I've got a Ticket to Ride...

Okay, this is embarrassing.  It's been a month of life just conspiring against me.  I apologize for the lack of updates, but between an illness, holiday, work trip and new game I just plain didn't have any time left for zombie gaming.

Not my work, but a cool zombie apocalypse train!

On a gaming note, my sister introduced me to the board game Ticket to Ride.  I know it's been around for years, but I hadn't tried it.  Trains just are not a huge draw for me.  I played Empire Builder way back in the day and couldn't get into it.  Ticket to Ride is a much more social or beer and pretzels game, and it has been a go-to for the wife and I for the past month or so.

Ticket to Ride USA board

The game is basically collecting cards to turn in sets and 'build' rail lines.  You can focus on making the longest sets possible or building specific routes and connecting cities to fulfill various 'tickets' to score points for routes.  I am pretty impressed with the game mechanics, it allows for different strategies as well as ways to score and win from seemingly poor starts.

Example game play

No zombies, but there is some sort of expansion with a large monster (Godzilla) and space alien.  Not sure what that is about, but the game has solid mechanics and I could see it adapted to many milieus.  Who knows, maybe there will be a Walking Dead version...  (hmm, they did have rail lines to Terminus...)

Map expansion maybe?

It is a fun strategy board game, and there are plenty of expansions and options to keep it fresh.  We have the basic game, set in the USA as well as the Ticket to Ride:Europe set.  It gives us a geography lesson when we play as well!

I have waited to post again until I felt I could commit to a few posts and get back into regular posting.  Once I get back to the apocalypse, we will see what happened to Dawn after the gang attack!

Game Time, Old West Style!

I had a chance to game with some friends, and didn't pass on the chance!  We had several stacks of games to play, but ended up playing just one...

Shadows of Brimstone

Art from the box (Not mine)

I'm sure many of you have heard of, played and love this game.  This was my first chance to play it, and I was not disappointed!  It plays very fast and I found the rules to be very solid.  The characters are complimentary, and everyone gets to get involved in the fights.  The layout is modular so each game is unique and it scales nicely with the number of players.

I took a few pictures, but to be honest, I lost track of taking pictures and just enjoyed playing the game.

I played the Lawman...

We were playing through scenarios somewhat randomly.  We would roll for what we were doing, but re-rolling to get 'new' missions.  It gave us plenty of variety of game play.

It seemed like these mines were empty

We wandered forever and didn't find anything...

Careful what you wish for!

It seemed we would wander quite a bit before encountering actual monsters.  Plenty of strange stuff from searching and such, but when we sprang an encounter, wow, they came at us!

That's a mess o' trouble for our posse

Our posse keeps hacking away

Now a giant hand attacks?!?

Just need to kill the pile of corpses

Like I said, I lost track of taking pictures, so there's not as many as I'd like.  Still, it's enough to get a feel for the game.  I would recommend this game to anyone who enjoys a Heroquest style dungeon crawl, or anyone who likes the weird west setting.  I found the rules pretty easy to pick up, and deep enough to keep us entertained.

An excellent game, the pieces are good quality, the minis are well detailed and everything has a nice polished look and feel.  I am looking forward to another chance to play the game.

Vacation Recap

This is off topic of the zombie apocalypse, but I wanted to share a few pictures of my family's trip out west this summer.  This doesn't have much to do with the miniatures side of the blog, but I did see a few interesting sights that may be inspiring for scenery... 

In August, we traveled to Denver, Colorado to start our trip, and from there crossed Wyoming to Rapid City, South Dakota.  From there we traveled back across South Dakota and Minnesota to return home to Wisconsin.  We spent nearly a week on the trip (which was just under 3000 miles total distance) and saw some neat places.

Crossing Iowa, we did encounter a military convoy (the first of several on the trip) which can be a pain to deal with, or interesting to see military equipment in use.  At a random rest area in the middle of the state there was an interesting display of a blade from a wind mill/electrical generator.  This would be a bizarre landmark after the apocalypse...

Convoy!

Random rest area in Iowa, with a blade from a wind turbine

Side view of the bottom of the blade

Outside of Denver, I took a few pics from Lookout Mountain (is it a warning?) while a shower moved through.  Its a small mountain, but it feels like you can see forever...

Looking West/Northwest

Golden, Colorado - East of the mountain.

Those plateaus would make a good place to hold up from the zombie apocalypse...

 We went up Pikes Peak on the train, which is roughly a 3 hour round trip.  Pretty nice ride, you can hike or drive to the top as well as the train.  When we got the top, it was clouded over, so not as cool of a view as I had hoped...

Moving up the mountain

Just above the tree line, not quite to the top

Not the peak, but it looked cool

The old train station on the peak

Panorama of the only break in the cloud cover.  (Is that a bunker?)

 After our adventure in Colorado, we crossed Wyoming to South Dakota.  Along the way we stopped at a portion of the Oregon trail, where wagon ruts can still be seen. 

Wagon ruts along the Oregon Trail

Wyoming, near the Oregon Trail

Driving across Wyoming I had a moment where I thought I had crossed into the Sea of Grass of the Dothraki from Game of Thrones.  If you have never traveled the great plains, vast hardly describes it.  The fact that people crossed this in wagons and horses is amazing.

This seems to never end..

This went on for hundreds of miles.

We made our way to Devil's Tower that afternoon...

It looks fake!

 From there we crossed South Dakota, stopping at Wall Drug (a tourist trap, full of kitsch and western memorabilia, but a fun place to stop) and the Badlands.  The Badlands is definitely sci-fi or fantasy terrain.  Very cool if you get the chance to wander around.

Some sort of mutant land mount...

Is it planet K?

Desolate hardly describes it

Wouldn't want to get lost here

  Just outside the park, near a gas station/convenience store I found this (unfortunately closed for the day!):

Apparently I found a WMD site...

If it had been open...

 Crossing Minnesota I did have a brief encounter with a giant.  Turned out to be pretty friendly, even if he wasn't wearing pants...

Archeologists will have a field day some day...

An HO scale layout of the Green Giant processing plant.  Would have been a fun game board...

The rest of the trip was uneventful, and I didn't get any interesting pictures after Blue Earth.  I had hoped for pictures of the Mississippi crossing to use as a reference for my river crossing scenario, but traffic had a different plan.  In the end I settled for crossing and being glad to make it home.

Now to prepare for Zomtober!

Zombie War Plan

I'll have a bat rep very soon, but I just had to share this:

Pentagon Zombie War Plan

It sounds like government spending gone amok, but its not like a REAL war plan.  Of course they'd never tell us that...

Time to put the tinfoil hat back on.

Here's a random fun pic from the internet:

Hell Yes.