Opinionated: ‘The Walking Dead: All-Out War’ – Everything comes to an end…
It was recently announced by Ronnie Renton, owner, and Head honcho at Mantic games that their skirmish tabletop game The Walking Dead: All-Out War along with the Call to Arms were not going to see further releases or further support.
A couple of years ago I reviewed The Walking Dead: All-Out War, which was one of my love letters to a game I thought was brilliant. If you want to learn a little about how the game plays, please follow the link to the original review I wrote, I won’t go into that again here. It is a great example of rules and theme pairing beautifully with a system that covers everything you need it to while remaining elegant, clean, and simple.
When I am having so much fun with something, I am trying to get more people to experience it for themselves. With official support now ending, I just wanted to bookmark its passing with my thoughts on the game and what happens next.
First thing to address, is why is the game is ending, with stories left untold?
The 5-year contract between Mantic games and Skybound games is coming to an end. The Walking Dead lives on, on TV but the original series is also ending. The comics (on which the games are based) has finished (rather oddly, in my humble opinion) so, rather than renew a presumably expensive contract, perhaps it is a logical time to bring the Walking Dead games to an end.
As a last hurrah, and shortly before the existing licence expires, Mantic have opened a made to order service so that fans can get one last chance to pick things up (I have Whisperers and the Kingdom on the way). There are a couple of boosters (Aaron, Heath, Jesus) that I am missing from my collection and sadly have no plans to add.
Naturally, since the announcement, there have been people online trying to dump their collections. While I am a little sad that there will be no Commonwealth models, or various other bits and pieces, I am happy to have a “closed” system. As someone that collects and plays Kings of War, KOW Armada, Deadzone, Fallout Wasteland Warfare and The Elder Scrolls, it is handy to have a game that is “complete”. There is a completely different feeling to a game when the obligation to “keep up” with purchasing new releases or reading errata ends. What we have now, will always remain so.
What is dead can never die
I am sure it could have been a perfectly good competitive game, but for whatever reason, I have always seen it as a narrative game (i.e., as the game unfolds, my friend and I are more interested in telling a cinematic horror story, rather than worrying about who “wins” a game). As I get older, I find myself finding the idea of a binary “win” or “loss” on something that is purely designed to be a fun thing, to be a bit odd. This came to a head, at a local game store at the end of last year as I gave a demo game of Deadzone to someone who was desperately trying to “win” the demo of me trying to show him how the game works, and why it’s fun.
Ironically, the end of The Walking Dead has spurred me into action. It had been a long time since I had played The Walking Dead, and I was inspired again to complete my collection. One of the reasons I wasn’t playing it, as often as it deserved, was, my painting has improved massively over the last 2 years and honestly, I was a bit embarrassed to look at my The Walking Dead miniatures. Some of which had snow bases, some had grass bases. After a few nights of staying up, way too late. I now have a simple, but smart and clean style and theme.
I have gone back in and repainted my Mantic Prison set. It was originally all dark colours, then I decided to make it look a bit cheerier.
As a self-confessed Mantic games fanboy, I always like to buy their official models, and when people use their Games Workshop models as proxies in Deadzone, rather than dropping 30 euros on a Mantic box set I get a little bit irritated. Having said that, in the year and a half since I last played the game, I have a cheap plastic 3D printer which has completely changed the way I think about my game tables and terrain. Suddenly, being able to 3D print shops, houses, objectives, and anything else you can think of is a game-changer. It is no longer about “making do” (my original The Walking Dead table had a cricket pavilion on it, because that is what I had, being able to print what you want, when you want completely changes that). It might not be as pronounced as Deadzone (best game ever), but the Walking Dead lends itself very well to verticality, to buildings, things to run along, snipe from, and fall from.
Here are some freshly painted bad guys –
So, the world ended, the game ended. What happens next? Well for me, I have literally hundreds more models to paint (I have a lot of duplicates, but a lot of characters to do, including Lee and Clementine from The Walking Dead video game that was fantastic).
Over the first wave of the pandemic, Mantic put out free rules to allow for solo play. It is simple but it works well. This means you can play the game solo, coop or competitively, and the game works well with more than two players. I am going to go back to the beginning of the comic, read it, then create a game scenario based directly on the comic (before which I need to check in my Walking Dead omnibus rulebook for their campaign rules). As I play, I will see what happens. Maybe Lori gets killed in the game, and she stays dead in my campaign? Perhaps I must keep core characters alive (or dead!) inline with their comics. I am not exactly sure how I want to run this, but I will play it by ear and most importantly, have a lot of fun while doing it. Another good tip: don’t be afraid to house rule stuff to make sure you are having as much fun as possible.
There is no doubting that Negan made a brilliant baddie, and there were some terrific stories and themes with the Whisperers, the Kingdom and Hilltop. For me, the Walking Dead was at its best in Atlanta, Woodbury, Terminus and in the prison, and I can’t wait to play that out on the table.
At the beginning of the review, I make mention of Call to Arms which is another game variant. As I understand it, it is played with more figures, and it is more of a “battle” and the zombies are somewhat less deadly than the machine guns and such everyone is packing. I have the rulebook, the cards and everything I need to play it, but I haven’t gotten around to trying it yet. The naming conventions come from the comic, and the skirmish game being called All-Out War ends up being confusing when a more war-like game ends up being added later.
A mix of models, I just fancied painting…
I would highly recommend getting into the Walking Dead now, even as support ends. If you can find someone dumping their collection cheap, that is a great way to do it. Failing that, the starter set, plus The Walking Dead omnibus rulebook are must-haves. The board game Here’s Negan would also give you some useful stuff if you were a new player (albeit I have no experience of it). The models are nice board game pieces, for the most part, there is no assembly required (an important exception is the later resin expansions). Mantic also makes great, easy scenery for the game via their terrain crate. If you can pick up a Kickstarter box, from 5 years ago you will get some nice plastic scatter terrain as well as the 2D card stock from the starter box.
To quote the title of Volume 32 of the comic, The Walking Dead the miniatures game: “Rest in Peace” (or possibly, pieces).
