The Walking Dead – A tale of boot camps and laughter

Happy with this guy.

I will make him a ‘soldier’ in Last Days. An old homeless war vet. when the Plague hits, but now looked upto for his courage and training.

I love The Walking Dead, but just fancied something a bit different. It has already caused some extra purchases of some fun looking miniatures. I am hoping to get my head around the Walking Dead custom characters creation rules so that any miniatures I buy for Last Days can be played in The Walking Dead too.

The list building is really interesting and the campaign element smacks of a Frostgrave style and it feels as though working a narrative into the game is really easy.

The Kickstarter box is a truly awesome introduction to the game and world.

3D terrain to get you immersed mixed with some 2D terrain tiles to keep some of the storage required and costs down.

Take a photo of where the minis are, so when you take it all out you have an idea where they all go once you are finished.

I have still not quite finished. As I looked through my photos on the project so far I realised that several haven’t really had a close up or pic at all, so tried to remedy that here.

One of the fun ways that Mantic Games are adding value and life to this product are to produce thematic sculpts with new stat cards. These fresh cards and extra equipment etc will give them a different dynamic in the game. I had to get this booster because Michonne is one of my favourite characters from the TV series and would love to see how she fairs in the graphic novels as well.

It has been a pleasure painting the walkers, but i probably need to do some better photographs once I have a few more painted.

I think I saw the idea on a Facebook page. The idea of a moving loot token was really appealing to me, so I reached into a Bolt Action bits box and these two models became the proud owners of US Infantry WW2 back packs. Now these guys would need to be shot or struck down and once dead, rather than just prone, the next survivor to perform a search action on it would receive the loot.

I painted a walker at the Mantic Games painting stand at Salute. It was late in my visit that day, but I had already picked up a couple of expansions so with the game fresh in my mind (and my feet sore) i decided it would be rude just to pick up a primed model and walk off without getting a brush wet.

Spent about 40 minutes on it at the time getting the basic colours down a touch of wash.

Spent another half hour on this guy once home and happy with how he came out.

The red paint i used at the event looked like dry blood and the “blood for the blood god” paint i used at home looked like fresh blood. The contrast came out well.

Painting the paving stones and the scraping behind his dragged foot was fun free hand.

Could have spent a bit more grossing up the skin, but can’t spend all day on minis that get splatted every two minutes I guess. 🙂

We scaled up to almost 6×4 level with 3 of us playing.

It took a little while to complete the game and the ranges got problematic. The wider the game area we have played across the less threatening the walkers become, even with some fun event cards dragging them into more dangerous locations on the board.

This is not a criticism because the game maker already told us that scaling making the battlefield wider rather than deeper was the way to go. The game was still fun and the urban feel was different to the rural / suburban settings we had been playing on.

My friend went with a comic style grey scale for most of his miniatures, but I didn’t really want to go that route. The immersion is still fine though and the contrast between forces didn’t feel like an issue for me. Had an awesome time and the tower blocks gave the game an interesting dynamic.

My friend Paul went in heavily (and wallet first) into The Walking Dead Kickstarter and got some beautiful mouse mat style gaming mats, all of the expansions so far I believe and has made keeping the games different every time we’ve played really easy.