Night Shift in New Chicago: Our 4th Annual Halloween Zombie Game

The club gathered last week for what has become an annual event: our Halloween zombie apocalypse game! This session continued the narrative that began in our first three games. First, our survivors escaped from the chaos and carnage of New Chicago and fled into the relative safety of rural Illinois. But last year, the dead came a-knockin', and the survivors were driven from their idyllic trailer park by hordes of slavering zombies.

After many months on the road, the survivors arrived at an industrial area on the outskirts of New Chicago. Yes, they were heading back into the stewing cauldron of urban decay in search of supplies and, perhaps, allies. But they were not alone: a group of inept, trigger-happy security guards were poised to blast away at anything that moved in the shadowy terrain. Meanwhile, a squad of military soldiers, part of the ill-fated Operation Sign Post, was also combing through the warehouses, searching for ... something ...

Tim's scenario gave each faction its own set of victory conditions. The survivors were tasked with recovering supplies and/or hotwiring vehicles to escape. Operation Sign Post was escorting a scientists who was trying to extract samples from zombie screamers scattered across the board. Turvaton Solutions wanted only to secure the three bunkers on the battlefield.

We were using Nuclear Renaissance, a fairly versatile ruleset that we've enjoyed recently, to play out this game.

Here's how the battlefield looked at the beginning of the game.

Operation Sign Post (the military detachment) deployed in the foreground, near those tire piles. The survivors arrived in the car park toward the rear left, and the bumbling security guards deployed from a bunker located behind the big tall parking garage in the back.

On the streets, the dead roamed...

 

The three factions crept cautiously into the city, each trying to secure their own victory conditions. If that brought them into contact with the other survivor groups, oh well ...

A detachment of security guards mobilized quickly by hotwiring a Chicago Police Department cruiser. Of course, the noise from the engine starting up brought even more zombies into the area. We found that, much like in real life, exploring the battlefield with a vehicle is much, much safer than traversing the zombie-infested streets by foot.

Operation Sign Post took a similar tack, motoring through the streets packed into their humvee in search of zombie screamers. The real danger came when they actually located one of these slavering, mindless creatures, because then the squad had to deploy quickly, neutralize any nearby zombies, and then guard the area while the scientist performed her extraction. Here's how it all went down.

The zombies charged the humvee and managed to drag the driver out into the street and dismember him, but the frosty soldiers reacted professionally by pouring firepower out the vehicle windows and into the massed hordes.

The first snatch & grab went well, but as Operation Sign Post cruised through the silent streets, they came upon Turvaton Solutions, the site's security detail. The terrified rent-a-cops, tired, dirty, barely holding it together after weeks spent cut off from the rest of the world, looked a whole lot like zombies, which is why the Sign Post soldiers identified them as threats and opened fire. Oops!

Lots of shouting and swearing ensued, as each side tried to convince the other that they should be focusing on the undead threat. Meanwhile, of course, the gunshots brought still more zombies shuffling over.

In the end, they worked out their differences, and Turvaton even offered to provide covering fire for the Sign Post soldiers as they carried out another field extraction.

Across the battlefield, the survivors were driving through the city, taking out zombies and moving ever closer to the other two factions.

 

Toward the end of the evening, the three factions rendezvoused near the abandoned semi truck and considered their options.Though easily dispatched, the walking dead were converging on their location and would surely be there within minutes. The fatalistic officer in charge of Operation Sign Post suggested calling in an air strike on their location -- sure to kill all the survivors, but sure to wreak havoc on the zombies too. That plan was quickly nixed in favor of an all-out retreat aboard whatever vehicles still functioned. 

As the undead closed in, the convoy moved out, with the Operation Sign Post humvee in the lead, and with Burt, the crazed, maniacal biker (survivor of our very first game) covering their rear with his sawed-off shotgun. Here is the convoy as it accelerated through the streets.

Did the scrappy survivors break through the cordon of rotting corpses and survive? Where will their next adventures take them? Find out all that and more in next year's installment of this epic campaign series!

-- Patrick, Chicago Skirmish Wargames club member