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.
