Alone in the Dark as a Prologue Balancing

[deepfreeze]

Alone in the dark - We really like to use is as suggested as a prologue to main game. It is that classic first scene in the zombie movie where you watch someone who didn't know about the outbreak yet get overwhelmed.

My suggestion is to balance the continuity aspect of it. Because zombies almost always win it really needs to not alter the main game balance too much. Here are my suggestions. Any thoughts?

If HERO WINS they start the full game with any items they possessed at the end of the game.
-Zombies get 1 additional zombie per item.
-I think that shotgun/chainsaw should probably we worth 2 or more zombies.

If the ZOMBIES WIN then the hero will enter the main game as a zombie hero. I found it too unbalancing to just give the zombies a zombie hero to start, so my suggestion to balance is:
-Zombie Hero counts as 3 normal zombies and is not placed during the setup (must be spawned at the end of a turn)

I think that the 3:1 makes sense given that a grave dead costs 2 zombies, and a zombie hero basically gets 2 grave dead abilities (move and health). I also think that it should cost the zombies 1 zombie/HP of the zombie hero so Sheriff Anderson for instance would actually cost 4 zombies. This might make them difficult to spawn however.

Thoughts?

[labrys]

I played something like this myself.

We managed to get 4 boards (4 sets of 2 L-shapes) on the table and used the sun track markers from LNOE and TP. there was 4 of use so 2 boards per person; 2 zombies players with 7 on each of their two boards, 2 hero's players with a hero on each of their two boards. We had to make sure to keep drawn cards separate but shares the same deck (which may or may not have caused some balance issues, but it seemed ok in the run we played).
We had to track two more suns by paper, and track the kills by paper to.. so I ended up creating a print sheet (for next time).
Only one of the hero's survived (with a nice gun), and we had 3 Zombie heroes to start with (which was cool).
We played it so the amount of wounds the hero had was the spawn sacrifice to create them.
We also let the surviving hero heal their one wound before starting the main game. (we figured during the travel from their start mini town to the new one they recuperated a little). Funny thing was two heroes got pounded in alone in the dark, one came close, but the survivor actually ended up chasing the zombies like a Benny Hill sketch! Guess it is pretty much luck of the draw / rolls)

The print sheet has
Zombie Kill Counter x 4:


another two sun track markers (TP/LNOE),
and I made 4 mini track counters for if space is an issue:


Also stuck in some more "couter counters"

Click here to download



Hope these help you too. Just realized another thing we had to frick was the spawn check. Might make 4 flappable Can Spawn/Cant Spawn counters too! we usually use the big Flying Frog white coin for one of the zombie players.