ATZ: Hospital 911

A couple of weeks ago, the PDF copy of Hospital 911, the latest expansion for All Things Zombie, arrived in my inbox. Today, the hard copy, including floor plans for the building and also miniatures has arrived. And it is pretty cool!

I've had a quick read and this looks like a great expansion. 15 different scenarios are covered, with connected ones for different characters including patients, hospital staff, police, SWAT, reporters, firemen and gangers. I'm particularly interested in the SWAT team scenario which asks you to clear out the WHOLE hospital and the firemen ones where you have to battle blazes as well as rescuing civilians. 

What I got: The rules, hospital floor plans and a bunch of 15mm figures

The floor plans, of which there are 6, are varied and decent looking. They seems to be scaled more towards 28mm figures, but this isn't really a problem as you only notice it when a 15mm person is standing next to a bed or other large item of furniture. If I was really bothered I could scale them down, but I doubt I will.

But there are two things which I really like about this expansion. The first, is that there now exists a more 'board game' approach to ATZ, which I can use to get people playing who may otherwise not be interested in a miniatures game. I'm also interested in the possibility of using gridded building plans and the rules from H911 for exploring buildings in ATZ. What will also be interesting, is porting these rules into other THW game sets. I may not have the time to play a big game with my Star Wars figures, but now I can break out the old gridded floor plans from the WotC game and have at it. In fact the same might work for Lord of The Rings figures and some of the RPG wilderness tile sets. Basically there are now lots of possibilities for when I don't have the time to set up a full table. Sure, it probably wasn't that hard to do this just by calling 1 square 1 inch, but it is nice to have some of the other tables 'officially reinterpreted' for a gridded layout.

The second thing is that this looks like be a very interesting way to set up an ATZ campaign. Play through the scenarios as patients, police and firemen. Survivors of the ordeal in the hospital are then all set to go out as a group in the wider, zombie infested world and have a ready made shared background explaining why they are together. 

Here a a few shots of the figures received as part of the project:

4 Police (sorry, I don't know why Blogger insists on having this sideways).

4 firemen, a reporter & cameraman and 2 "characters" for the scenarios

4 gang members

4 SWAT (sorry, sideways again)

12 terrified civilians.  Their poses will add some variety to the games, for sure!

Technically these are zombified hospital staff and patients, but I will probably paint them up as humans as I don't have any doctors etc at the moment.

Zombies. I love the crawling ones. These are all newer poses, so a great addition.

The figures are available from Rebel Minis.

You can read about Hospital 911 on the THW website and also their blog. The PDF is available for $15, including the floorplans to print. I'd say it is worth a look just to add a different dimension to your zombie games. I hope to get painting some of these figures and reporting on a game or two as soon as my current painting project is finished.