Zombies
Movies like Night of the Living Dead and television series such as The Walking Dead revolve around re-animated corpses that attack humans en-masse. Colloquially known as Zombies after the Haitian legend, these mindless monsters meander across the landscape. Most move in packs ranging from a few individuals to hundreds. They are motivated by food. Their food is any living being they can catch.
The adventures of the humans forced to fight these ghouls are the gist of the movies and TV shows. In some of the older movies, people took shelter and fought off marauding hordes. In other series, the humans had to fend off both the Zombies and human antagonists.
Zombies do not die easily. In most Zombie tales, they have to be decapitated or take a strike or shot to the head. That makes fighting them all the more difficult. And worse, in some stories, the bite of a Zombie is contagious. Those bitten will soon become Zombies themselves.
Naturally, the folks who make Army Men added their two cents and began making sets of Zombies. I bought a couple of these sets about three years ago. Yesterday, I found another set of Zombies for sale at the Freehold Dollar Tree store.
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| 45mm Defenders |
The first set of Zombies had a bag of figures about 45mm tall. There were two sides: blue colored human defenders and lime green Zombies. These figures had the most realistic proportions.
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| 45mm Zombies |
This next set by Imperial had 90 figures around the 54mm size. There were 45 Zombies in six poses and 45 “Zombie Responders” in blue. The Responders were Chinese copies of the Timmee M16 / Vietnam GIs in twelve poses. The Zombies were more caricature the realistic. The figures came in a clear plastic can.
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| 54mm Zombies and Responders |
The last set were bags if 14 figures each: two headstones, two Zombie dogs and ten Zombies. These were also caricature types. They were molded in stiff grey plastic.
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| Dollar Tree Zombies |
In Night of the Living Dead, the Zombies were a spontaneous phenomenon that was getting under control the next day.
In The Walking Dead, the Zombie disease has decimated the population, leaving a world that is part post-apocalyptic and part dystopian. The Zombies are out of control and society has broken down into roving bands of people and various settlements made of armed survivors. There is as much or more conflict between groups of living humans as there are confrontations with the Zombies.
Scenarios for possible games using Zombies might be a battle between two of these dystopian groups amid roving bands of Zombies. Another could be a n attempt to rescue people trapped by zombies amid a land plagued by meandering Zombies. Then there is a game where each tem tries to make it to the other side of the board with as few casualties as possible, fending off Zombies along the way.
I am working on a Zombie scenario game for OMOG.
