Collins tells the tale of the walking dead

Pre-Game Blah

Remember to go view my other project to see me make and paint all this cool stuff.

This map is *somewhere* on a main highway into Atlanta (just go with it) and is where I’ll start introducing more characters. When we last left Rick he had found a horse and a hatchet that had his name on it and managed to escape with only losing 1 wound so there was no need for post game rolls etc. His model cost was 264 points given how tooled up he is with his extra bag o guns. That’s 17.6 walkers worth of points! when I realised this I stood the characters in this episode in front of their cost in walkers just to convey what a massive difference it is.

It is the first outing for the supply runner Glenn, at 48 points he only has to defeat 3 walkers to make his cost back, a much easier task…. if he was armed. as a supply runner he prefers to avoid getting into trouble and slip away without a fight so left camp with only a radio, backpack and a bottle of water.

The board had a few cars crashed, one being a resource hub (supplies in the flatbed) and the other 9 supply tokens have been scattered randomly. other features are trees, a vending machine a skip, a couple of barricades blocking the carpark and of course Emma’s Diner. The board is 24×24 inches (so too big!) and so looks to be a bit open and devoid of scenery, the walkers will have an easier time getting into contact on this map.

Objectives

• Recover as many supplies as possible
• Not lose already collected supplies (bag o’ guns)
• Not die

Intro

Glenn survives the daily apocalypse by being light footed and light fingered, he puts these skills to use doing supply runs for his camp set up on the outskirts of Atlanta. Glenn quietly approaches Emma’s Diner with the hope of recovering something useful from the abandoned cars and maybe some tinned food from the diner itself if it hasn’t been picked clean already. He did always have the knack for finding things others couldn’t though. Little does Glenn know that our hero Rick is about to roll into town, and little does Rick know that he’s bringing a crowd with him…

Post Game Wrap-up

Ho-ly Smokes! what a fun episode. most will be able to see it was somewhat scripted in that Rick was going to turn up with a load of walkers chasing him shortly behind. what I had not anticipated was Glenn falling victim to 2 traps and nearly dying from it and finding the molotov. The supply deck gods giveth but also taketh away twice as hard. The first item out of the deck also played right into this too, horse pills, ‘discard this card as an action to recover [rollwhitedice] health points. the survivors activation ends immediately and they are laid prone’. basically, take some ketamine and get high but be unable to anything afterwards. quite a good mechanic if you’re safe enough to use them.

In each coat that Glenn was in he failed to slip away using his 50:50 ‘Nimble’ rule which meant he had to fight each time. His defence is better than attack so he routinely defended but never inflicted any damage on anyone for doing so.

The event cards that came out early game ramped the threat level up quite a lot too, several +1 to the threats, the addition of combats also bumped it up on top of the standard single player +1 a turn threat. By the time Rick joined the party the threat dial was half way to the end.

The fun thing in this game was the molotov and learning how the ‘Blast’ keyword works. It seems to be something that is deadly to 1 or two models as you can only kill walkers using ! but would be devastating to survivors, which kinda makes sense. When Glenn lobbed it he did a decent damage roll that each model needed to defend from individually, which was impossible, but he didn’t roll any ! so no walkers died. everyone under the blast template was laid down and 50% caught fire as the molotov exploded. The Mayhem caused the threat counter to increase and pulled in all the remaining walkers that weren’t caught in the blast already who then also caught fire.

Sadly Rick fluffed his attack roll against the 3 walkers in contact with him, he wasn’t able to beat 6 red dice (5 hits and 1 !) with his 2 white dice (1 hit) and was overwhelmed. It really doesn’t take much to bring you down in the game. the ! result would mean he was bitten which is super dangerous so he did the only reasonable thing and sacrificed the horse to the walker lasagne to keep himself alive.

I house ruled that falling from the horse might mean he would lose his bag of guns. a 50:50 black dice decided the fate of that and came up golden sheriff badges to Rick got to keep hold of his looted weapons.

all that remained was to escape. I decided to add a 2 turn limit to how long the horde would munch on the horse before losing interest. that seemed reasonable too me. Glenn tried to collect one more supply token on the way out only to find it was a grenade booby trap. that cost him 2hp which was very lucky as one more and he would dead but the mayhem dragged away the closest walker for him to try and flee from (fail) then fight (defended successfully).

game ended with them both making it back to a board edge and at threat level 16.

Cards Used

• The herd
• Too quiet
• frayed nerves
• the hunger
• the hunger
• pandemonium
• alarm (for the horse 2 turn limit)

also, I think this episode has my favourite photo so far in it, the one of the walkers all turning up and moving between a car. its so very ‘walking dead’.