Last Days (A Closer Look)

A Closer look at Last Days… (Part I: Anatomy of a Card)

Today we’ll be taking a closer look at the anatomy of a unit card for last days and hopefully shine a little light on what the numbers mean and how they are going to influence game play.  Each character in last days has their own specific unit card that represents their abilities and equipment on the tabletop.    From what we’ve seen so far, the cards are supplied blank with the expectation of writing your character’s stats in, and then using a trick familiar to the old school warmachine players, using a dry erase marker to track wounds and other situations that occur. 

 

Front of the Card:

 

Each character Card is topped with a line for its name and its type (this does mean you get to name your folks all sorts of interesting things for zombie survival hijinks).  The type line is indicative of the actual entry it comes from out of the specific rules for the warband it comes from.  The first example we see in the video is McGonagall, a 20 year veteran from the Lawmaker’s warband.

 

Each character has 8 statistics that represent their capabilities in the game.  They are:

·         AP:  Action points set your action economy for the turn and convert directly into movement, special actions

·         CQC: Close Quarters Combat, which determines your likeliness of success at hand to hand combat

·         FA: Firearms, just like CQC, it determines your capability with the ranged weapons in this game.  When using this stat in ranged combat, roll a D6 and add your FA rating, a 7+ hits.

·         S: Strength, which is used to determine how hard you hit something in close combat, some CQC weapons will modify this result for close combat damage.

·         E: Endurance, which directly affects the likelihood of you taking damage from being hit by either ranged or close quarters weapons

·         DC: Damage Capacity, which directly translates to the amount of damage you can take during a game before being removed from play

·         C/H: Courage/Horror:  A living character has courage, a zombie character has horror.

·         I: Intelligence:  Intelligence we haven’t seen much from the let’s play video, but I am sure that it will have some interesting applications throughout the game.

 

Now I know some of these are a little more vague than others, but this is our view from the let’s play video that Ash put out to show off Last Days.  Moving on to more stats on a card, we have a large section for Ranged Weapons, a smaller section for CQC Weapons and a Damage Tracker on the front of the card. 

Ranged Weapons have a number of statistics that are important to keep track of during game play:

·         Type:  The actual name of the weapon you’re using, it helps to determine the other stats as well.

·         Range:  Measured in inches, range is the maximum distance a target can be away from you and still be shot at.  Some guns have longer ranges than others.

·         Damage:  The amount of damage the weapon does to a target. 

·         ROF:  Rate of Fire is the number of times a weapon can be used in any given shooting phase.

·         Knockback:  Applicable when dealing with zombies, Knockback reduces the AP value of a zombie on its next activation if it hasn’t been killed by the weapon itself (as a result of the hilariously named “Got to shoot them in the head” rule). 

·         Reload:  As you play through the game, and shoot your ranged weapons at bad guys, you acquire ammunition tokens.   At the end of your shooting action with a dude, you roll a D6 and add your number of ammunition tokens.  If this number equals or exceeds the reload value of the weapon, you’re out of bullets and will have to spend time in the next round reloading.

 

CQC weapons have fewer statistics but still have the following:

·         Type:  just like with ranged weapons, the type of weapon determines its statistical benefits during the game. 

·         CQC Bonus:  Unlike the ranged weapons, some of the CQC weapons modify the CQC statistic of the person using it.  For example, Knives being easier to hit with, chainsaws being somewhat less so. 

·         Damage Bonus:  Some CQC weapons will modify the amount of damage done.  In this instance, this is a direct bonus to the strength of the person wielding the weapon. 

 

The Damage Tracker at the bottom represents the number of wounds that an individual character can take during the game. 

Back of the Card:

 

The Back of the Unit card isn’t quite as busy as the front, but it does have a lot of useful information to keep track of.  First, each character has a level, representing the amount of accumulated experience and skills they’ve acquired over the course of a campaign.  Paired with this is an experience box, to keep track of experience as the character progresses between levels.  Finally, at the top of the card is a box to track individual kills during a specific game, with a separate tracker for humans and zombies. 

 

The back of the card is dominated by the skills/attributes box.  This contains any special rules that your character has that will affect game play.  It’s a big section, so I would expect the potential for special rules to be quite massive as campaigns play out. 

 

The bottom of the card has two sections of note, Injuries and Cost.  Injuries represent nicks, bruises, and other ailments that keep a character from operating at full strength.  A character usually gets these from being knocked out during a game, but I am sure that there are optional rules hiding in Ash’s mind where a scenario would hand these out before the start (like an escape the hospital as the walking wounded while the walking dead are out brain munching).   

The other statistic, Cost, represents the amount of points a character will cost you to add to your warband.  War gamers should be familiar with this stat, but for those of you that are new to the hobby; this represents the allocation of resources you will need to make in order to include this character in your warband.  This stat doesn’t seem like it comes up during the game, but I suppose it would be possible for a situation to exist where you and your opponent are trying to kill each other’s most expensive models.  Bear in mind that this statistic also includes the cost of upgrades like weapons or body armor.

 

And that is the overall anatomy of a card for Last Days.  I hope this has helped you figure out more about this game and that look forward to more interesting stuff from Last Days. 

 

Game on, Game Fans