The Thing - Two Perfectly Assimilated Thumbs Up!

A SPOILER-FREE MINI-REVIEW

I saw the new Thing movie with my daughter yesterday and other members of the family and friends saw a later showing, and we all LOVED it!  The thing is (and sorry for the unintentional pun) you have to take the movie for what it is - a very good B-Movie monster flick.  It makes several "nods" to the Carpenter flick, and we had fun going "Oh, so that's why such-and-such was in the Carpenter flick."  I thought the creature effects were fantastic.  This Thing scuttles around and chases you and crashes through walls and makes you go' "OH SH*T!".  In the Carpenter film Clark says, "I don't know what it is, but it's weird and pissed off!"  Well, the Thing in this movie is VERY weird and VERY pissed off.

The one main gripe I had with this film is the music.  It often reverts to cliched Loud-Horns-And-Loud-Violins-Something-Exciting-Is-Happening music.  I would've preferred more of the creepy Carpenter-film score; but that's a pretty minor quibble for me. 

Go assimilate some friends and go see it!

Filling Out the Farm

I just finished up the additional buildings that go with the barn I have.  Here's what I have now:

Here's the cow shed, and yes, it is pretty boring right now, but it's meant as a filler piece and not eye-candy.  It could be a good building to dart around or hide in to get away from a ravenous zombie horde, assuming there isn't a ravenous zombie herd (of cows) inside.

The chicken coop with some more of the undead little cluckers.  And there's part of Farmer John sticking out of the little chicken door...

A nice dog house for the undead pup-dog rounds things out.

I have enough terrain for some rural scenarios.  Next up is to start working on more suburban and urban terrain.

Some Thing is coming soon...

The Thing (prequel) is opening up Friday out here.  I am so hyped-up for this movie.

All Things Zombie Batrep

I finally got around to snapping photos and scribbling notes during one of our games.  Some of the pictures are a little fuzzy because all I have is an iPhone to snap photos, but they look good enough to me.  I also got an app on the phone that lets me edit the photos and add comic book text and word balloons, so yeah, I went a little crazy playing with that.  But I had fun doing it.

The following batrep takes place sometime within the first month of the outbreak (I didn't really tie down the time).  The situation so far:

We have our home in the suburbs of Vancouver, WA.  Our house is being barricaded up.  The local neighborhood still hasn't been cleaned out completely.  We have 6 food units, a couple of luxury items (Rum and toilet paper), a bunch of improvised weapons (Garden tools), a Honda Civic (Sedan, no gas).  I have a baseball bat, and am using the rules from the Risks and Rewards Deck (if swung with two hands adds an additional 2d6 to melee).  The only gun is a shotgun that is being used by Next-Door-Neighbor Scott.

For this batrep we decided to go into the nearby neighborhood to scavage supplies.  Next-Door-Neighbor Scott and I will head out on foot.  My wife, Big (Bad) Mama and our two dogs will stay at home and guard it for us, so they won't appear in this batrep.

Let's start!

After another move farther along the street, a zombie charges ConfusedDad.  Being a Star, I calmly waiting for the attacking zombie to reach me (I have no gun to fire pre-emptively).  I do have a basebal bat that I'm using two-handed.  So my melee dice are: 4d6 for my Rep, +1d6 for Brawler, +1d6 for a higher impact weapon, and another +2d6 for the baseball bat's bonus = 8d6 vs. the zombie's measly 1d6.  No contest right?  Well the battle went as follows:

First Round - ConfusedDad = 5 successes        Zombie = 1 sucess

2nd Round - ConfusedDad = 3 successes        Zombie = 1 sucess

(I'm starting to worry a little now)

3rd Round- ConfusedDad = 1 success        Zombie = 0 sucess

The zombie goes down, and I suffer a near heart-attack at almost getting eaten within the first 5 minutes of the game!

Meanwhile, Next-Door-Neighbor Scott decides to blast away at an approaching zombie.

The zombies win the next activation and I'm charged again, but this time the undead fiend went down the

first round.

We decide to book it (fast-move) out of there, although Next-Door-Neighbor Scott unleashes another shotgun blast at the zombies behind us (Misses completely).

A shotgun blast generates 6 chances of riling up another zombie.  Luckily we only generated one.  Next-Door-Neighbor Scott fired at the beginning of the turn, then we moved.  The generated zombies are measured from where the shot was fired.  Guess where it turned up?

ConfusedDad easily takes out the trailer trash. (I'm getting good with this bat, but I still want a gun!)

ConfusedDad decides to search the trailer for loot/allies, and leaves Next-Door-Neighbor Scott outside to guard the rear, a decision Scott is not entirely happy with.

Using the Risk and Rewards Deck, I draw a zombie!  The undead resident lunges towards ConfusedDad but once again the baseball bat proves effective at dealing with the menace.

Next-Door-Neighbor Scott starts to get antsy.

At this point I rolled boxcars on the activation dice, which meant something random happened.  In this case, a hidden zombie burst out of a closet and attacked (Of course...).  ConfusedDad bashed in its head.  A search of the trailer turned up no loot.

ConfusedDad finally exits the trailer as Next-Door-Neighbor Scott thins out the herd a little.

Winning activation again, they both flee towards the police car.

With the zombies in hot pursuit, ConfusedDad decides not to waste time trying to hotwire the cruiser.

ConfusedDad and Next-Door-Neighbor Scott slip around behind the trucks and bus to lose the zombie horde following them.

At this point I made an error.  The zombie horde should've turned to their right as they passed the truck, because that's where they saw ConfusedDad and Next-Door-Neighbor Scott go.  Instead I had them continue wandering straight on off the board.  I don't think it would've made a difference, since I would've had the two heroes try to stay out of sight until they left anyway. 

You gotta admit, a school bus would've been kinda cool...

I rolled a "one"!!!  The keys are in the car!!!!

The car starts on the second try.  The noise of the first start up try actually generated 2 new zombies, but unfortunately my gaming table is actually our dining table, and I was getting kicked off, so I didn't place them.  I also would've explored more of the buildings if I had more time.

And so our heroes exit successfully, with a new car! (With 4 units of gas in the tank).

All-in-all a successful mission, even though I didn't get a gun or gain any allies.  We both killed zombies, we got a resource (car and gas), and neither one was incapacitated.  Afterwards, we both rolled for advancement.  I stayed Rep 4, but Next-Door-Neighbor Scott went up from Rep 3 to Rep 4.

And that's pretty good for one of my games of All Things Zombie. 

A Well-Defended House

This is another building that I did around the same time as the previous one.  I pretty much copied the ideas from the Survivalist's house on the Zombietown website.

Note that our survivalist friend has learned a few things from the mistakes of his late neighbors.  First off, the windows are boarded-up with metal bars, not easily ripped apart wood.  The bars were made from leftover plastic sprues cut to length and painted metal color.

The door is reinforced metal that no zombie horde will be bashing in anytime soon.  The door is simply plasticard cut to fit.  To make the rivets, I "dimple" the plasticard with a drill-bit, very carefully pushing and turning it on the backside to slowly dimple it out.  It's real easy to puncture the plasticard, and then you end up with a hole where a rivet should be.  It's not my favorite technique but I'm too lazy to punch out little tiny round disks (rivets) and glue them on.

I made a little escape-hatch on the roof from some balsa-wood and plasticard.  I figured our homeowner would crash up there every so often, so I added a couple of worn-out mattresses too. Even the roof is reinforced with metal.  I tend to use a lot of corrugated metal in my post-apocalyptic terrain, so I ended buying a paper-crimper from a craft store.



The crimper makes takes stiff paper and turns it into great-looking corrugated metal. 



I have a couple more homes in the process of being built, so stay tuned!

Last Stand

I put together this O-Scale house a couple of years ago.  I'm slowly working on a couple of others to help fill out the neighborhood.  (I guess there's a housing-market slow-down in zombie-apocalypse game worlds too)


The bloody handprint on the door was a pain in the butt to paint!

 


I was trying to make it look like an intense zombie-attack had occurred here.

While working on this I decided that the zombies won and made it inside, so I bashed this door apart.  Originally it was relatively intact, like the others.  Oh well...

 

Left 4 Dead

I finally finished the last two figures of my Left 4 Dead group.  Zoey and Louis have joined the group!




Francis,  Zoey,  Hunter,  Bill,  Louis



Zoey comes from a Reaper Miniature called Joplin. No conversion needed!

Louis started out as the Hasslefree mini called Ken. I had to file off some badges, and added a little greenstuff to make the shirt hanging out.  Otherwise, a pretty easy conversion.

Oh, and the Hunter is a Ghoul figure from Black Cat Bases, no conversion needed.


Well, now that they're a complete group of four, it's time to drop them in the middle of trouble and see how they do.  That's it for now.