Despite the cold and rainy weather, HvZ’s second mission drew a large crowd of both humans and zombies Sunday afternoon.
Players met in front of the Fine Arts Center at 1 p.m. to participate in the mission titled “Box Fort Blowout.” For humans, the object of the game was to find and destroy three zombie box forts and deliver each colored section of the forts to their corresponding colored barrel. There were three barrels total: a yellow one near the water towers behind Van Meter, a green one at Goessmann Lab, and a red one outside the Fine Arts Center. Zombies were expected to protect their block forts located outside the Student Union, Tobin Hall, and the Engineering Quad by picking off as many humans as possible. The mission was to be completed in under two hours; HvZ administrators stood by with the official time.
The game was off to an eventful start with both humans and zombies splitting into groups to strategize. Squads of humans moved together finding strength in numbers. They moved slowly in a tight crowd with Nerf guns pointed out towards the opposing zombie threat.
Zombies found a different approach to be most helpful. They split into smaller groups to cover more ground, moved quickly, and left several group members to guard forts. They also made good use of cell phones to keep in touch and call in support when they were outnumbered. They also used phones to alert other zombie squads of an incoming human attack.
One HvZ player, Alan Coughey, explained his personal strategy was to support the squad he saw as the best organized. “As a human, my strategy was to try and get with Clairmont squad, basically. They knew what they were doing.” He said that Clairmont “was a good squad leader. Everybody with him knew what they were doing, they all had automatics (Nerf guns); it was basically a good group to go with. They always had their planning down.”
The humans suffered three casualties during the course of the mission. Alan Coughey was one of those fallen humans. He said his death was the result of carelessness. “I was standing outside the door and somebody ran up and got me. I was like two feet from the safe zone. I was just getting over confident.” While initially he said he was “bitter as heck” by being tagged, he admits that it was “actually pretty funny.”
Coughey said he was proud of the work he did as a human. He explained that while still alive, he gathered and delivered a large portion of the human’s total block fort material. “The humans had to get a bunch of pieces of cardboard somewhere and I got literally a third.”
While humans did destroy the block forts, they were unable to deliver all of the pieces to their respective barrels within the time limit. Humans were held up in the Student Union where they shot off volleys of Nerf bullets into the surrounding zombie horde. While a large number of zombies were temporarily stunned by the shots, it was not enough to allow humans safe passage out of the Student Union. In a daring attempt for a last minute victory, three humans dashed from the building carrying as much of the cardboard fort as they could fit in their backpacks, however they were unable to grab all of the pieces. Zombies carefully guarded the doors of the Student Union after the humans’ escape, allowing for time to run out and leaving the humans with their mission incomplete.
Actually, humans completed 2/3 of the objectives. The humans at the student union provided a good distraction for the majority of the zombies while a few of us charged up towards Orchard Hill. We secured 2/3rds of the yellow box sides with a negligible amount of harassment from the zombies and took no losses.
Also, It’s usually more then members of my own squad with me, but they are all members of a multi-squad alliance called “The Pandemic Legion” if you want to use that to refer to me and my hooligans in the future.
It was less a one hour stand off at the student union than a one hour distraction at the student union. While only 3 to 5 people kept at least 20 zombies occupied there Clairmont and the rest of the Legion were running around campus doing the rest of the mission. Our job was to taunt and piss off the zombies more than than anything.
Balls of steel, did the red bag make it? Hell, after we busted out you guys should have ran off with yellow.
We seriously took it to the zombies, “[humans] Do not complete objective” is a little heavy, especially since we of the Pandemics got the 2/3 of the loads eight strong. Lucky us for the SU humans though, I didn’t even know there were that many zombies playing yesterday until I saw the video. I’d argue that with only three bites it was the zombies that didn’t quite make their quota.