At long last, Mantic’s Walking Dead: All Out War kickstarter is complete. My “Wave 2” package arrived the other day in all it’s glory and I’m pretty excited to see what we have in here.
Opening it up and removing the cautionary plastic flotation devices, we find… more boxes! And a floater. Well not really, that’s just Morgan. Loose and roaming free with a packing slip. While booking face I saw that Mantic had a possible issue with the original Morgan sculpt that went into the package so they fixed it and chucked a loose one in the box just in case you get a bad one in the packaging. Who knows, maybe I’ll go all “Ash vs Evil Ash” with the copies.
Loose Morgan will serve as our reference rep for the remainder of this show and tell. Here, he climbs the white boxes of expansions. They are a bit small but there is a lot of love packed into each one of those suckers.
In random opening order, we have the prison expansion Safety Behind Bars on the left, the Greene farm expansion, Miles Behind Us in the center, and the Woodbury expansion, Made To Suffer on the right. While the new minis, cards, and templates are nice, the big draw for me are these rule books. Each adds new scenario content and new core rules to the game.
In Miles Behind Us, we get to see the full campaign rules where, unlike the story mode narrative campaign, you build a core set of survivors for 150 points and run linked scenarios with them. All the while, they will gain experience, items, characters and likely lose some friends along the way. It was the preview of these rules sent out to backers early on that really got me hooked on this game’s potential.
Safety Behind Bars is probably the weakest of the three when it comes to rules as it introduces the cool new “interior” rules for fighting and navigating the confines of buildings and tight spaces. This is really cool but is duplicated in the next expansion and expanded a bit further there. That isn’t to say this expansion is light. It boasts 7 total scenarios and introduces a new class of walker, the armored kind that traipse around in old riot gear. The rules and scenarios also seem the most self-contained as the rules have a lot of detail as to how the Prison map works.
Made To Suffer rounds out the three by expanding the interior rules and city environs as well as adding the iconic Tank to the mix. This expansion also adds an environmental rule with “night.” Having played a bit more of the Batman Miniature Game and knowing Mark Latham had a hand in Knight Models’ ruleset, it isn’t surprising that a similar ruleset is coming to Walking Dead. I think it is fantastic as it is something very iconic to the Batman setting and will work very well in the Walking Dead games. Essentially, the darkness of night will limit line of sight and shooting to 8 inches unless a target is within the killzone of a lamp post. This just further mixes my Batman and Walking Dead scenery together.
Lastly, on Made To Suffer, they expand the rules further to include the running of large games, sometimes epic in scale (over 1000 points). This includes using larger maps or play areas and adding alternate victory conditions with Special Objective cards. These larger games are previewed in our first official two map scenarios detailing the epic Governor attack on the Prison. If I wasn’t such a sucker for a lasting narrative campaign like Miles Behind Us gives us, Made To Suffer would be the best expansion to date.
Alright, enough about the rules, let’s check out some props. Here we have bendy Otis. How is this guy any good at hunting? No wonder he messes up Carl. The bent rifle will be an easy fix and was the only really bent model I noticed in the whole batch.
Hell yeah, Axel. I follow ya.
Badass Rick is Badass. I can’t wait to start using him in earnest. Just a great pose for the star of the series.
Loose Morgan is back now to show us some of the other components like these room templates. The scenery looks a little small for giganto Morgan.
But oddly, the bed is about the right size.
The tank is pretty massive and dwarfs my little black tank I added a while back. That’s ok though as I suspect Mantic will release a kit to build our own tank. They already confirmed they will be doing a kit for the Miles Behind Us expansion:
Maybe a Prison guard tower and Woodbury house/tank kit will come in the future.
That about covers it for my initial opening of the Wave 2 kickstarter material. Very pleased and, honestly, a little sad that this kickstarter is finally closed down. Not too sad, mind you as I have a ton of new content to pour over and new models to paint up. Likely starting with this guy:
GLENN! HE EXISTS!!