This is the long awaited followup to the first part of our interview with Axis & Allies & Zombies game designer, Scott Van Essen. Scott…
Click here to see the full blog post
Subjective Complaints about AAZ (Zombies are stupid thread)
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A&A for other eras would probably just need a clever sales pitch.
Risk Napoleonics is a good game but limited to Europe and only released in French.
Axis and Allies Napoleonic Wars already exists, it just wasn’t made by WotC and doesn’t have “A&A” in the title, but Worthington Games “War and Peace” IS 100% Axis and Allies in the Napoleonic setting… if this intrigues you, you should pick up a copy… there’s a discussion about it on the “other games” section at the bottom of this forum.
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@Nowhere:
Axis and Allies Napoleonic Wars already exists, it just wasn’t made by WotC and doesn’t have “A&A” in the title, but Worthington Games “War and Peace” IS 100% Axis and Allies in the Napoleonic setting… if this intrigues you, you should pick up a copy… there’s a discussion about it on the “other games” section at the bottom of this forum.
Not the person you were replying to, but thanks for the tip. The French Revolutionary Wars is my favorite war-related historical period other than the WW1-Interwar-WW2 era, so I’ll be sure to check it out.
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@DouchemanMacgee:
Not the person you were replying to, but thanks for the tip.
Also, on your earlier post, you mentioned the desire to see a US Civil War version of A&A… oddly enough, I read the designer’s notes to War and Peace… he specifically mentioned A&A as being his template for W&P, but he actually originally started work on Civil War version of A&A… he switched to Napoleonic Wars because he didn’t like the 1 vs 1 nature of the Civil War and that the A&A system didn’t really work well with only two belligerent sides for the whole game, so he switched to Napoleonic Europe for more belligerent nations to work with.
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OMG …
So I am out of the loop for a few years while life gets busy, come back on here hoping for a new Axis & Allies game, and this is what they come up with?
… omg …
Well, if A&A survived Guadalcanal, it can survive this.
…first Metal Gear Survive and now this …
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OMG …
So I am out of the loop for a few years while life gets busy, come back on here hoping for a new Axis & Allies game, and this is what they come up with?
… omg …
Well, if A&A survived Guadalcanal, it can survive this.
…first Metal Gear Survive and now this …
FWIW, I thought A&A survived Bulge…that game was…not good…
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I had a lot of hopes and dreams for the possibility of A&A being continued without its legendary creator, but those were smashed with bloody zombies. Although I won’t be quitting A&A anytime soon, the lack of fresh appeal in the franchise is slowly taking away my game players. Alternate setups and house rules help but take too long to perfect to keep the less interested crowd from leaving after they’ve tried every strategy they wanted to.
I don’t get angry often or use such foul language but—
Fuck you WotC. Fuck you.
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@Charles:
I had a lot of hopes and dreams for the possibility of A&A being continued without its legendary creator, but those were smashed with bloody zombies. Although I won’t be quitting A&A anytime soon, the lack of fresh appeal in the franchise is slowly taking away my game players. Alternate setups and house rules help but take too long to perfect to keep the less interested crowd from leaving after they’ve tried every strategy they wanted to.
I don’t get angry often or use such foul language but�
���� you WotC. ���� you.
You could try waiting to see what we actually get and how normal players actually react to this game before cursing WotC out. It’s a thought.
To me, the best part of this game is that the Zombies are completely optional. Nothing about this game requires you to put one (1) Zombie figure on the board, if that’s the way you and yours wish to play.
So let’s relax and wait to see how things actually turn out, for a change.
-Midnight_Reaper
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@Charles:
I had a lot of hopes and dreams for the possibility of A&A being continued without its legendary creator, but those were smashed with bloody zombies. Although I won’t be quitting A&A anytime soon, the lack of fresh appeal in the franchise is slowly taking away my game players. Alternate setups and house rules help but take too long to perfect to keep the less interested crowd from leaving after they’ve tried every strategy they wanted to.
I don’t get angry often or use such foul language but�
���� you WotC. ���� you.
To be fair, G40 was Larry’s love letter to the fans and basically the peak of what Axis & Allies can be without becoming overly complicated (GW1936) or a proper War Game. I doubt the franchise is going to go in the “bigger and more in-depth” direction for a while, if ever again.
If bigger and more in-depth if what you want, we have an entire sub-forum for the Global War series, which is an evolution of A&A built to be more complex, with more nation-specific rules/details, special events (Spanish Civil War, US Entry into the war), etc. I’m not shilling or anything (I don’t own any GW products myself), but it might be the thing for you.
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@DouchemanMacgee:
@Charles:
I had a lot of hopes and dreams for the possibility of A&A being continued without its legendary creator, but those were smashed with bloody zombies. Although I won’t be quitting A&A anytime soon, the lack of fresh appeal in the franchise is slowly taking away my game players. Alternate setups and house rules help but take too long to perfect to keep the less interested crowd from leaving after they’ve tried every strategy they wanted to.
I don’t get angry often or use such foul language but�
���� you WotC. ���� you.
To be fair, G40 was Larry’s love letter to the fans and basically the peak of what Axis & Allies can be without becoming overly complicated (GW1936) or a proper War Game. I doubt the franchise is going to go in the “bigger and more in-depth” direction for a while, if ever again.
If bigger and more in-depth if what you want, we have an entire sub-forum for the Global War series, which is an evolution of A&A built to be more complex, with more nation-specific rules/details, special events (Spanish Civil War, US Entry into the war), etc. I’m not shilling or anything (I don’t own any GW products myself), but it might be the thing for you.
Yep. This was Larry’s attempt to make a “convention” play all day for one game.
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Although I personally dislike the AAZ concept and although I can understand why it might provoke a visceral negative reaction in devoted fans of the game (I had pretty much the same reaction myself when I first heard about the game), I think that its place in the developmental history of A&A shouldn’t be overblown at this stage. Depending on what happens to A&A over the next decade or so, we’ll eventually be able to look back on AAZ and make an informed assessment of its significance (or lack thereof). At the moment, there’s no way of telling whether AAZ will ultimately prove to be a misguided one-off statistical blip (which is my hope) or the first manifestation of the decline and fall of the A&A empire (to paraphrase Edward Gibbon).
CdG mentioned that AAZ has smashed his hopes of A&A being continued without Larry Harris. My own feeling is that, at this stage, it would be giving AAZ too much credit to conclude that this game will singlehandedly ruin the entire A&A franchise and its 30+ years of history. If WotC, from this point onward, publishes only “a whole string of wacky reconceptualizations of A&A” (as I described the concept in an earlier post), and abandons the mainstream version of the game altogether, then yes I think it will be fair to see such a development as a franchise-ruining debacle. If, on the other hand, AAZ ends up being just an oddball exception, then in retrospect it won’t deserve to be regarded as a zombie apocalypse (pun intended) for the overall franchise. Instead, we’ll simply be in a situation similar to the one that exists for two other iconic board games published by Hasbro: Monopoly and Risk. Those game have seen all kinds of variant editions produced (including, in the case of Risk, versions based on several sci-fi and fantasy franchises), but the important point to keep in mind is that the mainstream basic version of each game have remained in production right up to the present and continue to be bought and played; it’s actually the variants that have come and gone over the years. The basic mainstream versions haven’t remained completely static (for example the design gets tweaked / upgraded every now and then, as when Monopoly periodically retires – to great media fanfare – one of its tokens and introduces a new one), but they’re relatively stable and their survival doesn’t depend on maintaining the rapid evolution which is appropriate for the formative years of the game (as we saw with A&A, which originally didn’t even plastic sculpts). And you could argue that A&A currently has the luxury of having four mainstream versions of the basic game, i.e. four differently-scaled versions in terms of size and complexity: 1941, 1942 2nd ed., the recent Anniversary reprint, and Global 2nd ed. I see the AAZ game as being a non-mainstream variant, similarly to the WWI 1914 game and the periodically-reprinted D-Day game, not as conventional A&A game.
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@CWO:
Although I personally dislike the AAZ concept and although I can understand why it might provoke a visceral negative reaction in devoted fans of the game (I had pretty much the same reaction myself when I first heard about the game), I think that its place in the developmental history of A&A shouldn’t be overblown at this stage. Depending on what happens to A&A over the next decade or so, we’ll eventually be able to look back on AAZ and make an informed assessment of its significance (or lack thereof). At the moment, there’s no way of telling whether AAZ will ultimately prove to be a misguided one-off statistical blip (which is my hope) or the first manifestation of the decline and fall of the A&A empire (to paraphrase Edward Gibbon).
To me, the main issue is whether the game is balanced. I think a designer actually should be “good” at the game. If you dont play the game at the highest level, how do you know whether the game you designed is properly balanced or not?
Throwing extra rules or zombies or whatever mashup because it “sounds fun” does not make for a good game. Not saying AAZ is or isnt this yet, because its hard to know after playing just a few rounds. Though years ago I did get to play a demo Buldge game with Larry and instantly disliked it, so there is that…
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@Dauvio:
A&A gets monotonous after you get to a certain skill level.
This is true.
My league games this year have been very dull. Games with 20+ rounds and quite repetitive except for the occasional extreme dice. I honestly haven’t seen any new ideas in a very long time. No risk taking just endless grinding. Maybe if it gets fun again I will be back but for now I am out.
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Here’s a radical thought… if you don’t like the premise of a game and think it will suck… don’t buy it or play it… crazier still… keep playing games you enjoy and love… if game-x sux, it shouldn’t make you love game-y any less.
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Why make a game which will suck and everybody but you knows it will suck? The reason is future AA games will have no future, like a franchise killing movie that costs 200 million to make and sells 3 tickets…
The whole AA thing is being handled by monkeys who work at WOTC and have no idea what their doing because Larry Harris team was not involved and they have no Historical backgrounds. They just play fantasy, read fantasy, live fantasy and wear diapers for the most part.
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To be fair to WOTC 42 and 41 are trash, 42SE is mediocre, and 1914 is a disappointment from a purely gameplay perspective. Additionally, Larry didn’t have a ton to do with Revised, which is one of the better entries in the series. And that’s not even getting into the depressingly bad spin-offs from the early 2000s (Bulge, Revised, Guadalcanal).
That being said, he deserves most if not all of the credit for bringing us A&A (both Classic and the franchise as a whole), AA50, and G40 (which as I said a few posts up is basically his masterpiece, war room be damned).
Re: Sales. I have no sales data to back this up, but I seriously doubt A&A, other than the original Gamemaster Edition, has ever been a serious needle-mover in terms of sales figures. It falls into an unfortunate grey-area of being too complicated for casual gamers (think stupid young people who will only play on their phones, or folks who think Risk is “too hard to understand”), while being too abstract for the serious wargaming crowd (i.e. people who play A World at War, Advanced Third Reich, etc.). Additionally, other than the abysmal 1941 edition (and possibly the Gamemaster Edition, but I don’t remember 100% so don’t quote me), the game has only really been sold in dedicated hobby shops and online, which definitely limits its marketability.
A&As main niche is WW2 history buffs, which is a relatively small one in this day and age. I’m not making excuses for or defending the poorly thought out decision to put Zombies in the game, but there’s a clear reason why the decision was made. If you don’t like it, just don’t buy the game. There’s always War Room (Larry’s project, due out later this year, although I’m not sure you’ll be able to get a copy if you didn’t back the kickstarter) and the Global War line. Both of these have their own sub-forums.
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Iey Clutch Cargo is a history buff.
:-D -
@SS:
Iey Clutch Cargo is a history buff.
:-DWhile I agree with most of this, I do think BotB and D-Day were good games. It is a shame the line wasn’t extended more to say Stalingrad (urban fighting block by block) or North Africa.
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@SS:
Iey Clutch Cargo is a history buff.
:-DWhile I agree with most of this, I do think BotB and D-Day were good games. It is a shame the line wasn’t extended more to say Stalingrad (urban fighting block by block) or North Africa.
I always like d-day. Just havent gotten around to it to add more small things to game like trucks for supplys, amo depots and something to that affect.
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…but there’s a clear reason why the decision was made.
That decision comes from naked ignorance of what AA or wargames in general deliver and require some measure of knowledge of what WW2 was. The new cadre of WOTC are holdovers of D$D: they know nothing of what AA is about and i’ts not about zombies. They just took a 1941 board, made a few changes to that map and dropped “zombie” rules using Larry’s rules from past games ( 1941). Its pretty funny actually like when AA miniatures basically stole the AA name but has nothing to do with AA.
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I mean, you’re not wrong about the thing being a cash grab. I doubt anyone disagrees with you on that. I mean, Activision’s been putting “nazi zombies” into Call of Duty for like 10 years now.
I guess I just have thicker skin/care less. If I want to honor veterans I’ll volunteer at a VA center or watch a WW2 documentary. To me, A&A is just a board game set in a certain historical time period, not a means of honoring anything.
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