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.

Customising ATZ encounters (Part 2)

I have managed to get my ATZ encounter idea to a functional stage this week, so I thought I'd give it a test run.

I did make a couple of revisions from my last post on the subject. These were:

1) The table for generating the number of citizens or zombies has been incorporated into the card itself. Turns out there was enough space to do this and it worked fine.

2) The other encounters (i.e. not the zombies or Rep 3 citizens) are now in their own deck. Why? Well, it means that I can have a static deck that is not changed, and a different deck consisting of all the other encounters that can be modified as I want between games without having to rebuild the core deck each time. Instead, I created 'Special Encounter' cards, which go in to the Zombie/Citizen deck and indicate that you need to draw from the second deck. Also, some of the cards ended up asking for specific cards to be pulled (more on this later) and by having all of them in one big deck, you don't end up spoiling future 'surprises' when you look for other cards.

So the rules now look like this:

ATZ Encounter Deck

To build the deck, start by including zombie cards based upon how long it has been since the outbreak. These cards represent a roll of 1d3 or 1d6 depending on the card:

Days	Cards with 1d3 zombies	Cards with 1d6 zombies
1-10	8	4
11-20	6	6
21-30	4	8
31+	2	10

 To this deck of 12 cards, add cards representing 1d3 citizens, again based on the days since the outbreak:

Days	Civilian cards
1-10	6
11-20	4
21-30	2
31+	None!

Finally, add a number of  'Special Encounter' cards to bring the number of cards in the deck to 24. When one of these is drawn, take the top card from a separate deck consisting of all the possible encounters you have figures for. This deck can be adjusted as you get new figures or if you want more of a specific encounter (i.e. More National Guard encounters near a quarantine zone).

Whenever a PEF is resolved during the game, draw the top card from the main deck and follow the instructions.

Zombie a go-go.

Well, I'm suffering slightly from painting fatigue at the moment, which has given my brain more time to think about what is next on my list. I think it would be a good idea to scale down a little for the next project, so it seems it will be a good opportunity to work on my 15mm zombies.

Aside from a distinct lack of zombies (they are in a box out of shot), this is pretty much what I have at the moment. So fairly thin on the ground. On the other hand,  I have a huge pile of printed out card buildings and road sections to assemble, as well a load more figures from Rebel Minis. The playing area is only 2 feet square at the moment, but I hope to fill it up and grow to a dining table sized urban area soon enough!

One thing I do want to do is make some plain grey tiles to fill in the areas around the roads, so it doesn't look like everything is built on grass! I should say this is a budget project for me (can you tell?!), so it doesn't look as snazzy as a lot of zombie projects people blog about...

As for rules, I have both All Things Zombie and No More Room in Hell. I have only played ATZ but I am aiming on playing both rules and writing up some kind of comparison.

If any of you zombie fans out there have useful hints and tips, please feel free to share!

Zombie Fun

A while back I thought I'd have a go at a game of All Things Zombie: Better Dead than Zed, and it didn't disappoint. By and large the rules were okay and it was a fun game, although there were one or two unclear points that I had to make up as I went along. But as it is a solo game, that was not a problem.

The terrain is my regular stuff, although I printed out house plans I had made using Shuffler. As the game allows characters to enter buildings and I didn't have any appropriate ones, I thought it would do the job. To be honest I was happy with how it worked out.

The figures are all from the Last Night on Earth boardgame by Flying Frog.




The game started with the Sheriff and colleague entering the board. Their mission was to search the village for any survivors and lead them to safety. The initial zombie presence was limited, but as the female cop was carrying a shotgun, there were likely to be more attracted by the noise!



Another view of the set up with zombies lurking in the background.



A view of the board with 4 houses (excluding the garage) to explore.





A picture from towards the end of the game. I wasn't originally intending to post this, hence the lack of pictures. Two survivors had been found and joined my group. Unfortunately, someone decided it would be an okay idea to explore the final house alone and they were ambushed by zombies and got chewed up. Another character died shortly later, leaving two to escape off the board.

The game was definitely fun and I'd like to play a campaign at some point. The only downside is that the rules were vague in some places. It does make me wonder about trying "No More Room in Hell" for zombie games instead, but I'm happy to stick with ATZ for a while longer.