I made some time to work on this over the weekend and made some significant progress. Specifically, I managed to coax the concept off of my Google doc and onto tangible pieces of paper that took the approximate shape of a really ugly play-testing set complete with various piles of colored paper (color coded because it was easier than printing card-backs), a "board" printed on tabloid paper decorated with colored boxes, and a few player pieces scavenged from a copy of Zombies!!!
By the conclusion of my play-testing, the neatly stacked card decks were completely mixed together as cards were moved, reorganized, shuffled, written on, re-purposed, etc, and the board had so much red ink on it that I may have done better to open a vein over it and call it done. I expect anyone who has tried to put together a first prototype will know what this all looks like; it's the first time I have done it myself.
In the end, it did what I wanted it to do. Once the pacing was hammered out, survival became other than impossible, yet unlikely and more difficult as players were turned into viral, flesh-eating meat puppets. Supplies in the safe-house dwindled and the accrued building strength dropped as the remaining survivors were not able to loot enough supplies to keep up. Out of all the games played on it throughout the morning, only once did one of the four "players" I had set up manage to survive long enough for rescue, and even then it was by the skin of his teeth.
The game plays fairly quick, and it's not very deep. It boils down to decisions based on what the house has and what does it need, and are there enough supplies to keep all of the installed equipment functioning? I think I have the location decks worked out to a happy ratio, so my next step is to re-build these and reprint everything with the design changes made this weekend. There are a number of tweaks I want to explore, such as reducing the unique items to just two in a given deck, and then it can simmer while I brain-storm inspirations to make the game deeper.
Special thanks to my wife for rocking the beer chicken and sweet potatoes, and generally being fucking incredible while I entertained myself.
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