Convention Chaos

Once all the players dropped their characters in on the board, then the real fun started. We found that with that many players the "I move, then move the zombies attacking the player to my right" mechanism meant people had to wait a long time between turns & players were getting bored. Luckily one of the players came up with a great idea to separate the 2 moves. So while one player was moving his hunter, the player on the opposite side of the board moved the zombies attacking the player to his right.

This meant that not only were these 2 move activities happening in parallel which made the process faster, but the players were being actively involved in the game twice as frequently, either moving their hunter or the zombies. This worked very well, & the only problem we had was when the faster processed hunter move caught up with the slower processed zombie move. When that happened, we just had the hunter moves put on hold while the zombie movies got out ahead again. This also allowed the players intermittent breaks from the action to wander off for more than just a few minutes.
Unfortunately, I don't remember a lot of the actual game since I was usually helping someone with a specific question, but lots of zombies did die. The entry-level Redneck pairs didn't seem to work as well as I'd hoped. For one pair, they found the character with the melee weapon couldn't kill most of the zombies unless he could get 2 successful hits on them in 1 turn. So instead of going toe-to-toe with them & being munched on, he ran around in circles, trailing zombies behind him, while the other Redneck with the firearm skill took pot shots at the zombies as they ran by. I think one of the other Redneck pairs was one of the few, if only, hunters to actually die. & another player had to leave just about the time the hunter died, so he transferred his hunter over to that player, so everyone was able to pretty much play all the way to the end of the game.

Since many of the players running the veteran hunters came signed up in pairs (boyfriend/girlfriend, 2 friends, etc) they ended up working in pairs too, just more effectively than the Rednecks. There was some good cross-team help though. In particular, one hunter had about 6 zombies on them, & a hunter pair jumped in & helped them out.