In less than two weeks, my friends and I will trek into the mountains and unofficially start off the summer game convention season with our own private little game convention, CabinCon.
CabinCon logo designed by Bret Bays
Started almost 4 years ago, CabinCon began as a way to enjoy the 24/7 open-gaming of a big convention but within the comfort of a private setting. While we all enjoy the large and not-so-large conventions like Gen Con, BGG Con, we found that the larger conventions are so packed with interesting non-gaming alternatives that we don’t get to actually play many games. CabinCon has now become our annual gaming only retreat. A time when we can break out the extreme games that are either too complicated or too long to try to enjoy in a typical evening.
I tend to use CabinCon to also break out some of the many games I’ve pimped over the years. This year, I’m a little behind in prepping some pimped games so I’m going to have to burn through the remaining days to finish up in time.
I recently backed a new miniatures game from Mantic Games based on the Walking Dead comic series called The Walking Dead: All Out War. I’ve been looking for a flexible zombie miniatures game and after seeing what Mantic was producing for their Walking Dead game, it sounded like everything I needed. Since the end of the kickstarter campaign, Mantic has released a couple of iterations of the rules and even though I don’t have any physical product, I’ve decided to run a game or two at CabinCon using proxies.
While The Walking Dead minis game has a great tabletop minis skirmish ruleset, it also features a solo (which can easily be expanded to a co-operative game) and a campaign option. In this campaign option is also a nice custom character generator and I’m planning on creating all of us as custom characters to run in a little custom Walking Dead scenario.
custom TWD minis game character sheet draft
I’ll be proxying quite a bit since I don’t have the actual cards and miniatures but zombie games are so popular, it’s hard not to have an extra couple or ten lying around to pillage for parts.
probably using a few of these guys…
I’ll also proxy the necessary cards but those are easy to do and after years of prototyping for game testing, creating cards is like second nature. The bigger challenge will be making the terrain but I’m confident I can proxy up some paper terrain to give it enough atmosphere…
I’ll pull some Google Earth images to get a general game mat option. The resolution will be horrible but it should work for the one-off game. Alright enough writing, it’s time to get busy prototyping.