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Walking Dead Game App

02.16.2026

This time I have no painting or modeling to talk about. This time I have an app (ugh, I miss calling them "programs") to talk about. Honestly I call it a webpage since there's nothing to install. And technically this is just for me as to make it publicly available likely goes against some copyright and licensing laws. But this is not about trying to hawk a new app onto the public. This is about making myself a tool to make playing a game more likely.

The only game I've played in years is the Walking Dead Miniatures Game. The real reason I play it is an excuse to setup the scenery that I enjoy putting together. With that, I also like the game - it's light, I love a good zombie theme, it's solo friendly. I've always played the same self-made-up mission where I take 1 survivor and a set number of zombies, and said survivor has to get supplies from Point X and make it to the egress point. Survivor has a minimal loadout so I won't worry about things activating the Noise rule. I'm not sure if the survivor has ever made it to the egress point (maybe once). I enjoy playing this for the story of the game, not actually trying to win.

For a while now, I've thought about apps for solo games to make setup/teardown easier. There's a DVG Apache helicopter game that I played once. 45 min for setup with sorting through lots of cardboard counters for the right ones. 30 min game play on the playmat. I lost the game, by the way. Not a surprise for my first time playing. Then another 45 min to put it all away. I'd play it more often were it not for the extra hour and a half of not playing the game involved.

There's a factor of that with the Walking Dead game. I play a minimal version because I don't dig through the right equipment cards to add to a character. I also don't know all the "real" rules, and looking those up when needed during a game slows things down. Cheat sheets, or "Game Aids" as they're called these days, help, but tracking down something the first time always seems to take forever. The third time feels that way too.

This transitions us to our new best friend over the past year, ChatGPT. Thanksgiving 2025 I started playing around with ChatGPT and making some game rules. That went into a rabbit hole, and honestly it went into rabbit holes for the better part of a year as I learned how AI and GPTs and typing prompts works. Jerry jumped onto the AI trend and soon stated making quick, throw away, stupid browser games for fun. Being fun, I jumped in too. I found I was mush better at keeping an AI chat on target with a quick browser game than making new boardgame rules, or even mods to boardgame rules. Most of the times, one of my stupid quick games started as "can CSS do...." and most of the time it could. I didn't care about the underlying code, I found myself (ugh) vibe coding and just tweaking the results.

Which brings us back to the Walking Dead game. If I had an app that could handle all the drudgery of setup and book keeping during a game, would I play more? Would I play better? What could I automate that would help me go that direction? Well that's what I set out to tell ChatGPT.

For my (failed) boardgame attempts, I had a pretty good dice rolling app. It was even geared toward the Walking Dead dice, as I like the combat system of pitting attack dice against defense dice. With a small tweak, this used the Walking Dead rules details for combat resolution. While referencing the rules for this, I learned I've been resolving combat wrong the entire time I've been playing this game. ~10 years. The rule for combat against Walkers is that they always attack, never defend. I interpreted that as Survivor attack roll vs Walker attack roll. Nope, that's not how it works. Survivors attack against a Walker that rolls nothing for defense (free attack). Then the Walker attacks (up to Survivor to decide in the beginning if they're going to defend now). That makes it a very different game to me. I've gotten so used to the Attack vs Attack roll, I kept it in as an option. With that, I can now click a button and have the dice rolled, totals added, and a summary tell me the results with what damage to apply/if there was a headshot or a survivor was bitten. Space for dice rolling and remembering how to add no longer needed!

There are other specialty dice rolls in the game. There's a black die that is really a 50/50 chance die. It's used for a handful of things. Things I normally forget. New section to the dice rolling app - black die roller and a bullet list of common reasons to roll black die along with what game phase those happen in. Another die roll space saved along with Where In The Rules Is This reference no longer needed.

I have that same issue with a white die used at the end of the turn to see if bitten survivors turn into walkers. Add white die to the app and the note of when/why! There's also a yellow panic die with a different icon per side. This is used when the character's nerve is below the panic level. I can never remember what those icons mean. How about adding the panic icons to a die in the app, and when that icon is rolled the description/effect pops up. Add it to the app!

Hmm, now that I mentioned the threat level, there's a threat tracker that would be easy to add. It's just a number from 1-18. While that's easy, how about a range color chart to match what the game references too. Add it to the app!

I'm not sure how long I spent on all of the above, but I had gotten on a roll of seeing the usefulness for this. Table space could be saved. Looking up rules that I would likely forget. Not knocking around cards, dice, trackers, and having it all lose their place. Describing what I wanted to the chat and not worrying about the code behind it all was working out so far. What else would really help me move forward on playing a more fleshed out game?

I purchased MDF player dashboards from Etsy a while back. There's a center spot for the survivor card, then spots for equipped cards and backpack cards. An automated/browser version would take up less table space. I'd need to either type in all the info and have it displayed in a way that made sense, or I could just scan in cards and drag them to the right spots on a background. I have a scanner. I have more than 1, really.

For a proof of concept, I scanned a couple of cards and asked ChatGPT if it could pull in the images, make a deck of cards, and let me drag them to spots in the browser. Sure, no problem. Awesome, I'll get to scanning cards! Soon I had a non-Etsy dashboard that I could drag character and equipment cards onto.

It would be nice if I could add in some shortcuts or tooltips for the rules on those cards. I don't know what most of them mean. At this point I learned both AI OCR and Scanner OCR did not like the background of the scanned cards and was doing such a bad job converting to text that it would be just as easy for me to enter the text as to go back and double check everything. At that point, ChatGPT made a tool for me to enter the card info into some new MySql tables. One of those tables was a rules shortcut list, so when a card listed "Bulky", I would be able to lookup and show "Requires 2 Hands".

Now that all the relevant data is in there, we can add a filter to lookup/jump to cards instead of clicking through the deck. Well that's the most handy part so far. Looking through a deck of 100+ cards when I want to add a Shotgun to my survivor can take a while. But if I can type in "shot" and go click-click, survivor has a shotgun... Well that's just pretty damn convenient.

I can take the time to pick a survivor and equip stuff as desired. What else do I need to speed things up? Saving that loadout so I don't have to re-make it when I want to play, and (of course) loading it would be good. JSON save files activated!

Once I saved and loaded a character with their loadout, I cold really see the probability of using multiple survivors in a game and being able to keep up with them. The one, simple tweak that would really help me: add the character name to the browser title. So much easier to find people that way!

During all this, it was the first time I've probably gone through and paid attention to the majority of the rules. I added another browser page for a tab of rules and actions, grouped by the turn phase they're relevant in, as a nice "I haven't played in a while" turn walkthrough-refresher. There's were misinterpretations I had on equipping items, add-ons (like weapon suppressors), and how the character-specific rules should be used.

I'm now at the point I think I've got the app I want in order to play. Each of these will be a browser tab for my next game:
1. Turn phase based rules reference. This has the "what rule is that" and action definitions that I forget after a while of not playing. It's also the rules I never learned correctly to begin with. This should get used less after I play a few times.
2. The Dice Roller actually has 3 parts:
2.1 : Dice rollers for combat, panic, infection check, and the black "chance" die (used for about 4 things, which are listed with the die roll).
2.2 : Threat Tracker - color coded 1-18 range to show the current threat.
2.3 : Event Card Deck - Scanned in cards where I can draw a card (1 per turn). Some cards will change the threat, which is tied into the Threat Tracker to automatically update.
3. Player Dashboard - Survivor with loadout, health tracking. There's also a Supply Card Deck used for searching. This deck can be exported/imported so that each survivor with a tab can keep the deck in sync as it's supposed to be a shared deck for search results. I could have tried to make this sharable between tabs, but I preferred the simplicity of each tab having a copy.

And there's my first big foray into something usable with AI. Mentally running through scenarios and using everything has been my beta testing. I'm planning on playing (a/some) games while I take my annual birthday time off in a couple of weeks. That can be a real test of how useful this is. Laptop, or tablet, space taken vs dice, tray, etsy dashboard(s), threat tracker, and rulebook stashed away.

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