Gruntz & Zombies!

I've been playing Gruntz for a while now and recently I've been considering a new force, zombies.

Some of you may have come across Gruntz at Salute this past weekend, I know that the participation games were very popular. For those of you not familiar with Gruntz it's a set of rules for playing 15mm sci-fi games. This sounds pretty straightforward but what I like about Gruntz is not only that it's quick and simple to play and learn, while still having sufficient complexity, but also that it has a points based army builder system that lets you build any kind of force you want. In addition to the standard sci-fi type armies I've played games with alien lizards who had giant beetles acting as tanks (think Starship Troopers), weird WWII US troops with Shermans and mechs backed up by a group of super heroes and there's people on the forum building steampunk based forces. The system is just so flexible the only limiting factor is your imagination.


Giant beetles rampage across the battlefield

This flexibility got me thinking about ditching the mechs and power armour and going for a swarm of monsters like the bugs in Starship Troopers. The problem is that it would be pretty expensive to buy a swarm type army and then It would take a while to paint up. I decided to check out eBay and see if there were any painted figures I could buy cheap.

It was then I stumbled across the painted civilians used on model railway layouts. They're about the right scale and cheap. So I thought forget swarms of alien creatures why not go with zombies. The railway figures could easily be zombiefied with a few dabs of red here and there and a dark wash to make the somewhat limited detail stand out and also give them the dirty zombie look.


Pre-painted model railway figures

The figures come in pack sizes of 100 figures for £7.99 (some are cheaper but the painting is very poor) and a couple of packs should be enough for a decent force. They don't come with integral bases so they may be a bit tricky to glue onto bases for Gruntz but at £15 for a painted army you can't really complain. The only problem is I already have a couple of armies for Gruntz and as I'm trying to cut back on my wargame spending I'm not sure if I'll actually take the plunge and buy a couple of packs. But they are tempting.