The Walking Dead Wave Five: Veteran Skills
5th Sep 2018
Rob Burman
You may have noticed that the Wave Five boosters do not include any more Walker miniatures. We had feedback from community members that after collecting the game since Wave One, they had enough Walkers for multiple undead apocalypses (apocalypsi?). Instead, we started thinking about other things that could change up the way the game plays and make it even more thrilling/competitive – particularly if you’ve been playing since the early days.
This led to the creation of Veteran Cards. Now in each booster and the Fear the Hunters expansion you’ll get a number of Veteran Cards. These are mini cards, just like the standard equipment cards and they’re handled in a relatively similar way.
Before a game, you can choose to give your Survivors one Veteran Skill, alongside any other equipment that takes your fancy. Veteran Skills do not take up a slot on your character card but you can only give each Survivor ONE card. Also, you can’t stack skills, so there's no point in giving a Survivor a skill they already have because it won't boost further. Each Veteran Skill has a points cost and – as you might expect – the more powerful an ability is, the more it’ll cost.
This means you’ve got less expensive (but still very useful) skills like Hunter, which allows a Survivor to move through difficult terrain without suffering a penalty. This costs just five points. If you’re playing on a densely wooded area, this sort of ability is going to be invaluable. Particularly if you give it to a Runner, so they can quickly get across the board, pick up an item and then hide back in the copse.
Whereas for a mighty 12 points, you can have the Scavenger skill. This allows a Survivor to pick two supply cards when searching and choose which one to keep. This is great if you want to avoid the infamous Lurker and new incidents like Pile of Lurkers and Junk Pile Collapse (which also come in the Fear the Hunters expansion). You could either give it to one of your Runners to keep them out of trouble. Or give it to a stronger character to ensure they can pick the best supplies to increase their strength even more.
With Veteran Skills, we also want people to re-evaluate some of the older wave miniatures that they may no longer be using. Perhaps you’ve forgotten about poor old Lori from Wave One. However, with the 7 points Veteran Shot skill, she suddenly has the ability to force a target to discard one of their cover die. Now Negan hiding in some bushes isn’t quite as cocky when facing little old Lori.
Each of the Wave Five boosters will come with new Veteran Skills, so you’ll be able choose from a range of abilities and equipment if you pick up the entire wave. As such, it’s time to dust off some of those original miniatures and give them a quick upgrade. This is Liam’s time to shine people!
