Lets talk hobbies. Everyone has something they like to do in their free time. I know what you’re thinking, “He’s a zombie shut in. He probably spends all his time in front of a computer playing World of Warcraft or some other soul sucking MMORPG” Think again. I’ve no interest in wasting my time on such worthless endeavors, though I can’t say the same for others of my kind.

No I’m more interested in things like writing, painting, and real social games such as role playing and miniatures gaming. You know, games that require to to interact with real flesh and blood people who are sitting across the table. Face it, on line games are not the social exercise they pretend to be. Amazingly it isn’t that hard for a rotting corpse such as myself to blend in with a crowd of gamers inside a gaming store. Hell there’s usually at least three other guys who smell worse than I do., but this isn’t about personal hygiene, it’s about hobbies.

For those who don’t know miniatures games are, typically, war games played on a large table, often 4ft. square or larger, with small scale miniatures made of metal or plastic. These miniatures cover pretty much any genre imaginable, from historical to high fantasy to sci-fi and everything in between. Currently my top three picks would be Pulp City, Warmachine, and Spinespur.

Pulp City is all about the superheros and nefarious villains. Relatively new to the market, Pulp City is currently limited to two starter boxes of five characters each, but that’s plenty of variety for a game that plays smoothly with as few as two models per side. It’s most interesting concept, and one I haven’t seen in other games, is it’s action point system. Actions are attributed a point value, and each character can use a number of points per round. This means that characters are less limited in their actions instead of being limited to movement and attacking and relying on additional rules to break that mold.

Warmachine is all about its powerful central characters, known as Warcasters, and their nine ton steam powered robots. Much of the appeal of the game is built up around the robots, called warjacks, and their ability to slam, throw, and trample over infantry. The problem many a player runs into after getting heavily invested in the game is that it isn’t really as much about the warjacks as they originally thought. To some this kills the game, to others its an unfortunate consequence of the game they love to enjoy.

Spinespur is also fairly new, and focuses on slasher flick horror. The game, as evidenced by it’s parental advisory label, is aimed at adults and I think that has a lot to do with it’s popularity. it’s crude, vulgar, and pulls no punches with it’s fiction. The rules have added depth to them you don’t normally see in a miniatures game, the reason for this is the creators wanted a gritter more exciting game full of detail instead of a watered down system geared towards building a strong competitive scene. Plus it has no shortage of zombies, and who doesn’t love zombies?

I think that pretty well covers what takes up a pretty big chunk of my free time. While I’m far from a paragon of all things zombie, I’d like to think this has at least gone to show that zombies enjoy the same things as the living. Those in a state of advanced decay suffer from limitations to their actions, but really the same can be said of the elderly, so there’s no real change there either.

Until next time braaiiins…