Hail Mary .....of the LIVING DEAD!!!!

So I somehow managed to knock out another 60-something zombies before this baby arrives, nothing fancy here, I didn't even texture the bases. I figured I was throwing a real hail mary even trying to start these guys. Did a real production line technique on them to just get them done. I have only 29 zombies left in the zombicide figure pile to finish and they are the toxic Zombies from the mall expansion....oh and I have all the dog companions and zombie dogs to paint up too. 

I'm really struggling with whether or not to back Zombicide season 3 yet. I'm just not impressed with anything that's being added. All the characters are already kind of "samey" and the stretch goals and exclusives are all pretty "meh". We'll see, I still have time to worry about crap like little toy zombies since I'm not a dad yet. 

 I tried painting up this guy to look like the "Thanks for the ride lady!" guy from Creepshow 2. I'm totally into this stuff. 

 I painted up a bunch of this batch in a "grayscale" to try and make them look like they stepped out of Night of the Living Dead. I like the way they turned out and it made the assembly line technique go faster. 

Well that's it folks, I may or may not attempt to start that last batch of zombies but once the baby comes I'm guessing that I won't be updating the blog again for another 18 years or so. Goodbye and Godspeed! 

More Rasslin'

I made up some more custom wrestlers for the wrestling game I'm sporadically working on. I use the Jakks Micro Aggression figures and some two part sculpting epoxy to make these guys. 

 Alternate Elmer Costume, Geekend Mongo, and my Brother in Law Daniel (the current reigning Brothers Division Champion....it's a really real thing) 

 White Chocolate Todd Bookman and Cobra Kai Doctor Merkury

 Some generic guys, Barbarian, Santos, Tigermask

 Cthulhu Guy and Old School Undertaker (he broke my heart at this last Wrestlemania, with heartbreaking) 

IT CAME FROM THE HORROR SECTION OF A-Z VIDEO!!!!!

I've been watching a lot of old school horror lately....well I always watch a lot of old school horror. It's pretty much the only thing I watch. Anyway I got to thinking about doing something with my old VHS boxes for some reason as an homage to the days of going to the video store and my dad letting me pick something out of the horror section. Originally I was just gonna make some kind of collage, but that seemed lame....super lame. For some reason I got it into my head to build a big ass dice tower. The most obnoxious and unnecessary of all gaming accessories, so here it is. 

 I think my DiceHole is particularly inspired. 

My next project is going to involve making a hat out of that KFC 84 ounce soda bucket in the background. 

No More Room In H-E- Double Hockeysticks....THE DECKBUILDER!

So about a year ago I started this card game project. The project was a "Re-Skinning" of the Star Trek deckbuilder from Ban Dai. It's the only deckbuilder that I really find to be fun and thematic. The problem is that I never was really into Star Trek. Every time I played though I would think about how awesome it would be that instead of crew members and ships you has survivors and survival bases. At some point I made my wife give some rudimentary photoshop instruction and I started designing cards for a re-skinning.This is something that I had printed for me by ArtsCow.com. Obviously there is a lot of IP violation here since all my art came from the interwebs, and I use characters from popular zombie shows and films. I have no plans on producing it for sale. It's just something for my friends and I to enjoy. The designs aren't perfect, some things are harder to read than I'd like but I'm extremely happy with the printing results and they are certainly more than useable. 

 Basic generic Survivor Cards. I use terms from my Zombie tabletop strategy game "No More Room In Hell" 

 One of the original mechanics I added to the game was "Infection" this adds to the zombie theme. "Zombified Friend" cards and zombie attack cards make you take infection cards into your deck, making you weaker and more vulnerable when the zombies show up. 

 The backs of "The Wastes" deck cards. 

 There are a couple groups of cards in the wastes deck that allow you to try and bring multiple cards of a type together to win the game. "The Cure" is one of those sets. 

 Victor French...Hey I'll put whatever the hell I want into this game.

 Pages of the Necronomicon is another Wastes collection set. The police station is one of the strongholds that you can try to upgrade to by defeating in battle or smoothtalking your way in with Charisma. 

I threw in friends and movie characters, whatever I pleased. That's the awesome part of making a custom game for just you and your friends to play. 

Starting Deck Cards

Starting Stronghold

This is another original mechanic I added. When your stronghold defense reaches zero your survivors have to take to life on foot until a new stronghold can be found. This was one issue I had with the Star Trek game. If you lost your ship in battle ultimately you just re-set it and carry on. There didn't feel like any consequences were there. 

 More friends and in-joke references for us to enjoy. 

I'm excited to give this a go. It had zero playtesting since it is based on something else that already works. However I did add a lot of original cards and several original mechanics that may make the game too difficult. Luckily if we find that things are a little too hairy I should be able to trim it back by just removing cards from the scavenge and wastes decks to get things back on scale. We'll see how it plays, updates to come. 

1st Play Through of Zombicide...We got beat so bad it felt like we were the Jackson kids.

My buddy Elmer came down Friday to get in one last game day before our babies arrive (both due in early July) and the first thing we fired up was Zombicide. I've been working so hard trying to get the figures painted up that it was fun finally getting them to the table. 

 The first thing I do with Molotov Cocktease is search our hideout and of course I draw the card that causes you to find a zombie in a pile of rubble. So right inside our "Safehouse" there was a zed hiding under a pile of rags or something. Good stuff. 

 The team starts to make its way out of the safehouse. 

 We were off to a pretty decent start, spreading out, finding objective tokens, killing zeds and then...

 ....This happened. The zombies got an extra activation catching us off guard and killing 80 percent of the team in one shot. 

 Literally, almost everyone dropped dead at once. Awesome. 

 So ultimately the only survivor left was Elmer's Erykah Badu character.She squirreled around a building for a bit picking up another couple objectives but ultimately succumbed to the horde. 

I had fun with this, I think Elmer did too. It's very tactical. It reminds me a little of the D&D Adventure system board games like Ashardalon. You have to really consider each move your making. It's easy to pick up though and it offers some depth. I love how the threat scales up too. It lulls you into a false sense of security and makes you feel overconfident. You don't realize your boned until it's too late. Thematically that's perfect. We both wanted to try this scenario again, but time didn't permit. I'm looking forward to playing this one with some more people. Still working on miniatures for it too. I also love the tiles, they are really nice looking for 2d terrain. They'd be great for roleplaying things like Gamma World or All Flesh Must Be Eaten.