Zombie

The post-apocalyptic 'Even Death May Die' rules make another outing. Three human factions clash while the zombies take advantage for a quick snack. Game organised by Dave M. Tel plays the defenders of the town while Matt tries to recover some stolen loot taken by Mark.

10 Year Apocalypse

It was the ten year anniversary, on the 3rd July, of the launch of the browser game Urban Dead, and to mark this special occasion the games owner \ designer, Kevan, has sent out a survey for players to fill in. Which was not quite what I was expecting for this landmark occasion.

 Given that the game has not had any significant development in the last five years it's a bit of a surprise that the survey strongly hints at a new wave of features, and that he's finally asking players for feedback\ideas (other than the game wiki suggestions pages, which was little more than player squabbling). But I do feel that this is 3 to 5 years too late to have a major affect.

End is Nigh

The final game of the zombie campaign, as all the survivors make up their differences and try and hang on in the town after encirclement by the hordes.

Zombie Xmas

The Twilight World rules, and Dave M's horde of zombies and terrain, make a festive appearance as the game attracted a larger than expected turn out as some of the role-players\boardgamers joined in.

The 8 good guys, including Tel, Matt, Jim, Mark, Keir, and the returning Dave S, vs Dave M, who was the Xmas Grinch controlling the Zeds.

Zombie Town

A cooperative skirmish game as 5 survivors try to scavenge some supplies from a Zombie infested town. Using the free Twilight World rules, that, despite the name, has nothing to do with Sparkly Vampires or Swing Out Sister.

Majority of the terrain and all the figures supplied by Dave M. Mini's are a mixture of plastics but include a lot of Wargames Factory's Dark Futures line of Zombies and Survivors. (The disembodied hand on the photo below is not part of the game.)

Zombiefied

Ended up digging out my copy of Zombies!!! at the club after Martin's group got left in the lurch by his no show.

We used the Six Feet Under expansion but not the Subway transit rules as didn't want to complicate it for the first time players. The increased deck size was probably a mistake. After a long struggle the game was declared a draw\Zombie victory as the late appearing helipad was miles away (20+ spaces from nearest player) and no one was close to the 25 kills for a win, despite having plenty of zombie targets. So many zombies, in fact, that we had to start using zombie dogs as kill markers.

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Dead Again

The Urban Dead online game has finally left the doldrums! The balance of power has shifted in Malton and, according to the stats page, the zombies now outnumber the living by 4:1.

The cause of this shift? The Dead have returned after having launched an invasion a few years ago, organised by the Something Awful forum in early 2008 as an attempt to ruin the game. Apparently they are at it again, The Dead have returned.

The first invasion was a big one, but was, in my opinion, one of the best times to play the game as it had a real apocalyptic feel to it, what with hiding and sleeping in ruins, because all the 'safehouses' were overrun and ruined. There was real difficulty in finding vital resources such as first aid kits and revivification syringes until Kevan, the game's designer, tweaked the search rates and sort of spoilt things. I feel too many people are stuck in their comfort zones in the game; and the furries that occasionally pop-up in Malton Zoo are even stranger than the idea of a zombie Apocalypse so kudos to the Dead for hunting them.

A certain amount of revisionist history in the linked forum thread above, as they didn't come close to their intent of trashing the game the first time round; ruined buildings always were viable locations for searching and living in, it's just that the standard survivor is afraid to use them and prefer huddling together with the lights on waiting to get eaten. Also those who whinged about being dead (lowercase) are probably without friends to priority revive them. The original Dead had a good rampage, trashed the place big style and then things went quite, with only around 10% of invaders carrying on; This still made them the biggest single group in Malton.

Unfortunately, regardless of the current record ratio, the numbers are not currently as much as last time and despite the Danger Map on the wiki being mostly red (for zombie controlled) or grey (ghost town - few zeds or survivors) the humans are still holding out, they just can't hang around one spot too long. Time for the old 'river tactics' of ducking and diving behind the zombie 'wavefront'. Thankfully the actually density of the zeds compared to map locations is low enough to make hiding possible. The 10000 locations in the game (more if you include inside of buildings as distinct) are too much for even the 1500 members of The Dead to cover.

Update: (22 May) The maps slowly changing to a more friendly colour, less Red and more Orange, but not in the area I'm currently camped. Kevan has tweaked the search percentages again so very easy to find first aid kits and revive syringes. My group is currently trying to set up a series of decoy repaired buildings to distract the zombies a bit and continues to work on the still long revive queues.
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Diet 2 Night

Got suckered into playing another online Zombie game after seeing an advert on the Urban Dead login page.



Die2Nite is very different to UD in that you are humans who are facing an inevitable demise in a small desert community (each isolated town only has a population of 40). The goal is to survive as many nights there as possible, each night more zombies attack, and it is a race to find and use a limited amount of resources to build more defenses. Once your zombie food your soul moves to another town and you hope you can do better.

It is apparently an adaptation of an existing french site, which might explain some of the strange selection of objects available and some of their unusual uses. Unlike a lot of games it actually comes with decent tutorials and a wiki.

There are achievements that can be obtained, some automatically just by surviving or dieing. I've already manage to obtain the cannibal one, well you've to eat haven't you! It's currently free to play, but like a lot of games you can get bonuses by coughing up some money.

Still visiting the Urban Dead game, but not much is happening and if any thing the survivors now clearly have the upper hand in an increasingly thinning active population, so it's boring playing a human and futile playing as a zombie.
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Humans!!!

People were thin on the ground at the club again this Tuesday.

Ended up playing a couple of games of Humans!!! by Twilight Creations, the sequel\companion game to Zombies!!! Have scanned through the rules (which are available as online pdf) but this was the first play proper.

The rules are slightly more complex than in Z!!! but not difficult once you get your head around the capture rules. These could of done with a little bit of rewording to reinforce the fact that Humans who can't escape are instantly captured and infected; this could of saved a bit of unnecessary dice and card action. There is also some room for confusion in the naming of the infection value and the capture cards. This is cleared up in the FAQ available for the game. We did not have this on hand and things may of turned out slightly different.

The game plays out faster than Z!!! as well, with two games being completed despite the first being a 'learn as you go' affair. This might of been down to only having three players but the town layout seems more compact, and once you've got a few infections on the go you can easily start herding the humans into dead ends (pun intended). In both games there was one person who trailed behind badly due to luck of the dice and just not getting started with the infections.

Have not tried a Humans vs Zombies game yet, it would probably require at least four players to make it interesting.
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Urban Dead Set

From Urban Dead News

Latest News - 28th October 2008
With the launch of Charlie Brooker's Dead Set on E4 and 4DVD, the Borehamwood outbreak is now open to Urban Dead players, with permanent zombification, fast zombies and a battle for the Big Brother house. The map will remain open for four weeks.

The login page has also turned bright red with some horrid wallpaper background.

Not seen the series yet, but hope to catch it on E4 when its shown this weekend. With it being from Charlie Brooker it's probably either going to be funny or totally condescending to its viewers.

Hope this one turns out better than the Diary of the Dead promo tie-in. That failed initially due to the permanent take-down rule for both zombies and humans and the fact that the Map of Monroeville was too big. The modifications then tilted it into a Zombie\Player Killer heaven. In fact more survivors were probably killed by other survivors than Zombies. Monroeville being based on the real-life Monroeville stateside, famous for being the location for 'the mall'.

In the main Map, our survivor group is planing a bit of 'Trick or Treat' for our local neighbourhood. Normally on Halloween in Malton things get a little different, with shops suddenly having sweets available to loot, and Zombies the ability to knock on doors!

Also according to the spellchecker: Nearest match to zombification is syllabification; which could do with exactly that.
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New Toys

Got some new toys from Infinity Games

Humans!!!

Humans!!! is the separate, stand alone, follow up to Zombies!!! It can be combined with the original to do a really big game. Strangely the Zombie PCs in Humans!!! are more detailed than the 'Shotgun Men' in Zombies!!! This paragraph is starting to get overloaded with !!!'s!

For some reason the figures in this set are slightly larger than those in Zombies!!! Partially due to the thicker bases, but they are at least the same size or greater than the hero 'shotgun guys'

I'll have to see about doing a tailored combined scenario for Halloween. But I think the Z v H rules that come with Humans!!! might need a bit of a tweak.

The Great War

Decided to get these rules just so I can check them out again. Will also be useful if Dave M starts a campaign up. Will not be combining it with the above (despite of movies such as Deathwatch). Not sure what the statline for WW1 Zombie Cheerleaders would be!
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Online Games I play

Other than the occasional game of Day of Defeat (a WW2 shoot'em up) I not a big player of online games and games such as WoW, Eve and LoTR online have never really appealed to me.

I prefer more primitive games that may not be nice lookers but do require a bit of thought. The current batch that I'm playing includes...

Battrick - Cricket Management game.

Signed up a couple of months after my friends did and have managed to put together a semi-respectable team.

Urban Dead - a game of zombies vs survivors in the fictional city of Malton.

Two characters in this game, one Human and one Zed. The zed was put on hold will I was playing in the Monroeville tie in for Romeros latest Zombie flick.

Popmundo - the music career game (formally known as Popomundo)

Read about the existence of the game on Battrick so decided to give it a go. Currently running a Blues Musician who's recently broke into the Blues top 200 rankings after a year playing the game. Strangely enough this also contains elements of Zombie hunting.


These games all have one thing in common and its the thing that makes me more likely to play this type of game than other more advanced online games. Its the fact that there is a limit to what you can do in in each game, there's only a minor advantage in spending hours on each game rather than minutes. And you can leave them for days on end without really damaging your position in the game world. They are also playable free of charge, but with optional payment to support the games you can get additional tools that make playing easier but still maintain the level playing field for payers and non-payers alike. No power ups involved.

I've recently finished a game of Travian, a game which does eat up more time than you would expect, and to get the most from this you do need to have a 'sitter' to enable for 24\7 coverage on your account else you can end up logging in and finding yourself destroyed. There's also the fact that the game has victory conditions, and eventually all your hours of work basically amount to nothing as the world resets and a new crowd of players enter. It has also started to feature a pay option, but this does directly effect game play - the ones who spend most get the advantage.

Further back in the past I was a player of the text based MUD Avalon RPG. Despite playing it regularly for a number of years I eventually quit as the background world, despite being remarkably well detailed was static, overall unchanging, even the in game politics didn't really allow for change. Basically all four cities just took turns in conquering each other, same with the Guilds. The 'modern' history could never match up with the background story and the world just became boring.