Zombie Survival Weekender – 9, 2014 full time launch event. 5-6th April.
Players- 15
Weather – Rainy and cloudy
Marshals- Amanda, Alicia, Allan, Mickey, Paul, (reserve: Josh)
Mini-Games: Don’t buzz the wire, Bomb Disposal, Tin Can Alley, Crossbow dark target shooting, babushka boxes.
So after three years of developing the system Zombie Survival Weekender has now launched full time! We had a good weekend despite some setbacks and disorganisation. The new site works well, The onsite pub was a hit, the two big fields for camping and day time activities are great and the 6acre contained play-zone is hard work but exciting with its rough terrain of hill, wood, track, mud, boulders, fences, walls, and now the beginning of some barricades… The play-zone looks set to be even more exciting as the year goes on as the tall bracken and ferns grow for cover and we build more barricades etc. too.
We were low on numbers for this event, mainly because with various life events, having a baby, moving house, having to sort the caravan from the old site, building new games, organising everything etc. I haven’t had enough time to promote. But there were 15 of us, which isn’t our smallest turn out, though really we need more numbers to operate at our best.
We had our marshals briefing, sorting out the games for the night and making sure our veterans were all ready to take on the added responsibility of running their own game… Because we had low numbers we only split into 2 teams instead of the standard five.
COMPLAINT: Some issues (such as the rain, which wasn’t the worst we’ve had at a ZSW and many players think add to the atmosphere of the event) were out of my control. But right from the outset there was a group of players who did not want to listen or play as part of a team… Despite me explaining that we would have the safety brief first and that we would set up camp in teams, one person/group decided to ignore me and set up his/their tent right at the beginning, forcing me to change the order and structure of the beginning of the event. Perhaps I’m too nice and not authoritative enough, but as this had a knock on effect that was disruptive for the whole weekend I will be ensuring that I make myself clearer at future events and anybody who wants to arrogantly do their own thing can do it at someone else’s events as they won’t be welcome at mine (rant over!)
So we did the boring admin and safety brief bit, set up the zombification tent, on loan from Cowleys Fine Foods as my new one is being made. We split the players into the two teams; The red team “Shit Zombies” led by Alicia. And the blue team “RALF” led by Mickey. We then had to miss out the camp set up race that is supposed to unify the team, promote good camp efficiency and team work, to get people active and motivated and break the ice as people had already painfully slowly set up.
Teams separated and as it was an Aftermath event went through their character backstories, the glimpses of peoples I heard were good, some were adlibbed and spoken and some were planned and written out, the finalists came down to; from the Blues: ZSW newbie Suzie Cowley with her disturbing tale of resorting to cannibalising fallen comrades and preserving their meat in a variety of ways. From the Reds: ZSW newbie Martin, who hadn’t realised he had to do this homework and still managed to adlib a well-structured and detailed character back story, involving the potential benefits of Medicinal Marijuana in combating the onset of zombification. When put to the vote people just couldn’t stomach the idea of eating each other so Martin brought the first victory to the Shit Zombies of the Red Team.
The next event was the Survival Kits. Players again split into their teams and went through their survival kits/go-bags… This is a ZSW favourite and engages both the newest most inexperienced players and the hardcore veterans who for them Zombie Survival Weekender is their main hobby… The survival kits being shown gives people a chance to look at how prepared they are, show off their homemade preps, and their ideas of what items would be needed in a survival situation and why. As usual the selection of kits was varied, with everyone developing their kits over the winter with something new. The finalists boiled down to, from the Blue Team Paul, with what is still in my opinion one of the best kits as it has so much content in such a small pack. And from the Red Team, Josh, with his different style of utility belt survival kit. When voted, Josh’s kit was decided the best.
Before we stopped for break we had a quick competition to see which team could collect the most stone for us to build our fire pit with… It was over very quickly with The Blue team ‘RALF’ collecting the most stone… Whilst we built the chimney for the fire pit some local farmers brought us a trailer full of scrap wood, which we unloaded… so it’s a good job we had to do the stone collecting competition as the wood collecting competition standard for ZSW was now redundant!
We had a break at the Rose and Crown, our new on-site pub! It was a nice cosy atmosphere and great that we can be mutually beneficial for a local business, us using their car park and during the day toilets and them getting our custom for break time drinks, lunch, dinner and breakfast.
After break I took all the players round the play-zone for a safety walk pointing out the number of dangerous points while the weather was good and it was daylight so players could become familiar with the play-zone before we use it in earnest in the night… Some points we had to highlight as dangerous were; low branches-be careful of eyes, Steep slopes-Restricted to only climbing up not coming down, A wasps nest in one of the fallen trees-Avoid, boulders, fences with barb wire, nettles/brambles etc. all just common sense really but good to get a feel of the site in the daylight none-the-less.
Once we had walked the perimeter we moved into the centre of the play-zone for a little exercise I had devised. A simple example of a very basic palisade/barricade I made using pallets, fence posts and planks was shown to the two teams… Spread out on the site were two more locations with posts and planks and between them was a pile of pallets. And only one post hammer and spike… The teams were then instructed to race build a similar pallet barricade/palisade from the available resources… Red Team’s Martin stole the initiative by grabbing the tools immediately retreating to their allocated pitch… The Blue team left without tools quickly rushed to the pallet pile, they managed to grab four of the seven pallets, then straight away working well as a team with everyone motivated and doing something they constructed their defence, hammering in the fence posts with nearby rocks and improvising support beams with the planks even going on to decorate their defence with branches and foliage from the nearby area to camouflage their barricade… Despite having the resources, and unlike the Blues the tools to make a decent defence, the Red team seemed to do a lot of standing around every time I checked on them there were only one or two people being active whilst the rest stood around and watched. They finished eventually but I had to award the win for this exercise to the Blues RALF, for their excellent team work, resourcefulness, determination and efficiency.
When we got back up to the fields we began our skills shares:
Red Team:
Alicia- Tactical Practical Sign language for use in quiet-necessary times.
Amanda – Water purification/filtration.
Josh- Patrol Signs
Dai- Tarp shelter
Martin-Vaseline and cotton wool balls fire starter.
Martyn- Animal Snare
Tom- Archery/Benefits of a compound bow.
Blue Team:
Mickey- cooking oil and toilet roll to make a torch
Allan- used kitchen utensils to make a trap
Paul- tin of cardboard coil with wax melted/soaked in as a firestarter/burner
Sue- fire lighting using punkwood and charcloth
Simon- Vaseline and cotton wool firelighter.
Maff- adlibbed water filter theory.
Steve- Didn’t bother (-20TP)
Jamie- Didn’t bother (-20TP)
Bran- Archery
Between the initial sharing of the skill and the final, everyone had a try at Bran Bucca Archery, by Bran (on the Blue Team) Bran will be doing several events with us over the 2014 epic campaign and he will also be coming on the great Zombie Survival Weekender Charity Trek in May. Everyone had a good try at archery before we settled back round the fire for the finals… Brans Archery was put forward as the best from the Blue team and this was pitted against Jasons very good skill share which was a mix of several skills under the heading, ‘surviving without your pack’…
Jason was voted for the best skill share in the end, possibly for his sheer determination trying so hard for so long to get the bow drill method of fire lighting to work… or perhaps it was because of the presentation of several skills in one scenario.
After the skills shares we had some more mini-games to blow away the cobwebs… first of all we had the three legged race, which was a bit of a shambles… at past events it has been a case of simply saying ‘lash two of your players together ‘GO!’ but this time it involved a lot of faffing and a false start before we actually got a race! We ended up having six legs from each team run, first place was won by the reds, and so was second place…. Third place was won by Blue team and eventually in fourth place came the other blue players… After The three legged race we played a good round of Zombie Bulldog, the rain had made the rolling hill of the day field nice and slippery so it was fun seeing players slide around trying to avoid each other… in the end Jamie from the Blue team was the last player standing. So Points clawed back by the blues…
We went back to the pub for another break and dinner, some people ate by the fire, darkness slowly started to descend… around 8 everyone was back round the fire, we went back over the in game rules, we practiced being a zombie, I sorted out the marshals and sent them off, then we waited for the game to begin, when would the first zombie be spotted? Tension grew, we had one terrifying tale from Paul, a couple of others touched on some scary experiences from their past, people jumped as tensions grew and figures loomed out of the darkness only to turn out to be comrades…
THE NIGHTS GAME: The first zombie was finally spotted scattering the nervous players into the play-zone… Marshal run games in the night were: Don’t buzz the wire, Bomb Disposal, Tin Can Alley, Crossbow dark target shooting, babushka boxes. We had some teething problems with some of the newer games (which will be fixed for the next event) and a couple of the older games also had glitches that weren’t helped by the weather, some waterproofing and reinforcement is required and shall be done! The terrain in the play zone is a challenge, a severe incline at the top of the six acre triangle of play-zone with tangled trees, boulders, mud, fern, rocks, brambles etc. all make running around a test of endurance not for the faint hearted… But by the time we had our first break after two hours there were still only two zombies and a few demon attacks (for those unaware the demon can attack both zombies and humans, not killing them but sucking away life and vitality in the form of Team Points.) we had a decent break most of us huddled in the Zombiefication tent or round the fire… When we went back out again we quickly upped the pace. As there were not a huge amount of players to begin with zombies were finding it hard, so first I increased the time window that humans had to get to games, there had to be a human playing one of the five games every 2 minutes… This forced humans to take more risks and not just hide out… More humans got caught and turned into zombies. With some players dropping out of the game, one due to existing injury and a couple of others because they didn’t like the rain (?!) I next sped up the game by making all zombies in play elite zombies (allowing them to run), this helped speed up the game and eventually there were only three players left (Martyn, Josh and Tom) The pace had slowed down and the rain had gotten a bit heavier so I called break about 15mins early… When people made it back to the fire I checked on everyone, some more people decided to call it a night, I asked the remaining survivors if they wanted to carry on, Martyn decided he didn’t want to go back out… Some zombies and marshals said they would go back out if required, Tom and Josh were resting in the Zombiefication tent after doing a lot of running around the game-zone. They eyed each other nervously as if waiting to see who would draw their gun first… In the end they decided to call it a tie. We relaxed around the fire and in the zombiefication tent as the rain carried on…
SUNDAY: As planned we got up and ready for 9, as we had a window of no rain, we packed down the borrowed heavy canvas zombification tent before heading off to the pub for breakfast and games, again some people decided to do their own thing slowing down and disrupting the event by slowly packing down their massive tent instead of waiting for when everyone else was doing it together.
A hearty breakfast and tea/coffee, followed by ZSW favourite ‘Are you a Werewolf?’. After that we had regular map drawing challenge, in teams players drawing a detailed map of the site from memory, this was won by the Red team’s ‘Shit Zombies’. We then filled out feedback forms, counted up the night’s games tokens and team points… It was here that it was decided that though the night’s game was officially a draw Josh would get the title of Sole Survivor for this event as he had succeeded in far more of the marshal run mini-games and still held THREE SPBC, all three of which were amazingly extra lives! So even if the game had gone on for two nights the chances are that Josh would have won regardless… We briefly discussed what would you do if you had a sick/noisy child in your group of survivors with nearby human or zombie enemies what would you do? The response was varied, some were noble and honourable saying they’d put their lives at risk to save an infant, others suggested surgery on the infants voice boxes, others suggested drugging the babe, some mentioned slaying the child. Before the awards ceremony we ran the Epitaphs creative writing challenge, as usual the quality of efforts was varied but most people got into the spirit of things…
At the award ceremony I introduced the new Ranks and Rewards System… (Full details of which will be shortly available on the website)
The Winners for this event were:
Character History – Martin
Best Survival Kit – Josh
Best Skill Share – Jason
Sole Survivor – Josh
Chief Infector – Sue
Best Marshal – Mickey
LITTER SWEEP & PACKDOWN- Another rant I’m afraid; Whilst the majority of participants carried out the unpleasant but necessary group litter pick, which ensures the environment we play in is kept in good condition, keeping the land owners happy and ensuring our continued use of the land, there were two groups that left straight away after the awards ceremony, one group cheekily waving goodbye when I asked them if they were going to help out. The litter sweep and group pack down is part of the event and wraps up the event nicely with a sense of accomplishment and satisfied finality. ZSW prides itself on its conservation, preservation and environmental ethic. It is stated on the website and on emails and at the beginning of the event that participants are to take part in the litter sweep… Anybody ducking out of the litter sweep (or any other group activity) in future will not be welcome at subsequent events.
Thank you to the majority for a good weekend, the points raised will be looked into, we’ll iron out the bumps in the road and polish the edges and each event this year is going to get better and better… Thank you to the newbies, the veterans and the marshals. An extra thank you to Josh for being the only one to help set up on the Friday.
See you all soon, don’t forget to share the event with all your friends, family, colleagues, and groovy looking strangers to help make ZSW the best it can be.
Dombie Spens
Head of Zombie Contingency Planning
Zombie Survival Weekender
Zombie Survival Weekender 