed here for a period of hours for road maintenance work, and there was quite a queue of vehicles waiting to get through, so we parked up and walked up to find a place to get lunch, when all of a sudden, I noticed what I thought was a small bronze statue of the iconic Kea mountain parrot on the pavement - and then it moved, and was joined by another!

Kea in flight shows the bright red feathers on the underside of its wings

It was very easy to get up close and personal with the cheeky critters!

After the entertainment provided by the Keas (definitely a highlight for my mate Gavin!) we had lunch then headed back to the city

Avon River in the CBD once again

This guy pops up in a lot of places in New Zealand (and Australia!)

The temporary replacement Christchurch Cathedral

Some of the new architecture of the regenerated city centre, post the destruction wrought by the earthquake - I suspect the city centre is now far more residential than it was fifteen years ago.

We meandered along riverside bars, stopping at several for a drink, before finding a very nice spot for dinner

A couple of views on the walk home, with the city lights along the quiet riverside

This was all about a month ago now, so pleasant memories for me as I add the captions - hope they were of some interest to my blog buddies too! Please let me know in the comments section. 😏