Painting Last Night on Earth with Nigel

As good as the figures that come with Last Night on Earth are, they are unfortunately unpainted and come as plain grey (for the Heroes ) and green/brown (for the Zombies). Steve had done some attempts at painting his Hero figures and Nigel asked if I was interested in getting together one day over the Christmas Break to paint our own figures; seeing as he had the Growing Hunger and I had the Hero Pack each as well as the base game. Nigel had found a great close picture of the figures painted in lovely detail as we set out with our respect Games Workshop paints to do as good a job. Unfortunately my Skull White had dried up and I had to get one from Andy, this was for undercoating.

Nigel used a white spray for his undercoat, which came out perfectly, whilst mine was very disappointing because the new Skull White was very thin and needed several coats. The paint volume had also gone down and annoyingly, a new lid type is used that is flip type and flips shut almost as soon as you have opened it.

Nigel and I with our lack of practise managed to get some base colours and skin tones done, but we found it very relaxing and enjoyable - I compared it to two guys sitting fishing :-)

Nigel emailed later about looking for another source of paints and said he found some at a company called Wayland Games made by a company that had dealings with Games Workshop in the past to make paints using the same paint mixtures and colours as the GW set. Sounds good.

Last piece of Memoir 44 products bought - Breakthrough maps!

The Breakthrough Maps for Memoir '44 have been on the shelf at Andys Battlequest Games for quite some time now - and each time I have gone into the shop I have picked it up and had a look and put it down again. In this period of Christmas sales and being silly with money, I picked it up and decided to buy it - I spend £50 a week on petrol just to drive back and forth from work yet I fretting for about a year over £28 for the maps. The maps themselves are ENORMOUS and cover a large part of our lounge floor, so a table will be no use. There are two maps in all, with two sides - snow, green fields, desert and beach. Plus it comes with a set of large scale games that make use of the maps. Now I have all of the Memoir '44 items so I had better start putting them to use!

Another game of Ticket to Ride India - beaten hands down!

Anita and I had another go at the amazing India map for Ticket to Ride: India/Swiss - again I was beaten hands down with Anita getting almost double my score!!

More Last Night on Earth and Memoir '44!

Today I picked up two more items for some of our base games - the 2nd Campaign Book for Memoir'44 and the Survival of the Fittest scenario box for Last Night on Earth. These are two great addons that are in no means small fry. The 2nd Campaign book concentrates more on the Far East campaigns, the Japanese invasion of South-East Asia and the subsequent American Campaign in the Pacific. There is also a campaign for the breakout of Normandy and another for the Fall of Poland. There is also an Air Aces campaign too.

The Survival of the Fittest box contains a whole bunch of new missions and punch out tokens for LNOE. It also includes a great sounding mission for barricading up buildings (including barricade tokens) and one for going out for supplies whilst fighting off the zombie horde! New weapons, cards, zombie and hero cards too.

Christmas pressies and Christmas Gaming!

Merry Christmas!! And happy boxing day! Great family Christmas all round with everyone getting something nice that they always wanted - as it is every year; we get one big present each and then lots of little ones. And my big present was Railways of the World! A massive re-imagining of Railroad Tycoon that uses a huge Eastern Seaboard map of the United States and one smaller one of Mexico. The game also contains huge "empty city" markers, lots of plastic trains, millions of hexagonal track markers, oodles of money, game cards and other play pieces. You just get loads of stuff in your huge box.

The basic aim of the game is that dotted around the map are coloured cities marked with a number and the game comes with a large number of little coloured wooden cubes representing different goods, oil, wood, steel etc. Each city has a number of random cubes placed on it as indicated by the number on the city and then the idea of the game is to simply raise money to place track linking cities and delivering a coloured cube from one city to another city of that colour. The game is based on Railroad Tycoon which in turn is based on the computer game of the same name and this is exactly what happens in the computer game.

Players can also upgrade engines to take goods further, score more points and get more money for delivering those goods. We haven't played it yet, but I have been through the very short looking rules (there is a short set for the game and then a short set for each map - there are also other maps you can get, Europe, Western USA, England and Wales etc.) and it does look great and easy to play yet very in-depth.

Looking forward to my first play against Anita!!

Also on Boxing Day we all had a family game of 7 Wonders - our family favourite.

Last night on earth - with Maya and Roshni

Maya asked for another game of Last Night on Earth whilst Roshni wanted to join in too having not played before but had heard lots of good things about the game from her sister. They took the role of the Heroes, two each, whilst I played the Zombies again. This time I thought no holds barred - if I get good anti human cards, I'm going to use them! The scenario was the basic one, the humans had to kill off 15 zombies to win. We all rubbed out hands and set out to win!

First things started going badly for the zombies, the Heroes whacked a couple but then they started charging other zombies and were wondering why they were not winning, only just pushing them off. Quite rightly I've not exposed my kids to the sort of films this game is based upon, but anyone who has seen a zombie film will understand that zombies are pretty hard to kill - head shot and nothing else will do. But if you didn't have this knowledge you'd be wondering why your dice vs the single zombie die results in not many kills. Zombie knowledge is a pre-requisite for playing this game! I tried not to use this to my advantage, but the fact you're charging my zombies I'm not going to give you an easy time!

Things going well (for the Zombies!), Billy bites the dust!

After Billy bit the dust (or the Zombie bit Billy), the Heroes floundered a bit but the new character they got helped out a bit more. Then the girls got the idea to attack en mass and started clobbering more zombies. I fought back but as you can see in the image below, my dice rolling left a lot to be desired!! Three 1's is great in Vegas, but not in the Last Night on Earth!

Gimme a break!

Finally the game started to turn into a slog match of human v zombie, with me getting the upper hand with a lot of draw dice rolls equalling wounds against the humans. 

End game, zombies win!!

The end of the game was triggered with the loss of the humans second Hero, Jake going down under a storm of groans and outstretched zombie arms (why do they walk like that??). Great game!

Pre-Christmas Gaming

 So Christmas is coming and it's time to get some games done and the festivities to begin! Firstly we had a game of 7 Wonders to get back into the swing of gaming. That was won by Kavita with her Hanging Gardens of Babylon wonder. We then had a good game of Apples to Apples - always a great laugh; the current player puts down a card with noun on it and the other players look at their cards with items on and try to match the most appropriate (or funny) card to the noun. Very funny game. Then later in the day we played Agricola - we had a few rounds as Roshni, Kavita and Anita had not played before just so that they can get used to the rules. 

End game - Anita won!