Madness!

Hi,

What a weekend!  After an orgy of gaming at the inaugural Mark's Madness, I've returned home with loads of pictures, and some fun memories as well.  We made the trek up Friday (many thanks to DaveB), arrived safely, cracked open some drinks, and got to work, with a few games of Zombicide and Formula D.



This is the rather extravagantly gorgeous set belonging to ChrisB, who has, among other things, painted each of several hundred zombies individually, and has a tile signed by the hand of George Romero (and Russ Streiner!).



From what I remember of the game (we were making rather merry), we managed to crack and sweep the first building without too much difficulty, but it moved us into yellow stress (which increases the number and danger of the zombies that appear on the table).







Yours truly was playing the redoubtable member of law enforcement, holding the shotgun.  I like the character as he starts with a pistol, but given my luck to date with finding firearms, I might switch out for another character the next time we play.



With the stress level in yellow, zombies started popping out of the woodwork, but we managed to hold them off.



ChrisB picked up the game by buying heavily into their Kickstarter, and ended up with (I think) all of the Kickstarter-only characters, including the not-Ash you see below, teaming up with me to draw off (and shoot) the zombie horde, so our team-mates could recover objectives.





As I recall, this was about the peak of teamwork for the weekend.  Zombicide is primarily a cooperative game, but there is room for a degree of player competition, something that came up in the games we played on Saturday.







We won the final game when the team made a hole for our fastest survivor (the former roller-skate waitress), who swept in to seize the last objective.



A highlight of the game was the use of a molotov cocktail.  Now you see 'em:



Now you don't:





Still glowing from our victory, and perhaps a bit of the creature, we moved on to Formula D, a racing game.  There's a nice little mechanic where different gears are represented by different (loaded) dice; 3rd gear, if I recall, is a d12 number 7-12 (for 7-12 spaces of movement), while 4th is a d20, etc.  Players are constantly faced with the decision to move up and down gears to maximise their movement, while negotiating turns (the sharper the turn, the greater the number of times cars must finish their movement in the space of the turn, with things like hairpins requiring 3-4 stops).





I was off to an early lead, but lost it a bit in the first tight turn when I misjudged a few movement rates.  From the pack of the pack, however, I managed to work my way back up fairly steadily.





That's me in the all-green car.







I finished in third, which was a miracle, as by that point in the evening, I shouldn't have been behind the wheel of any car, even a toy one.

Thus ended Friday.  I'll save Saturday and Sunday for another post, as there's still plenty of games to go.

FMB