Late last week, Mantic’s stand-alone board game based on The Walking Dead, titled “Here’s Negan,” got an early leak thanks to an impatient web developer at ICv2. The link was only up for a few hours before they realized the blunder and pulled it down but earlier this week, they released the details again.
image from ICv2 and Mantic Games
The article has a good bit of detail confirming the the semi-co-operative game play of vying for attention of Negan while completing various missions. Even though the game is supposed to be based on the “Here’s Negan” one-shot comic, detailing Negan’s life right before the Walking Dead outbreak, it sounds like the scenarios are all centered around clearing out “Sanctuary,” his eventual base of operations in the main series of the comics. Ah well, the premise sounds interesting and the game play is supposed to have a lot in common with The Walking Dead: All Out War so I’m definitely intrigued.
image from ICv2 and Mantic Games
As a bonus, the miniatures are all in scale and in the same style as the tabletop wargame along with being fully compatible. This is a smart play by Mantic as it will introduce a lot of Saviors figures (Negan’s faction) quickly without having to wait for the story line that the successive waves of All Out War figures are released in to catch up.
The MSRP is $69.99 and should include 19 figures (6 survivors you see in the ICv2 Image) and 13 others, which I assume will be more walker figures. Hopefully they are also brand new sculpts as I really love the idea of all these unique walker figures. Lastly, it sounds like it has solo play as a nice boon.
Trolling the interwebs further, I found a product description on Golden Distribution’s website:
Reputation is the unique resource element that is introduced in Here’s Negan. Gained through killing walkers, securing rooms and protecting Negan himself – players must manage increasing their reputation while also making sure that the mission is accomplished.
With the reputation mechanic this also separates this product from others as its not completely co-operative, as the players are working together to protect Negan, but also selfishly looking to increase their reputation
And finally, Stewart Gibbs of Mantic was answering some questions on Facebook confirming the figures:
The six Survivors seen in the pic Paul Welsh posted, plus 12 Walkers and a larger scale model of Lucille to use as the Initiative counter instead of the Sheriff badge.
And the differences between Here’s Negan and All Out War:
It’s still got threat and noise, and event and supply cards, and the dice mechanics are the same, but otherwise it’s sort of like a ‘dungeon crawler’ board game.
Sounds like there is some great content in there and an interesting set of stand alone rules. “Here’s Negan” will be one of the first demos I try at Gen Con so I hope to have more info available later in August.
In other news, the models for Maggie and Glen on horseback surfaced, leaving only the new Rick Grimes model image yet to be seen in the upcoming All Out War wave 5.
