Friday 12 November 2010

Z-Busters?

Zombies are de rigueur once again (or should that be de rigor mortis?!), with continuing book releases such as Osprey's excellent Zombie Hunter Guide and Stephen Jones' Zombie Apocalypse! which looks really good. However a lot of the interest is no doubt down to the new TV show The Walking Dead (based on the excellent comic book series of the same name), which is now showing on FX UK here.

I was very impressed with the pilot and once again it got me pondering on zombie gaming and possibly digging out Twilight's excellent Zombies!!! However, rather than the standard survivalist zombie game I started thinking about the military response and this led me to considering working up a variant based on Scudbusters, a great SOF game were the players take the part of the SOF and the Iraqis are card generated and table controlled. Using the 'Guts' friction system the longer your troops are on mission, the more worn down they become and I think this would be perfect for soldiers in a hostile environment such as a zombie infested world.

Most zombie games are US based, not surprising as most media is US based but as the excellent 28 Days Later showed, zombies (whether they run or not) work just as well in our green and pleasant land. Having picked up a pack of Wargames Factory's excellent modern zombies and some TAG SAS for my (slightly stalled) 2ECW project I've started penning some notes and will see where this takes me. In the meantime another episode of The Walking Dead not to be missed tonight...

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