Episode Details

Hi everyone, this is a special episode of Firebreathing Kittens. I’m the game master for an upcoming session using the rules for Mall Zombies by W.H Arthur. In this episode, I’ll share my thoughts after reading the rule book. Hopefully this episode will be a handy guide for how to play for my players, will help me organize myself, and will be useful for you listeners, too, who are looking to play Mall Zombies yourselves.

Set up

• Get a deck of cards, preferable a zombie themed deck for that extra narrative spark

• Separate the cards into three piles, all of the number cards, the court cards (aka, j, q k), and the two jokers.

• We now shuffle the number cards together and create 7 face down piles of 3 cards by drawing from this deck.

• Once we have these 7 face down piles, we turn over the top card in each pile.

• Each pile should now have 1 faceup card and two face down cards underneath.

• We’ve just created our shops for the players to scavenge from.

• The top card number tells us what the Prompt is for that shop. This is a list of names given in the rules. Such as, Wisdom, Luxury, Power, etc. You can come up with the rest of the name of the shop yourself. If one of the piles has 6 as the top visible card the Prompt indicates it is an Eletrical store, so we could call it, Roberts Bits and Bobs. So we know what type of items might be in that store. (We will go into what our players want later on).

• We take the remaining cards we didn’t draw and shuffle the two jokers into it that pile to create the “main deck”. The players will be drawing from this Main deck during the game when scavenging through the shops.

• The court cards are shuffled and set aside as the Zombie Deck. We draw from this deck when the players are attacked by the zombies.

• This completes the set up!

Before we go on, let’s discuss what our players are looking for during the game.

• The group first discuss what things the colony needs to survive. (e.g. food, batteries, heating, clothes, medicine, entertainment).

• Once they have decided on 5 needs this will be the basis for your players to focus on what they are scavenging for. So lets look now at how to scavenge the mall!

Scavenging examples

• During the game the players will be scavenging for supplies by looking through the shops. Mechanically this is by searching through the piles of cards one after another.

• Example. Rosie, a widowed survivor of the colony has spotted Roberts Bits and Bobs and decides to scavenge through the shop to find some useful tools for the colony.

• Rosie describes how she would find her husband, Barry in the shop every time they went to the mall together thumbing through the bargain bins looking for a great deal on hammers. It would annoy her at the time, but now it just