A moment of madness - turning a mobile game into a tabletop solo game!

One of the most frequently played games I play on my phone is The Walking Dead: No Man's Land. The game is a tactical turn-based RPG based on the AMC hit TV series The Walking Dead. Alongside characters from the TV series, you also have your own survivors with their own abilities and traits. You pick three survivors and then undertake a variety of missions for various rewards.

Now with the current Coronavirus lockdown in the UK, I'm working from home and have never been busier. Spending 10+ hours a day looking at a computer screen means I am less inclined to play electronic games.

So I thought about converting The Walking Dead: No Man's Land to a solo tabletop game. I had the bare essentials already.

• I had three 2' x 2' mats - one for rural, one for a warehouse and one for urban locales.
• Kept the buildings to a minimum - a house, a barn and a workshop.
• Had plenty of figures for survivors and zombies.
• Had plenty of scatter scenery.

So with no additional expenditure required, I was good to go. All I needed to do was to decide on which rules to use. I decided to use Fistful of Lead and the Tales of Horror expansion. I had already built on the existing rules to turn zombies into an uncontrollable force.

The zombies used the following rules:

• Soulless: They never take Shaken results. Anyone targeting you with a Shoot action gets a +1 to their roll.
• Slow: -1” to movement Actions.
• Wounds knock them down and can only be killed by ‘Out of Action’ results on the Wound chart.
• Every shot or loud noise will generate a zombie(s). They will appear 1d8 away from the source of the noise and placed the direction the dice is pointing.
• Roll d10.
• On a “6-10”, two zombies appear.
• On a “2-5”, one zombie appears.
• If a “1” is rolled, no zombie appears.
• At the start of the game (before each player has activated), roll 1d10. This is the total number of zombies starting in this area. For each zombie, roll a d12 and measure from the centre of the table. The direction the dice is pointing in and number is the number of inches the zombie needs to be placed.
• Zombies will move in a random direction unless they can see a figure or hear a loud noise (within 12"), in which case they will move towards the figure or noise.
• Zombies will be created the first time you enter a room/building. Roll a d8 for the number of zombies.
• Any figure ‘Out of Action’ has the potential to be a meal for a Zombie. Any zombie encountering a ‘Out of Action’ figure rolls a d8.
• On a “5-8” they ignore the figure.
• On a “1-4” they stop and ‘eat’.
• Repeat this roll for any feasting zombie until it ignores the figure. Once eaten, the figure can be removed.
• Zombies move and attack after everyone else.

With a bit of play-testing, I determined that a maximum of three survivors (Leader and two Specialists) and a six turn limit makes the scenario challenging, without being too hard.