MARTIAN ZOMBIES

Captain Hank Space guy and the crew of the Space Patrol ship Atom Eagle are in serious trouble – while on a routine patrol near Mars they have picked up a sinister Martian virus which is turning the crew into blood-crazed, purple-haired mindless zombies! Can the surviving crewmen make it to their escape pods in time to warn the Space Patrol on Earth, or will they, too be turned to zombies?

Martian Zombies is the first game I have published. It pits the plucky crew of the Space Patrol ship 'Atom Eagle' against a shambling horde of the undead and can be played either solo or as a two player game. The game uses a hex tile based map which is built up as you play, so no two games are ever exactly alike. The aim for the Survivor player is to get as many of the crew to the escape pods as possible. The zombie player obviously tries to stop him!

The survivor player needs to make use of the various special rooms to get equipment or block the shambling hordes. It takes about twenty minutes or so for a game, and, apart from the game components, all you need is a D6, a D8 and some paper clips.

The rules of the game are simple and quick to learn. Survivors move two hex tiles at a time, zombies move one. When you end up on the same tile both players roll a die - survivors roll a D8, zombies roll a D6. Highest score wins, and you remove the difference in the scores as casualties. Survivors can be turned to zombies if they die! Scattered throughout the ship are various special rooms like the Armoury, Med Bay, Life Support room etc. Each of these will either provide a piece of useful equipment (which will usually give a bonus in combats) or allows you to do something cool like open a hex to vacuum, sucking the undead out! During playtesting we found that imaginative use of the special hexes was especially rewarding and entertaining.

Making the art work for Martian Zombies was really good fun. There's a lot of components in the game - the various different room tiles, four different kinds of survivor figure, the zombie figures, and the various counters. I decided the game needed to use stand-up figures rather than just simple tokens, but, since facing is unimportant to the game, they have the same art on both sides. Obviously, if you don't fancy folding and pasting all those figures, you can just cut them up and use them as flat tokens.

I do have plans for an expansion to Martian Zombies! which will add some radioactive slime beasts to make further use of the radiation rules, along with various new rooms and abilities. 

You can purchase a copy of Martian Zombies from RPGNow.