Back in May, I had the opportunity to flee the usual Nerfy weekend for a unique experience. Weekend Survival Challenge is a Humans v Zombies game that takes place entirely on a campground out in Kansas, and goes on day and night from Friday evening to Sunday morning. Generally, you only get to sleep if you’re a zombie, or really good at hiding. It’s a unique, ammo-scarce experience that I hope to try again next year, if the schedule allows it!

Weekend on Titan

This year’s theme revolved around a fun disease outbreak on a research facility on Titan. After crash-landing, humans had to get life support going. After which we found zombies, and proceeded to die one by one in an initial night that just didn’t go very well (a few humans hid in the forest).

WSC has many unique things, including the fact that any area that has been accessed by players is now open to play, including indoor areas (for safety reasons, one hallway at the main building, with bathrooms, was a safe zone). Zombies don’t spawn indoors, but they can play inside. Or charge out of doorways to massacre unsuspecting humans.

In addition, ammo is scarce – you’re lucky if, after ammo is distributed, there’s enough for two magazines. Light loadouts are best, and you have to scavenge for extra ammo throughout the entire play area – especially if you don’t pick up after yourself.

After a reset the first morning, players proceeded to fulfill various side missions and find perks like medics or flamethrowers (cans of silly string for tagging out all zombies, even shielded ones). However, due to the weather playing havoc with both player and mod attendance, the actual game progressed at a slow burn. Humans searching for things cleared individual buildings at a careful pace, and zombies did their best with the ten minute stun timers.

I, being there my first time, showed up with a Revreaper and lots of mags. Most of the mags soon got left behind, as I’d end up filling maybe two at most during the game.

Picking up the Pace

Saturday afternoon, before dinner, is when the game exploded. After lots of plot fell into place and zombies got perks, the humans attempted to deactivate a new spawn point – and utterly failed. The few humans that were left attempted to disarm some “explosives” in a real life version of the game “Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes”. We also failed at that, and ran to the zombies to end it all for another reset.

After the reset, the weather moved in, forcing gameplay to pause. After the bulk of it passed, I chose to sleep, but some brave humans kept going through the night. By the time I woke up for breakfast, perhaps five humans were still alive. They died soon after.

It was a fun weekend, even with dodging all the weather, and I did get to see a few familiar faces from other events, even if I was horrible at placing them with names. More importantly, it was a unique HvZ experience that emphasized teamwork over being walking dart hoses, and one I’ll hopefully do again.

Last Notes

I was HORRIBLE at getting good footage of the exciting moments. The mods did get footage of things like the “last stand” sequence, and the humans attempting and failing to take out a hive. I’ll be sure to post a link when such footage appears.

If you’re interested in the event, see the group page on Facebook!