Deadloque

Tabletop Game Supplement

Reviewed by: Alex Stewart


Alternative Armies, Boxed Set - £19.95

Some of you may remember I was very impressed by Flintloque, Alternative Armies' pseudo-Napoleonic fantasy skirmish game, when I reviewed it back in issue 10. It was always going to be a hard act to follow, but Alternative have confounded my expectations; their first supplement, which introduces the undead to the world of Valon, comes close to outshining the core rules.

Like Flintloque itself, Deadloque comes as a boxed set containing sixteen miniatures and a rules booklet. As we've come to expect from this range, the figures, sculpted by Mike Owen, who was responsible for the orcs of Sharke's Rifles in the starter set, are exquisite; six ragtag elves under the swashbuckling leadership of Colonel Gerard, facing off against a unit of distinctly slavic-looking zombies under a rakish-looking vampire count and a liche from the dreaded Komissariat Graveski Bureau.

Little surprise, then, to find that the background to this supplement is based on Napoleon's disasterous Russian campaign, with small bands of elven survivors fleeing desperately south through a frozen wasteland, trying to avoid being picked off by the relentless undead.

But it's the rules themselves which make this product so special. The undead tend to get fairly short shrift in most fantasy games, being treated as fragile automata which cease to fight effectively outside the influence of the magician who raised them; smeg the git in the pointy hat, and the whole army falls to bits. Not here. These are George Romero zombies; they can think for themselves, albeit slowly, they can adapt to changing circumstances, and they won't stop coming even if they've taken enough damage to drop an elephant. Unless you get lucky...

Typical of the thought which has gone into this product is the way the campaign rules have been adapted to take account of the way undead units develop over time. At its most basic, unlike his living counterparts, an undead trooper loses experience instead of gaining it. Coupled with their inability to recover from wounds, this means the average zombie will collapse into a heap of offal after a number of battles, however fresh they are when first resurrected. Fortunately, replacements are easy to get.

In short, then, another winner from Alternative Armies. If you play Flintloque, you want this. Then again, you probably already have.

More Reviews

Back to Valkyrie 14 Table of Contents
Back to Valkyrie List of Issues
Back to MagWeb Master Magazine List
© Copyright 1997 by Partizan Press.
This article appears in MagWeb (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web.
Other military history articles and gaming articles are available at http://www.magweb.com