Sunday, January 15, 2012

I Hate Quarantines!

I tried today to play the Quarantine scenario from the All Things Zombie: Haven scenario book. Basically, its cops trying to hold the line on the board against zombies, infected humans, and all sorts just trying to break quarantine. As such, the board doesn't start with either zombies or PEFs at the beginning. You only have events when you have encounters. The scenario ends when 16 activation turns go by, when the scenario assumes your relief arrives for the next watch shift.

Seems simple right? Well, it is. TOO simple. Encounters only occur when you roll doubles on the activation dice. This happened exactly TWICE during the game. Turn 1, when the streetlights went out (this is a night shift) and on Activation 14, when a sniper took a shot at one of the cops and missed.

That was it. The entire game. In four sentences. :P
I think its taking me longer to write this !@#$ post than the 'game' took.

So, I'm going to replay it tomorrow, but with the rule that encounters happen on either a 7 or doubles. Just to have some action going on! Otherwise, I spent a lot of time setting up my terrain and minis for (almost) nothing.

Have any of my readers played the Quarantine scenario? What was your experience with the scenario as written? Other than Vampifan that is. HIS BatRep had a lot of action! Wonder if its my dice....


Zombie Chow

5 comments:

Shelldrake said...

rather that reply on dice rolls you could convert the charts into a deck of cards - instead of rolling you draw a card from an 'event' deck.

You can include blanks so that you don't know when an event will happen.

Not knowing the events on the chart I can't give a good example, but:

you might want 10 events. Mix into this 10 blank cards. This gives you a 50% chance of an even at any given time (you can adjust the ratio by adding or removing blank cards).

the other 50% of the cards include: Lights go out or Sniper as you mentioned... plus what ever else is on your chart.

Simon Quinton said...

Sounds like both are a good ideas I think a it will need some more experimentation will be needed

Vampifan said...

The dice were kind to me when I played this scenario but it could have gone so differently. I agree that it is possible to play a game like yours where nothing significant happens. I tweaked my scenario a bit just to make Team Vampifan one of the encounters. I like the idea of events occuring on a roll of doubles or a seven. Definitely worth playing again with some rule tweaks.

Zombie Chow said...

Thanks all for the ideas....I'll be giving this another go I think. Shell, I like the cards idea but considering my disability it'd be hard to work out in practice. Which is a pity really because I've love to give the Risks&Rewards deck a try. Alas!

Hmmm. I wonder if maybe rolling 3 dice would help? Better chance of doubles anyway?

ZC

Zabadak said...

Having such a quick scenario after probably taking more time to set up than to play, would indeed have been a pain in the proverbial. My "solution" would have been to replay the scenarion and swap a couple of buildings around and have the quarantine going on at another location (or locations).