Zombicide! Sexy Ladies of the Night (Painted Walkers II)

Hello all,
The second type of Walker from the game Zombicide had me confused for some time. Was she a classy lady or a member of that unfortuante part of humanity who makes a living by walking along the streets at night. If so, she would naturally have been an easy target for the first zombies.

 She seems to half way between classy and trampy - but quite scary - look at the 10mm crossbowman hiding behind his shield...

Verdict on the mini:
Pros: Great fun to paint, some clear details, looks quite scary due to mixed signals.
Cons: I have a few problems with this model. Some with the figure itself, e.g. the hands are terrible - unless they are supposed to represent half-eaten fingers. In addition, the necklace seems a bit out of place and halfdone. A second issue is that she is so distinct - even with different colour schemes she sticks out amongst the shuffling horde and is the first one where you go "oh, its the same miniature repeated over and over". Which is a shame.
But all in all it is still a good mini, fun to paint - and having painted only Skaven and 10mm historicals for some twenty years it was quite fun to paint panties for once :-).


The zombies are divided into four classes; Walkers (your average slow moving, easy to kill zombie although they spawn by the million), Runners (quick and semi intelligent, most likely candidate to destroy your Survivor), Fatties (Huge bloated master zombies - hard to kill at first but halfway through the game you'll fear the runners more) and finally the Abomination (the super-zombie-tank-destroyer-thingie).
In each tray there is two types of Runner (8 total), five different models of Walker (20 total) and one fatty (4 copies) so each tray holds 32 zombies, while the abomination gets his own little tray - he would probably just eat the other zombies otherwise. (So I got 96 zombies, two Abominations and nine survivors in the initial Kickstarter pack - that's a lot of zombies!).


Stay tuned for the rest of the zombies!

All the best,
Kasper

Zombicide! Wall Street Zombie (Painted Walkers I)

Hello all,
Finally had some sun in Denmark so I could get some half good pictures taken as my entire photo-setup has gone missing.
Anyways, I've managed to paint more than a tray of the Zombies that came with the brilliant game (Zombicide) and thought I would show what I did with them and share my thoughts on the quality of the minis. Bear in mind that you do get a shit load of figures with the game so my expectations were not that high before I got my hands on the game.

The zombies are divided into four classes; Walkers (your average slow moving, easy to kill zombie although they spawn by the million), Runners (quick and semi intelligent, most likely candidate to destroy your Survivor), Fatties (Huge bloated master zombies - hard to kill at first but halfway through the game you'll fear the runners more) and finally the Abomination (the super-zombie-tank-destroyer-thingie).
In each tray there is two types of Runner (8 total), five different models of Walker (20 total) and one fatty (4 copies) so each tray holds 32 zombies, while the abomination gets his own little tray - he would probably just eat the other zombies otherwise. (So I got 96 zombies, two Abominations and nine survivors in the initial Kickstarter pack - that's a lot of zombies!).

The first type is the Walker: Type 1 (aka "the Business Man):

 I included a 10mm crossbowman just to scale reference the Zombie...

So, to begin with these Zombies represents the first large batch of 28mm models that I have painted in a long, long time. This meant I had to re-think how to do stuff that once came automatic. But I decided this first batch would be a good place to relearn and so tried different methods. On these I used washes to paint their business attires and think that went ok. Remember these have been photographed in sun light so they look much better in real life - a lot more scary at least.
The blood was that great stuff made by Tamira - continues to look like fresh blood even when dried and great fun to dap, paint, and blob onto the zombies.
I should probably do something about their eyes.

Verdict on the mini:
Pros: Great fun to paint, good clear details, looks quite scary in a shuffling Zombie like way, realistic model
Cons: Not really any - it is subdued enough that with a bit of variance you don't really notice that its the same model coming to kill you.

Stay tuned for the rest of the zombies!

All the best,
Kasper

Tired of shaking Vallejo paints?

Hello all,

Painting the bazillion Zombies included in the game Zombicide! required using quite a few colours that I normally never use for painting my 10mm armies. And as these are Vallejo paints it means that they were completely seperated. As anyone who has used Vallejo knows these paints are among the best out there - their colour pigments are excellent and a pleasure to paint with. But - and this is a big but - they also seperate verye asilyu and once seperated they need approximately 10 minutes of shaking to get back into shape and become the colour they used to be. This really annoys me, and being lazy I never really shook them as much as they needed whereby they wouldn't really cover nor shine as well as they could.

So to solve this problem I devised the following gizmo to shake my paints for me - almost instantly and without any hassle. And its free as well:

It is basicly a container (in this case a small plastic bottle which can hold three Vallejo paints at one time), a random piece of metal tool that can fit into a drill, and a power drill.

The lid of the container is quickly attached to the metal tool (in this case by tape).

And, presto, after five minutes of construction time, and five seconds of "drilling" the paints go from completely seperated pigments to fully shaken and perfect coverage and colour. It literally takes a few seconds to shake three pots of colour and it is a lot more fun to work with a power drill than to sit and shake for five minutes of your precious painting time.

Lets name it the "Kasper Gizmo!" :-).

Best regards,
Kasper

Zombicide!: First playtest - Superb game!

Hello all,
Got to playtest the Zombicide! game yesterday evening with three friends and we were all  impressed bythe game.
I think we all (four players, of which three are very experienced board-gamers) rated the game near maximum - somewhere around the 9 out of 10 mark.

A few random words of praise:
* The rules are succinct and easily read and remembered. Although I was the only one to have read the rules (twice) and we spent about half an hour goofing around and learning the rules, once the game began I don' think we needed to consult the rulebook more than four or five times. Pretty impressive. In addition, the nifty summary on the backside of the rules? Well, I had made a few copies but after the first turn noone needed to consult them anymore. Even more impressive. Very intuitive.
* The game itself flows smoothly, is quite frankly intense. Very intense! I read somewhere a review which described the game as cinematic, and it really did feel like watching a zombie-survivor horror film at times. Quite scary to see a horde of zombies shuffling down the street towards your few survivors.
* The board is brilliant - great design, brilliant details etc.
* Great variety within the game - plenty of different items and gadgets. The Survivors are very diverse - some are fighters others are more akin to scouts or gatherers. Some are better than others but that doesn't really trouble me.
* The missions seem to be very diverse as well, and all in all I think the game has excellent replay value - even without any future additions.
* The experience system is brilliant - great fun getting better skills and at the same time intimidating to watch more and more zombies enter the game (as the amount scales to the best player in the game).
* The whole idea and mechanics of the zombies being controlled by the game rules is great and works almost perfectly.

And a few minor irritations:
*Game length - although it was our first game, difficult mission etc the game appears to be just a bit too long to squeeze two games into a single evening of leisurely gaming. Although this might change with more experience etc. Also a turn limit might increase the pressure even more, which could be fun....
* Perhaps a bit too few "surprises" - Although deadly and nasty, I felt there was a bit too long between special event-cards - i.e. when zombies suddenly pop up from manhole-covers etc.
* We quickly became supremely well-equipped (Sniper rifles, dual SMGs, etc) sue to intensive searching and the Survivor Ned's special abilities. This somehow felt to have happened a bit too quickly.
* A bit too much "micro"-management e.g. swapping items between players to create perfect combinations - but perhaps we were a bit too cooperative in our attempts at surviving.
* Minor rule issues: e.g. that a molotov cocktail makes noise when it is thrown not when it explodes :-).

But, apart from these few comments we were very pleased with the entire experience and heartily recommend the game. And to paint the minis - made the game a lot more fun that the zombies were painted (btw, one 'tray' of zombies was fine until we came into the 'orange' danger level).

Anyways, I'm so glad I bought this game!

All the best,
Kasper

Zombicide Painting Progress: I

Hello all,
So almost got a third of the zombies ready. They just need a few touch-ups, base details and of course that all important blood-gore-splattering!
So far I am quite pleased with the models. I'll be doing a review of each of the eight different zombies and how they paint up, but so far so good. There are a few irritating details, i.e. the zombie disease seems to eat away any new zombies fingers - for some reason most of the sculpts only have weird clumps to represent fingers.

Apart from that they are pretty cool, and some are even intimidating (especially so the runners and the two female sculpts).

All the best,
Kasper

Zombicide: Initial impressions

Hello all,
As I mentioned earlier, I was one of the lucky ones who backed the game Zombicide (produced by Cool Mini or Not and Guillotine Games) on Kickstarter. After a lenghty discussion with the Danish custom authorities (argh!) I finally got the game home this weekend and thought I would just share my initial impressions with you guys.
Also, weirdly enough, the game arrived on the same day we threw a Zombie birthday party for my son - hence the picture below

The blogger considering wether or not to slay this young zombie - notice the T-shirt :-).

So, initial impressions (I'm planning on painting a few zombies tonight and playtesting the game with a few friends next week, so stay tuned!)...
* The game looks and feels amazing. High quality and tons of details.
* The rules seem well-written (a few errors and discontinuities aside) and simple enough to produce a great cinematic game, without having to look up every last move in the process.
* The ton of miniatures are of an adequate detail level (I'll know better once I get a few painted). The soft plastic doesn't seem an issue. They seem to be quite tall - i.e. Games Workshop tall. And the amount of minis is just stupefying - especially with the Abomination add-on I bought.
* Also, I cannot help but be amazed at the skill with which they have packed so much content into the box - quite ingenious.
* All the extra stuff are fine - T-shirt seems of good quality, the print is fine (although what I'm going to do with that I do not know, not like the wife will allow that on the wall....),a nd the extra die are cool.
* The only minor issue I have so far is that the cards (items, random events etc) are a bit small - they seem to disappear in my hands, and I would have preferred regular sized cards. But once the zombies start pounding on the door I don't really think that will be something you worry about too much.

So far, it seems a brilliant game, with great miniatures, and I cannot wait to try it out.

The contents of the box (including the Abomination additions). My own camera ate the picture so this one is stolen from www.goodreads.com/author/show/5151420.Michael_Langlois/blog who wrote a review of the game

All the best,
Kasper