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A simple track on the character card would work. Move a marker (like the Zombicide level tracker) a step each turn after bitten to track current health. After X turns the track shows 'dead' and at X+1 it shows Rotter.

Looks like the tests at least are played on a 2x2 area. i hope there's a way to extend that.

 DaveC wrote:
The playtest picture they posted on Facebook doesn't show much Terran - there are no buildings in this set up, 4 cars though. No idea if this typical or not.

Mantic Games
Wrecked Cars and Barricades are the basics. we have some other ideas, too.
1 · Hide · 1 hour ago

Looking at this photo does not get me excited about this game and I previously was. I hope the size of that table and amount of terrain is solely for playtesting during the early stages of development.

That's definitely the danger of showing WIPs over finished studio photos of stuff.

Even though actually most player's experience of the game will be unpainted with shoddy terrain, we all like to imagine that it's going to look exactly like those studio shots on the box !

Battle System's KS terrain will help.
But it will not be available until the end of the year.
KS delivers in September.

 pongo50 wrote:
Battle System's KS terrain will help.
But it will not be available until the end of the year.
KS delivers in September.

This is going to be a KS as well, and has yet to actually start. I put the odds that this ships before the Battle Systems terrain at VERY low.

 BobtheInquisitor wrote:
Speaking of zombie sex dolls, zombie burlesque is a thing. One of my facebook friends is heavily involved with Dead Hooker's Ball and other adult cosplay events focused on the undead. I don't quite get it myself. If Mantic manages to get their message to a crowd that devoted, millions might end up on the table.


I'm just glad Mantic picked up a license I care about even less than Mars Attacks. Maybe this time I won't have to pledge that dollar.

Putting the Romance back in Necromancy.....

Every year the city where I live has zombie kickball.

The first several years it was a flash mob... now... it is sanctioned.

*EDIT* On topic, maybe some of that resin MA terrain can be ported over to TWD as a stretch goal....

And so far, the miniatures for this are looking really, really good.

The Auld Grump

Are these going to be shoddy mantic restic, or are they going to go hard plastic this time?

 Grot 6 wrote:
Are these going to be shoddy mantic restic, or are they going to go hard plastic this time?

I don't think thy have said, but I would guess plastic similar to the Mars Attacks figures.

Considering Mars Attacks and Dungeon Saga were in plastic, and they are expecting a much higher volume with Walking Dead, I'd say it's a safe bet it's in plastic.

Not sure if that 'answers' the Grotsters questions though.

Weren't Mars Attacks and Dungeon Saga both 'board game plastic' and not HIPs?

As HIPs is often what many of us gamers 'mean' when we ask about "Plastic"...

MA and DS were also quite different in practice. MA being closer to the softer, FFG plastic, while the DS stuff is much harder, though much more prone to some horrible warping.

Yeah yeah, heat them bla bla. Do you think the BGG or the wider market (if they're aiming for $1m+) are going to heat-treat their models?

I really don't imagine they'll do HIPS for this if they're expecting non gamers to pick it up for the IP. The DS/Mars attacks material has really come along. After you do the hot water fixing the Dungeon Saga stuff is really nice. I just cleaned up the Orc Warlord dude and I could barely find mold lines to clean. There were a few that were harder to get to, but they were very slight and mostly safe to ignore.

@Az, perhaps Boardgamers or newcomers would not do so, though suggesting it in the rulebook/pamphlet couldn't hurt... the DS minis are really quite nice and so far they've been the most receptive to hot water bending of the things I've used it for.

HIPS would probably be great for wargamers but I expect them to be single part (or preassembled multi part) boardgame plastic.

The info so far has mentioned something along the lines of 120 sculpts across the range, if we were talking HIPS that would seem unnecessary.

Anyway, just speculation, we'll have to wait for official word.

Am I the only one not particularly impressed with the DS plastics?

I mean they're ok, but nothing great imho. I was more impressed with my DBX stuff to be honest.

I think the sculpts are very good, but I'm not too impressed with the plastic as far as miniatures go. Then again, as I said during the KS, people needed to bear in mind that we're not getting "high quality miniatures" but "boardgame miniatures" and temper their expectations appropriately. If so many of them weren't badly warped on arrival (i.e.: better QA in the Chinese factory), I'd probably have been impressed.

Grim - you know as well as I do that.. what's the saying? "That Dog Don't Hunt." If they want it to be a success or (as I suspect) a gateway project for mainstream to the Mantic wargaming brand they'd be better off with the softer Mars Attacks-style plastic. Where the warpage on the models isn't nearly as common nor as ridiculously bad. It's lighter on detail for us wargamers, but again - mass market.

Or whatever they did for DBX. I think those were the hardest of the three we've been mentioning to clean... but if you aren't going to bother cleaning the mold lines (and most of them arent that bad anyway) as a boardgamer/nonhobbyist would do, they were probably the straightest of the three with the most definition. Well.. I mean DS is close the same or better, haven't had *that* close of a look... but overall the DBX was still pretty crisp and the mold lines weren't bad either, with less 'bent in half please heat treat'.

I haven't been cleaning the Dungeon Saga minis I've been working on, and only a few have needed hot water straightening. The material seems pretty ideal for this sort of game.

Only had 1 model from my DS that needed the hot water treatment. DS material is fine, just seems to be the vocal minority thats not happy with it.

On the other hand the rest of the box I wasn't happy with, tiles were to thin, clips (which i was strangely excited for) didn't fit the tiles, rulebook was a mess, miscellaneous item's looked cheap and nasty....

Thought the DS plastics were OK.

Have to be honest though having painted both I would rank the Zombiecide black plague minis above it, some of the nicest board game minis I have seen in that pack.

overtyrant wrote:
Only had 1 model from my DS that needed the hot water treatment. DS material is fine, just seems to be the vocal minority thats not happy with it.
On the other hand the rest of the box I wasn't happy with, tiles were to thin, clips (which i was strangely excited for) didn't fit the tiles, rulebook was a mess, miscellaneous item's looked cheap and nasty....

I should take some photos. Maybe I got a bad batch of add-ons. The core game stuff wasn't as bad, but still suffered from warpage, but some of the extras.. sheesh!

 Azazelx wrote:

overtyrant wrote:
Only had 1 model from my DS that needed the hot water treatment. DS material is fine, just seems to be the vocal minority thats not happy with it.
On the other hand the rest of the box I wasn't happy with, tiles were to thin, clips (which i was strangely excited for) didn't fit the tiles, rulebook was a mess, miscellaneous item's looked cheap and nasty....

I should take some photos. Maybe I got a bad batch of add-ons. The core game stuff wasn't as bad, but still suffered from warpage, but some of the extras.. sheesh!

I wouldn't of orderd any of the extras if I knew Mantic were going to vist Poundland for them!

Not that it's an "excuse", but human-sized Zombicide models are 35mm+, whereas Mars Attacks & Dungeon Saga were more or less exactly 28mm by my recollection. Bigger models means less warping and better details. Journey: Wrath of Demons can attest to this with its near-Inquisitor scale models and lovely deep detail!

I don't recall the warping being especially bad on the DS models, but because of the more "realistic" proportions I recall ankles being the most bent part, which resulted in some...interesting monster poses.

From the description in the blog, it looks like Mantic are trying to keep WD roughly in scale with their other models, but "chunkier" presumably to resist bending.

I should clarify - the DS models I got in my expansions were more badly warped than in my core game sets. The point of me stating this here isn't actually to have a piss and moan session, but to state that perhaps MA plastics might be a better choice since the warping seems a lot less severe than the DS one.

I can imagine some real "WTF is this gak?" reactions if mainstream TWD fans opened up their boxes to find some of the models severely warped (and half of them overall of them doing an odd dance with one leg in the air for some reason...)

Can confirm that the Mars Attacks plastic warped less (pretty much not at all, I recall Edwyn's sword and not much else), but also had less detail on some sculpts (Martians bad, Novs Vira awesome - perhaps it took some time to get the casting right?).

I hot water bent my Dungeon Saga minis (and fully painted all of them), but in the cold weather after a few weeks they've mostly all bent back to their original warped positions, either partially or entirely. :(

The casting quality and whether or not you get warped casts is very random, and this is why some people are raging, other people are happy with it, and both are right. About a third of my set required some work, and most of the large ones did as well (my trolls are some of the worst ones in fact, so the point about thicker models doesn't always hold up).

I'd rather have poor casting quality than warped minis at this point, especially after discovering that hot water is only a temporary solution (I could hot water bend them again, but really don't want to have to do that to painted minis constantly).

Some hard plastic sprues with one-piece minis would be amazing, could do a big zombies one and then release one per gang with extra weapon and equipment options (still one-piece minis, just things like add-on hands with different weapons or weapons/ gear to add to the mini). Clip them off the sprue in advance if scaring casuals is a concern.

Alternatively, some actual QC could take place at the Chinese factory. It's restic all over again, the early restic minis that Mantic had (Revenant Cavalry, Warpath Corp etc.) were fantastic, almost no mould lines or warping at all. But then as soon as the factory secured the deal with Mantic their quality dropped like a stone. There is a way to consistently get good non-warped casts, it just takes a little more time and attention, but from the factory worker's perspective they're getting paid $50/day to make cheap McDonald's toys or something for rich westerners so who cares?

I think the solid base with the mini attached to the base was a good idea for Mars Attacks, it prevented a lot of the worst kinds of "mini with one leg in the air, other bent at the ankle" warping that happened with Dungeon Saga.

Most of my DS minis were perfectly fine. I had some warping, but really how hard is it to dunk a model in a hot water to fix it?

My minis also had very few mold lines, and those that I found were easy to clean up. There were a few though that I didn't see pop out till I primed and started painting, but that was still an easy fix. Before this my last big PVC KS game that I got was Sedition Wars, so I was really expecting the worst.

I'd say nearly a third of all my Dungeon Saga is warped.

So bad to the point I boxed the whole thing back up and have set it aside, the amount of time it would take to fix everything is going to need an entire day at least. There's just so much wrong with their poses I haven't had the heart to even try the game out yet.

I'm with Highlord in having a large amount of stuff warped and also having packed my stuff away to the side for now. I don't think it'll take a full day, but it's going to take a few hours at least, and I don't have the time or patience to deal with it right now.

Seriously though. If Scarletsquig says there's a problem with one of Mantic products, then you know it's not just other people like me being a pack of whinging witches. I'm more concerned with hearing that they RE-warped... that gak is a deal-breaker. I might have to dig one out to heat-treat myself and see what happens now.

As a sculptor for that game, I'm looking VERY forward to having those on my desktop. I was surprised when they announced the game, mostly because they hadn't told me which game it was for (I was just doing Walking dead minis for skybound)

aw that sucks.. I wonder if I just got lucky, or if you guys just got real unlucky.

The one that was warped the worst for me was that super tall knight guy with the spear. it was bent almost 90 degrees at the edge of his hand. I just dunked it in hot water and was able to bend it back. In most cases it was just a sword blade or something like that that was bent, I just stuck a mug of water in the microwave till I started seeing bubbles, dunked the bent part in, and in most cases I saw it just straighten itself out and fix itself, I didn't have to manually push things around on any of them except for the spear guy.

To be honest though, I haven't checked every mini. I just have been working with the heroes and I only opened up 1 bag of undead, orcs and demon guys, the rest are still in the bookboxes. I'm also taking them off the square bases and giving them round warmachine bases since I have tons and I'm probably going to be using them more for my own skirmish games. The round bases still fit on the board tiles good though and they look a lot nicer

If you don't heat a warped part all the way through it can bend back as the bit in the middle is still 'set' in the wrong position (bigger minis will be especially prone to this)

so if the mini gets a bit warm (eg sitting in the sunlight, or in the boot of a car) the outside layer softens again and the still warped inner core will bend the whole thing back into the wrong shape again

so give them a nice long heat treatment rather than just a quick dip