Zombicide Prison Outbreak campaign

Last year at GenCon we bought Zombicide (which we'd later learn is referred to as Season 1). It was well regarded online, and we'd played a reasonable amount of Zpocalypse and Run, Fight, or Die! but were looking for something different in a zombie game. So, Zombicide.

We played enough missions between us that we decided we wanted to try making a campaign of it. Also, after a few missions in Season 1, we wanted more variety. So we picked up Season 2 - Prison Outbreak + Ultimate Survivors #1 to go with the base game. Since then we've been playing through the Season 2 missions as a campaign. That's working really well - tons of fun. The ultimate survivors make things easier, especially with accumulating experience, but the missions are still hard. Also, the mission difficulties are really arbitrary. Easy / Medium / Hard? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I think it's easier to estimate difficulty based on number of spawn points.

Campaign Setup

We've been using the set up for experience mode in Ultimate Survivors (rules). The key points are that characters gain an experience card the first time they enter a new danger level in the campaign, and while experience, wounds & equipment reset between games, zombvivor status and experience cards are maintained across missions.

For zombies and equipment, we've simply combined the zombie decks and the equipment decks. I suspect that makes things a little easier too, as we don't spawn quite as many berserker zombies (and thus don't run out of them which would trigger extra activations). Berserkers are a nice switch from the standard zombies but skewing towards too many of them would be... unpleasant. Though Season 2 does bring some really nice weapons like the Chainsaw and better default weapons (nightsticks >> frying pans).

In later posts, I'll review specific missions as we go through them. So far we've done M00, 01 and 02 of Season 2 in campaign mode. M02 has definitely been the most difficult, even though it's rated as medium and M01 is rated hard. It took us four tries to finish M02. Still, tons of fun!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

1:58:33!

Last weekend at the Queens Half Marathon hosted by NYC Runs, I achieved one of my goals for 2015. I ran a half marathon in under two hours. My garmin had me finishing in 1:58:33 and the official time was 1:58:31. My previous best was around two hours, seven minutes so I took nearly 10 minutes off my time! Overall my pace was 8:55 / mile. I have to say I'm pretty happy with that! I think it's the last time I'll set a half-marathon PR for a while. The timing for this race was perfect. The course was mostly flat, the weather was perfect, and it was the first race of the year that I really pushed as hard as I could for. I'll push for the next race too (the Brooklyn Half Marathon) but after that I expect the weather to be too hot to push for a PR. That's fine. I have many more half marathons to run this year. Maybe in December I can try for a 1:45:00 half marathon! Anyway, 1:58:33, my best half time ever. It feels good.
Read more

Dice, probabilities, and Go - Part 1

Image
A post on dmg42 got me thinking about damage rolls in D&D. The main point of the post was that in 4e, damage doesn't scale with the players' abilities to mitigate the damage. He makes a great argument for new damage rolls (with graphs!) but it got me thinking, how do I distinguish the damage brutes do vs lurkers? I wanted something a little more flexible with burstier damage so I figured I'd write an app to show how damage is distributed for different sets of dice.  Other   tools  exist which do most of what I want but that would make for a boring project. So I'm working on a tool written in Go. Why Go? I went with go because 1) I've never used it, 2) someday I may want to use it seriously, and most importantly 3) it has the cutest mascot. I mean just look at it: I have one on my shelf. This one is from someone else's shelf. Learning new languages is fun and I'll have a post on surprising features of Go sometime later, once I feel mo
Read more

Planetfall by Emma Newman

I read this book based largely on the Emma Newman's entry on The Big Idea . I'm conflicted on how I feel about it. I either hate or love it depending on how I interpret the ending.  What she set out to do, write a character based science fiction story centered around the main character's (Ren's) mental illness, she did beautifully. For that, this book gets top marks. I felt empathy for Ren when I realized what illness she had, rage at the reactions of those around her, and awe at the details of the big reveal and how I had misinterpreted the hints leading up to it. If the book had ended in the middle of the crisis on a cliffhanger or had resolved differently (everything is terrible, done), I'd be championing this book to everyone who would listen to me. - Spoilers below - ... - You were warned - Unfortunately, the ending completely ruined the book for me on my first pass. If it wasn't my kindle, I'd have thrown the book after finishing it. The shift
Read more