Zombies?

Last Friday, Paul Brook and his friend Kasper came down to the Brixham Berserkers to show us their latest game, Bullets and Brains, soon to be released by East Street Games.

The game’s premise is simple - one side plays a group of well armed survivors, the other controls (as far as you do) the gathering horde of zombies. Each game has a random primary and secondary mission which the survivors have to complete. If the survivors fail in their objectives, the zombies win. There is a turn limit (note the D8 in the picture), so the survivors cannot afford to dawdle either!

The game is IGO UGO, with the survivors going first. There is a clever mechanism for noise. The more noise the survivors make, the faster the zombies move and how may reinforcements the zombie players get. Complete the mission silently - if you can with the time available - and you limit the zombies numbers and movement. Blaze away with all weapons and the zombie player can bring on hordes! This adds a very interesting tactical element to the game.

Each figure has to be activated in turn. Once activated, a survivor gains 2 actions, which can be move, shoot or perform another action. However if the model moves twice (runs) or shoots, this generates noise.

Various weapons are included, including Assault Rifles, the Sniper Rifle (with silencer), LMGs and the RPG (if you really want one… Dave Davies did and it appears to be not the most silent of weapons!). Combat is simple: a 2D6 roll to beat the target number followed by a 2D6 roll to inflict a wound. Zombies have two wounds while humans typically have five. Grenades and RPG fire tends to leave the undead as ‘crawlers’: slower but still dangerous. Most weapons do one point of damage, so it takes two hits to take out the average zombie. However, the survivors will really want to avoid being bit! An infected human loses a health point  at the end of every turn and ‘turns’ into a zombie if he dies. Only a medic can stop the infection from spreading. This did require a little bookwork and some counters, but nothing too drastic.

We had loads of people wanting to play this one, so ended up having three human players (each controlling three survivors) and four zombie players (controlling a ‘spawn point’ each). Just to add more confusion (and fun for the zombie player), there were a number of counters around the board to trigger random events - just so the human players didn’t have a ‘cake walk’. The Zombie players also had two random events they could play whenever they wanted.

All in all it was a good club game which we all enjoyed. The Berserkers are familiar with other Zombie games (such as Zombicide) and they found this one different and refreshing. Our thanks to Paul and Kasper for coming down. The game will be at Salute 2014 or you can catch it in Croydon for the East Street games January Jolly.