"Zombie RV"

It's Halloween time and I haven't posted on this blog in years, so let's do a quick write-up on a game I've been playing a bit recently, Zombie RV by Dave Bezio's Grey Area Games.

I can't quite remember why I wanted to do zombie apocalypse gaming earlier this year, but something drew my attention to Zombie RV. I grabbed the rules, read them, realised I needed a load of miniatures I didn't own, ordered some now out-of-production Project Z sets on Amazon, and then promptly forgot to do much beyond assemble and undercoat some figures. Then I organised with some friends to host a game night and after a few evenings of furious painting, plus another order to Sarissa Precision for the titular vehicle, it was time to give Zombie RV a proper spin. I had, that being said, played a solo game in advance to check that it wasn't going to annoy my friends too much.

Zombie RV is a short but fairly sweet rule set published in a 'zine-like format similar to Space Weirdos and Sword Weirdos. There are only six pages of main rules, including how to generate the default scenario. The rules are correspondingly simple, although detailed enough for most things that will come up in the game: you create your team of survivors, set up the board, spawn some zombies, and start playing. Every turn the survivors take actions, normally trying to search loot points around the 2' by 2' game area, after which all the zombies take actions, and then there's an end phase in which more zombies spawn onto the board. Survivors can sneak, move, shoot, fight in close combat, search, all the things you'd expect. The only caveat is that the majority of actions cause varying degrees of noise.

Everyone knows that zombies are attracted to loud noises, so in the zombie phase the restless dead will move towards if not the nearest survivor in their line of sight, then to the survivor with the most noise tokens for that turn, assuming they're within 9". Otherwise, they do nothing, a rule I've repeatedly forgotten. Most zombies are slow, only moving 3" per action, although rarer fast zombies and the dreaded "nasty zombies" are, unsurprisingly, more formidable.

There's a lot of what I might call "flat die rolling" in this game: roll a D6 at the start of your turn to see if you get an extra action on a 6; searching only finds anything on a 4+, and in all other cases the loot area has nothing; attacking pushes zombies back 1D3" on a 4+, kills zombies and fast zombies on a 5+, and kills nasty zombies on a 6. Zombies only hit on a 6, although nasty zombies do so on a 5+ and zombies get a +1 for every other zombie in base contact with the survivor they're attacking. If you find something on a 4+ you roll again to see what you find; if you find a weapon, roll yet another D6 to determine what weapon it is. So you only have a 50/50 chance of finding anything when you search, and only a 1/3 chance of killing a zombie when you attack it, down to 1/6 for a nasty zombie

Overall I really like Zombie RV for its simplicity, but the 1D6-driven mechanics can feel frustrating. The tactic seems to be to avoid combat altogether, to keep one's distance from the zombies and to stay out of line of sight, because charging in expecting to "splatter" loads of them depends upon one's luck rolling 5s and 6s, bearing in mind that a 1 means "Out of Ammo", rendering a weapon useless for the rest of the game. This proved a particular annoyance in the scenario "Cabin in the Woods", in which one of the objectives is to kill "Uncle Bob", a nasty zombie. If you don't roll a 6 when attacking him, you're not winning.

All that being said, there's nothing saying you can't house rule any of this stuff, and a lot of people online seem to. After all, it's a free solo/casual game which works as good way of generating a quick zombie survival experience, not a huge exhaustive system like Zombiecide or County Road Z.  The main rule set has four more specific scenarios, and the free mini-campaign "A Place to Chillax" has another four, so that's a fair bit of replayability even within the bounds of the game's "official" material. If you've ever wanted an excuse to pick up figures from Wargames Atlantic's new Pulp Adventures range, or to buy modern and post apocalyptic terrain from Mantic, Sarissa Precision or Battle Systems, this game gives you that.

While I know some people like complexity and crunch, I hope games like this encourage more people to develop short and simple but flavourful rule sets for those of us who just want to get the toy soldiers on the table. I'm looking forward to more games of Zombie RV in the future, and have been reading other blogs as well as ruminating on my own ideas for how to tinker with it. Probably won't be long before I take another trip down that lonely undead highway.