Scott van Essen interview - when will part 2 be posted?

@commando-brado Players choose their own casualties.

@thrasher1 Yeah, I think we need to look at this game as a different beast and not through the lens of the core games. While this strategy is crazy and overpowered mitigating hordes of zombies throughout the war campaign is clearly an extra challenge for the Axis (more so than the allies) that can’t be ignored if you want to take and hold territory. If Germany simply wants to take Russia out of the game quickly and take Russian IPCs they are welcome to rush Russia, but yeah, this will become a zombie controlled territory most likely. The end result would still benefit the axis but not at greatly as in an 1942.2 game.

I don’t see this immediately as a flaw, but as a characteristic of the game.
But I really don’t see how the axis have any chance to mitigate zombies properly without zombie technologies.

I understand wanting to limit luck for tournament play but I don’t see this game being a great tournament game at all, although it could be fun to play at a conference with enough beer is flowing.

For tournament or otherwise it feels like there needs to be a reliable way to acquire zombie tech that isn’t based on randomly drawing cards. Creating zombie stacks is obviously a benefit for the defenders, so the attackers should probably be rewarded too for taking on stacks of zombies. Perhaps granting a zombie tech for x number of Zs killed in a single battle either in addition to or instead of the cards.

I’d also like to see the technologies a bit more evenly balanced.
Maybe I’ll post in house rules instead of clouding the discussion here, but I think some community rules could lead to a better second edition for this game.

I think the Z42 variant has much more potential to be fun and needs even more attention/refinement. Larger national budgets should make the game feel a bit less swingy.

I was skeptical but I think is the first bold attempt at creating an A&A game in an alternate universe and it will have to undergo revision to become solid. And by solid I mean a fun romp of a beer and pretzel experience. I will never take a game of this too seriously, but I will laugh more during sessions of AAZ than any other war game and there will be some interesting tactical situations at times. But some refinement is clearly needed.

This is the long awaited followup to the first part of our interview with Axis & Allies & Zombies game designer, Scott Van Essen. Scott…

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Scott Van Essen, designer of Axis & Allies & Zombies provides detailed answers about how the game was created. Part 2 will be available next week.

Click here to see the full blog post

2023 UPDATE

As we finally played AAZ again we were wondering:

Did more people interprete this rule wrongly?
Namely that you had to destroy ALL Zs that were present in an Z-controlled area?

If I introduce players to AAZ it seems all of them expect this to be the case: that you only get the bonus if ALL Z-units are destroyed.

Just wondering…

Rule book: see pages 4 and 23…

@Krieghund

As always: thanks for your fast replies!
We played AAZ1942SE tonight. And we had fun! Still had some questions regarding US setup. Will come back to that.
But we had a fun evening. And a lot of unexpected stuff happened. That is part of AAZ. Some may not like that. And that is of course fully OK!