It can’t have escaped anyone’s notice that our pet game “Apocalypse: Earth” has been conspicuous by it’s absence so far this year. There’s a fairly straightforward reason for that – the setting is based around a rampaging Soviet Empire under a genocidal lunatic trying to enslave the world and this year that hasn’t really been escapist fantasy, it’s just been.. well, the news. And as such, neither Dan or myself have really felt in the mood for it.
But after spending a month last year painting a whole load of zombies for a specially themed Halloween game, we both rather fancied the idea of breaking out the Atlantic Alliance to fight out a scenario based on the Battle of Yonkers from the brilliant novel (and passable film) World War Z.. if you haven’t read the book – well, you definitely should… if you haven’t seen the film – well, it’ll be on telly again before long, there’s no rush!
Basically the Battle Of Yonkers saw the US military making a concerted stand at the town of Yonkers, NY against a crowd of zombies numbering in the millions. There’s some fascinating descriptions of the effects of MLRS and artillery against the undead, as well as the Land Warrior system (which correct me if I’m wrong, never did make it into service in real life) and the famed “Silver Bullet” tungsten / depleted uranium armour piercing shells.. if you haven’t read it, I won’t spoil it but let’s just say it doesn’t go too well for humanity… the US Army being a finely honed instrument of warfare honed for a completely different war than it found itself fighting.
With this in mind we set up a half urban, half rural board with a bunch of woods on the rural side and ruins on the urban side to represent Yonkers city limits, and put our big group of trusty Airfix civilians (who seem to be forever getting caught up in this sort of thing) in the middle, and with a randomly rolled up mob of zombies either side, homing in menacingly…
We were winging the rules as we went, but the basic idea was that each zombie mob would get reinforced by (Turn Number)xD6 zombies each turn.. and behind the Alliance lines were four spawning points that would spawn (Turn Number-1)x D6 zombies each turn.. trust me, it was simpler than it sounded! At the far side of the table was a waiting APC to shuttle out the survivors.
Well that was a belter! Took a little time to get going but the gradual ramping up of zombie numbers turned what initially looked like a walk in the park for the Alliance into a lethal and cinematic last stand where once again, Buffalo 2-7 died gloriously to a man in defence of freedom! Great fun and hiding out in the gaming shed kept us safe from the attentions of wandering trick or treaters.. bah humbug! X-D
So, what next? What zombie-themed scenario could we investigate for Halloween next year? There’s almost a year to figure something out… drop us a comment and we’ll see you soon!
Sounds like this game picked up quite a bit of momentum as it went on! 🙂 Nice looking game with a cast of thousands (maths is not my strong point)!
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Cheers John, it definitely did and really started to feel quite ‘realistic ‘, the Allies moving from confidence to “oh SH*T” in just a couple of turns! 😱🤣
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Fantastic- can never go wrong with a big zombie game.
Cheers,
Pete.
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Cheers Pete, although Mac might disagree with you there 😉
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Now that was a lot of Zombies!, when you play the apocalypse you don’t mess around do you!
Cheers Roger.
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