Dawn of the Zeds Gameplay Overview | Solo Zombie Wargame | Designer Edition
Transcript
Hi everyone, I'm Silvitz and welcome. If you like chaos in your games and if you like games that tell great stories and if you like zombies, then Dawn of the Zed's Designer Edition might be something you want to check out. In this game, the premise is very simple. You defend your town against a zombie horde using all the heroes and weapons at your disposal. Now, this designer edition of the game designed by Herman Lutman and published by Blue Panther Games has all sorts of revisions and upgrades from previous editions. Let's jump right in and take a look. So, I've got Dawn of the Eds all set up to start one of the scenarios in the game. Let's do a quick overview of the game as we look at everything in front of us, though. And a very important caveat before we start out. This is a prototype version of the game. Now, while the art feels pretty close to the final version, the component quality is very different in the final version than what we're looking at here today. And I'll talk about that as we go through and look at the individual pieces. First up, this is a solo game. At heart, it is a one-player game where you are going to play the town and you're defending yourself against the zombies, which are automated by the card deck as you play through the game. However, the game also is built up for cooperative modes. Two, three, four, and up to six players can play this game cooperatively. I think at the larger sizes like five and six, it's probably a little bit less optimal. So, I'm thinking one to four is probably that sweet spot there. But, if you like cooperative games, this might be something you would enjoy as well.
Gameplay length is listed as 1 to two hours, but there are six scenarios and the earlier scenarios are a little simpler and a little shorter. So, I think as you get into that full length scenarios that the 2-hour length is probably more appropriate. The historical length of a turn and the historical length of the whole scenario is abstract. I would say it's probably something that happens out over the course of a number of days or weeks, but there isn't a set period of time for a turn or for the entire scenario. units in the game are either individuals like the 16 heroes that are included in the game or groups like zombies move in packs and then you have a civilian defense that are considered to be kind of a larger group of individuals. So there's both individuals and then groups as far as unit size. Let's talk about gameplay now in Dawn of the Zed's designer edition. Best place to start with that, I think, is the map. And this is an important place to note that this is a canvas map that we're looking at right now, but the final version is going to be a fully mounted map in the designer edition. And this is 17x 22 in.
I think it's going to be similar in the final version as well. So, what are we trying to do and what are we looking at here? Well, right in the center here, we have the town center. And this is where our four heroes and a couple of the civilian watches start. And this is very much a state of siege type of game. So, you're trying to protect this town center because if zombies make it to the town center, right in the middle here, it's an instant loss. You lose the game. And where are the zombies coming from? And how does this all work? Well, you'll follow. Notice that there is this trail here. This is called the forest track over here. And the zombies start down here in this little start zone. We can see some zombies right here ready to start marching towards the town center from here. Now, along the way, we have some villagers up here. We have a civilian defense unit. This is up by St.
Thomas. And they're going to perhaps put up resistance. We can send our units up along this path to try to fight the zombies as they make their way down towards the town. But this is roughly one track right here. Now, of course, there's more. We have the suburbs track here. Zombies starting here, working their way through the suburbs, trying to get to the town center this way. And we also have the mountain track over here. We got our starting zombies in place. Get up to the village lefties pass here. We have some villagers up there working their way towards it. And then the fourth and final zone, which is the highway track. Zombies starting here, working their way towards the town center. So, a big part of this game is sending units out, pulling units back, slowing zombies down, but zombies are going to be popping up in a lot of different places, too. It gets fairly chaotic. And that brings me to one thing about how do you actually win the game?
Well, there's three end states for the game. One end state is the instant loss if the zombies reach the town center. There is a national guard event in the game and there's the national guard unit. If they get to the town center, then you're protected and saved and you win the game that way. Otherwise, the game ends in somewhat of a draw state and that's when you go through all of the event cards in your event deck. That's essentially a game timer and we'll take a look at those in a minute. But if the event deck runs out and neither of those two end states have uh happened, then you accumulate the the victory points to see how you did in terms of defending the town against the zombies. Now, the other thing I would say that one of the things about this game that's clear from the time spent with it so far is that winning and losing is yeah, you're trying to win the game, but a huge part of the fun in this game is the stories the game tells.
There are so many events, so many different things that can happen in the game, so many things that can go sideways and change the state of the game. This is a game that is truly fun to lose, and I think it's designed that way. So, winning and losing, I would say, is almost a little bit secondary to the emergent narrative and the things that you try to do in the game. The experience here is what matters somewhat more, I think, than the final end state. Now, let's take a look at some of the units that we're fighting with. I mentioned the heroes and I mentioned the civilian defense units here. Let's take a little bit of look first at the 16 heroes that are in the game. And you start a game with four heroes. Now, I've got them stacked up here. They also come with stands like this where you can stand them up into the stand, but on video they look better horizontal like this. So, I'm not using the stands just for the sake of the video. Now, I've got the classic start here and let's take a look what that is. So, the game comes with 16 different heroes and this is the what I think was called the classic start. So, we've got Deputy Schmidt, Sheriff Hunt, Mayor Hernandez, and Pickles the Dog. How awesome is that?
Pickles the dog. Now, each of these heroes has their own melee, and then fire combat values. They have different movement rates. They have different health points. They have different authority levels. So, Mayor Hernandez here has an authority level of one. One is the highest here. So, he's really in charge. And when you're playing multiplayer, those authority levels can matter. And then they have certain special abilities. So each one of these 16 heroes in the game is very unique. And if we take a look at four of the other heroes, we have Captain Piaza, who's the elite sniper. Emily Oroso, long drive golf cart. Professor, Professor AG has bioengineering PhD. Doc Siver has first aid. And all of these interact with the game state in very different ways. Which gets me to the point that I think you could play this game a hundred times and end up with a completely different story and a completely different game each time, which I think is really one of the features of this designer edition that it really has everything in it now. And again, you don't have to start with those four traditional heroes. One of the ways to start is just pick your own pick your own four heroes out of the 16.
And they have a couple of other remend recommended starts in the game as well. So part of the game is you're fighting with your heroes. Now, if a hero dies, they're going to get replaced with another hero in the game. So, it's a a churning perhaps of your heroes as you're fighting against the zombies. But this is one of the units that you've got and of course one of the larger ones that you're using to defend the town against the zombies. Couple of other things on your side. Uh there are civilian defense units. The game starts with seven of them. Five of them are out on in the field in the cities and the forest and stuff like that at the start and they have a close combat value and a ranged fire value too. And they start with this defiant position. And then we have these villagers who are starting at various place out out of the town center and when they come in contact with zombies, they turn into refugees. So you're going to have refugee packs streaming towards your city as well. So a lot of different gameplay elements on your side. And that's not it. Certain events can bring rangers into game play.
We have outside survivors that could be brought into gameplay. and outside survivors and ra and refugees can be morphed into town guard units, particular units like this one here, marks maniacs that can help with your defense. We mentioned the national guard that can show up as well. And lastly, we have raiders, which are uh evil units that will are just marauding around that are non-zombie enemies that could come into gameplay as well. And when you see this, you start to get an idea for all of the different variables that could show up. Some of these will show up in some games, some of them won't show up in some games. You never know quite what you're going to get. It's like a box of chocolates. By and large, you're fighting against these zombie units, which have various strengths that are going to be moving towards the town center. But there are also alpha zeds.
So, here we have the war zeds. Here we have skeers. Here we have leapers. And these all have special abilities. And there's a bunch more. There's about five or six more off on the side here of the gameplay. They can come into gameplay in v through various actions and through through various events. And these are fast. They have special abilities. And they can be particularly nasty zombies. So you're not just fighting against the dumb, slow, braineeing zombies. You could al also be going up against more evolved ones. And again, which ones come into gameplay and which ones don't come into gameplay can vary game to game. And so that's the basic structure of gameplay. But how does gameplay actually work? Well, in order to answer that question, we have to look at the event cards. Now, Dawn of the Zed's Designer Edition comes with about over 80 of these event cards, and they're really the engine that drives all the variety and drives all the gameplay. In each game turn, well, before the game starts, you're going to create an event card deck. And then each turn, you're going to flip over one of these event cards and follow through a sequence of play that acts on each one of these cards.
Now, in order to get an idea of all the different variety in the game, let's take a look at some of these cards. Here are eight of the roughly 80 event cards that are in the game. And again, each turn, you flip them over and you're going to execute this sequence of play down the left hand side. And at some point in this sequence of play, this event is going to trigger. Now, if you look in the bottom corner, you can see these little green boxes, or not a green box, a regular, just blank background here. The green ones are positive events. So that means in general this is going to be something good that happens in your turn. The black ones or the ones without those green boxes tend to be negative events. And then we have a couple over here that are unique ones. And we'll talk about those in a moment. Now we can see here this is what drives all of the creativity and all of the variety in the game. Keeping in mind too that not all the event cards are in any one particular game of Dawn of the Zeds.
So you might play a game where this event card appears two games in a row and then in the next two games it doesn't appear at all. And if we look at these we can start to see some of the variety that appears and spawns in Zawn of the Deads. The raiders appear. So this is that human evil unit that will attack some of your units uh in the course of a game. So a bad event. But down here we have a good one. The Oakidge Rangers deploy. This was that rangers unit that would show up and start fighting for you in your battle. Now Zed's mutate. A toxic stench is a random event here that triggers and causes your forces to give ground ground from the zombies to push back towards the town center because they've exhibited this terrible smell. Hidden zeds appear means they're going to spawn in different places in the battlefield. Hard-headed zed here. This one makes them tougher to kill or let's see. All zed units attacking a named space including barricades and strongpoint spaces cancel the shields benefit. So these are just they're harder to damage.
Hunting lodge. Uh, this is one that's going to help you find some ammo in the game. And ammo and supply is a key factor. We'll see this as we look through the sequence of play a little bit. And then over here we have a couple of unique ones. Brain one. Brains one is one that comes up in a game and it it causes a general increase in activity and problems that you're having with the zombies. And then down here we have particularly one here. This is a red one. This is a particular nightmare event card. There are nightmare event cards and apocalypse cards that the scenario will seed into play. So in the harder scenarios, you're going to be seeding in some of these nightmare cards. These are particularly bad cards where really nasty things can happen. So as we look at these, we can see that again the order they appear in, the games they appear in, the games they don't appear, when they appear, what state they appear, the sequence of how they appear can make any one game of Dawn of the Zeds play completely differently. And on top of the event deck card, if that isn't enough, we have a fake deck card, which adds further variety and diversity into the game play. There are about 50 of these cards in the game. Here's a look at eight of them. They fall into two different types. Uh, and generally these could get triggered from various events during a turn, from event cards, from different actions and things that happen in the game. And we have two types. One is that you play immediately, and then another is that you can hold. And some of these are positive, and some of these are negative. For example, down here you find a massive killdozer that you can use fighting against the zombies. Sticks of dynamite that you can play in a certain battle to blow up zombies. But
here we have deadly contagion, which means it's an outbreak of zombies occurs right away in the game. You could find a motorcycle, a building collapses, rescue signal brings a supply drop. This adds supply points and ammo points to your forces, which are helpful as well. So, this fate deck in coordination with the event deck, you start to get an idea for just how much incredible variety there is and how any one given game of Dawn of the Zeds could play out completely differently. And so, now that we've got an idea of gameplay and we've seen how the event deck and the fate card decks spawn all sorts of different events in the game, let's walk through just the sequence of play in a given turn. And what I've got here is the event deck for the introductory scenario. And the introductory is all set up on the map. Introductory scenario is all set up on the map. So, let's just do a rough overview of a turn in the game. And each turn in the game essentially is generated by flipping over an event deck and then we're going to walk through these sequence of play basically that's exhibited down here on the left side.
This is called utter chaos and there's going to be event here. Now, certain part of the card has a red outline to it. We can see right here everything's a neutral outline. This is a red outline. That means the event utter chaos, this part here, happens in this phase of the turn. So when we get to this phase of the turn, we're going to execute the event in addition to doing that phase of the turn. So let's get started. So looking at our utter chaos event card, we can see in the top lefthand corner there is somewhat of a a solders's head symbol and there's a one underneath it. And this is the top left is what's called the RR phase. And that stands for raiders, rangers, refugees, and rescue. And while the heroes and our civilian defense and the zombies are the main units in the game, each turn starts out with this RR phase where you're going to move these other secondary units in the game. Now, we don't have any raiders. We don't have any raiders or rangers in the game at this point. So, we don't have to do anything with that. And we don't have any refugees either because the villagers only become refugees when the zeds get to their location and they start freaking out and running and panicking back for the town. And lastly, we don't have the uh National Guard unit. So we don't have any rescue considerations to deal with. So in this first term, this RR phase is basically complete. So let's go down to the second element here, which is this hazard biohazard symbol with a five plus on it.
And this has a red box around the end, which means we need to take a look at the event. So let's take a look at the utter chaos event and see what this is about. We got some flavor text here. It says, well, there goes the neighborhood. And then we have an explanation. It says when a named space and so we can see on the map certain spaces don't have special locations attached to them. St. Thomas, the farm, Farmingdale suspension bridge. So these are only referring to these named spaces. When a named space would normally receive a chaos marker this turn, place two chaos markers there instead. A restore order action in this space increases the infection level by two instead of one. So this would be, you know, a probably signifying a particularly frenzied zombie attack in one particular location that's happening in this turn. Now, fortunately, I don't think there's going to be any chaos that gets spawned in this turn cuz we still have some distance to go between the zombies and our named locations. So, I think we're fortunate in this turn that thisa chaos event here won't really do any potential damage to us. But, we'll see. Something might happen that I'm not aware of. But the other thing that we have to do here is we have to look at this biohazard symbol with the five plus on it and that means we have to see if there is an outbreak in the the in the game too in the battle as well. Now to do that we have to look at the current infection level and we can see under the biohazard symbol on this event card that it's a five plus and what we're looking for then is to compare it to the infection track. So there is an
infection state in your town basically depending on how bad are people getting infected with zombie disease. And right now at the beginning of the game it starts out with zero which is fortunate for us because what it to in order to spawn an outbreak with this card this the infection level would have to be a five or greater. And since it is not that high that means there's no outbreak of further zombies in this turn which is another good thing for us. But as the game gets deeper and deeper, this infection track is going to get higher and higher, and then you're going to be seeing more outbreaks as the game progresses. But for the moment, we don't have an outbreak. So, we're done with that section of the turn. Let's go now down to our third element here, which is the little supply symbol with a seven plus underneath it. And in order to do this section of the turn, we have to compare things to our supply and ammo track. Now, in the final version of the game, the the final designer version, these cubes are going to be a different color, but I'm using the red one to symbolize our starting ammunition and our the black one here to symbolize the starting supplies. The town's people are going to be consuming some of these supplies at this point in the game, just organically through the game state changing, the people could be consuming supplies. And so, we're going to roll two dice. And if the number is a seven or greater, then we reduce the supply level by one. got six, which is fortunate for us. So, the supply level stays at six and it doesn't get down.
Now, if you run out of supplies, bad things happen, of course. So, we want to keep supplies in the game as much as we possibly can. So, those are mainly the preliminary events. And now we're going to go to the next stage here, which is the zombie activation phase, the zed's activation phase. And we can see here that we have four symbols on the left hand side. And this indicates of the the event card here. You can see this indicates which areas, which tracks on the map the zombies are going to activate. So if we look on the left hand side of the event card, we can see that all four of the tracks are going to activate. The highway symbol is there, the mountain track symbol is there, the suburb symbol is there, and of course the forest track symbol is there, which means that every single zombie pack in these tracks are going to activate and they're going to move towards the town center. Now, at the start of the battle, we only have zombies. They're still distant. They're way out in these starting areas. They're far away from the town center. And fortunately, there there are two types of zombies we mentioned. We have these alpha zombies.
Now, they would move two spaces towards the town center. So, they are faster. The regular zombies only move one. So, in order of the event track, we're going to move the zombies forward. First, we're going to start with the highway track. So, they are closing in here on Ing Ingabberg here, which but they're not there yet, which is good. And then we're going to go to the mountain track which is farther away. They're going to move up here. They're starting down the mountain trail. We're going to go to the suburbs over here in the bottom left corner. They're moving closer. And then lastly, the forest track. Now, if the zombies had gotten to an occupied space, combat would ensue, but they didn't. So, there's no combat that's triggered by this, but ominously, we can hear the rumbles and groans of the zombies as they start moving towards the town center. But that finishes that section of the that phase of the turn as well.
And the last thing we look at is the bottom left hand number there which is a two which and this is for the player action phase. Now by default every hero gets one action. The two there signifies the number of extra actions we could get with our heroes. So one hero could take two actions and so on. We can divide those extra two points up after our initial hero disposition of action points if you would. Now, at this point in the battle, despite my lack of experience, my general tendency is that we want to start getting heroes moving out to try to battle the zombies so that we can keep them away from the town center. So, I think one of the things we' be doing is picking each hero maybe to take a particular lane. But maybe we're going to leave one hero behind to see how we can do here. And roughly, I'm thinking there are two civilian defense units out here in the suburbs. So, I think we're going to leave this to the civilian defense units. And this zombie is only a strength of three. So, it's not super strong. So, I think for the moment, the suburbs are okay. But up here on the mountain track, we have a five strength zombie unit approaching.
This is how much damage they do, not how many hit points they have. But still, I think we're going to need to help out on this mountain track. So, one of the things I'm thinking is we would be moving our heroes up along these lines. And the other things, there can be a lot of other actions here. So, in addition to just the movement action that you can take with your heroes and your player units, you can do things like ranged combat, you can build a barricade, you can retrieve an item if you're in a space where that item you need is, you can research. So, we have a laboratory here where you can do research and the research. As your research level builds up, it triggers things like super weapons, ultra weapons, the final comp uh component needed and the antidote developed, which gives you a lot of victory points at the end. So, in addition to just fighting the zombies, you're also trying to research stuff.
You can have a hospital where you can heal units. Lots of different stuff going on. And a hero can also forage for items for ammos and supply to help build up those levels. And there's if you're using some of the optional rules, you can have a manhunt to hunt down some of the special enemies that are in the game. And so now, let's decide what we're going to do with our heroes. So, Sheriff Hunt is going to he we're going to give Sheriff Hunt an extra action point. We're going to give uh let's give uh Deputy Schmidt here uh Mayor Hernandez an extra action point too. And we're going to have Sheriff Hunt delegate, which is basically give one of his actions to one of these civilian defense teams, and we're going to have them start moving up the mountain trail. So, they have a movement of two. They're going to go one to the east side and then out on the mountain trail, heading their way up to help stifle these zombies moving down the the trail here.
Now, we're also going to take our four heroes. We're going to have Sheriff Hunt. He's going to move out along the trail. Now, each hero has a unique movement. Hunt has a four, so he's going to go one, two, three, four, and he's starting out the trail, heading up to here to this defense point. Maybe we can hold off the zombies. I think that Deputy Schmidt is probably going to need to help out some things. And we have combat potentially starting down on the highway track soon. So, we're going to send Deputy Schmidt one. And his movement is, let's see, is a 42. Deputy Schmidt is a four as well. He's going to go one, two, three, four. He's going to move down here towards the plant. Let's keep uh Pickles the dog. We're going to keep him handy for a while and then let's send Mayor Hernandez up here to the research laboratory and he gets in there and then I think with that extra action he can do some research. Yeah.
So, we're going to have Mayor Hernandez do a some research here. It's a one to six role. Uh on a one there's a failure and it gets reduced, but we're at zero. So, that's not bad. Now, a two to four has no effect. But if it's a five or six, we increase the research level by one. So, Mayor Hernandez looking for the cure to zombie. Wow, total failure here. Mayor Hernandez gets a one. So, the research track level doesn't move up, but we've burned that action point. And that is basically the actions in our turn. We could have Pickles the dog do something, but I think we're just going to leave him there. Actually, he's he's going to just be happy where he is for the moment. So, we'll keep that extra action point. We probably could have moved another hero twice, but anyway, that's good for right now just to show how it works. So you get a sense now for how the player activation phase. The only thing that we haven't seen is what would happen if zombies have combat with humans. So just to show how combat works in a rough sense, let's imagine that this Zed's unit moved in here to East Ire where we have the civilian defense team, some villagers, and then the zombies now are in there. So the attack is happening. They are attacking the civilian defense team. The villagers are there. Now they're in defiant status, which means they're holding their position. And so basically, we're going to determine how many hit points the zombies, the zeds, do on us, and then how many hit points we do on the zombies. Now, because we're in the same space, this is close combat. And you'll notice that on the unit here, there are two numbers, a three and a two. And the right number there has the little gun beside it. That's for ranged combat. And the left number has the knife. That's for close combat. So, we have a three
for our close combat value. The zombies close combat value is the number that's printed on it here, three. Now, this has is regardless of the hit points, a regular zombie unit has three hit points, too. Um, now this number could be bigger, but this is the attack strength, and the hit points aren't listed on the counter. They're always a three. And basically, for the zombies, it's easy. They're going to do three hits on our civilian defense unit here. So, we have to figure out what's going to happen here in this particular case because the battle's going on. So, we have three hits on us, but it's not quite done yet because we get to roll our attack dice. We have three dice here that we can roll. And the game comes with custom dice. There are blue dice, which are regular kind of the regular attack dice, and there are enhanced dice, which are the yellow dice. So, these are the regular dice here, and then the yellow dice here, the ones with the yellow stickers, are the enhanced dice. Now, the final, these are wooden dice for the prototype. The final version has custom dice that are much nicer regular dice with these symbols printed on them. So, it's going to look much much cooler than these right here.
But, we're going to roll three of these and we're going to see what kind of results we get. All right. So, I'm going to just jury rig one of these because I want to show some things here. So, this is our die roll here and let's see what this means in terms of results of hits on the zombies. So, [clears throat] we got one die here for us that did no damage at all. So, we're just going to take that one out. We got one die here that did a hit on the zombies. That's good. Now, we have this other die here, which is the special symbol. The special symbol tells you to look at this HD characteristic of this civilian defense unit, and that will tell you what it means. Now, if I look at the special characteristics list here on the the game uh supply, the the player aids, the HD indicates hunker down. So this means this the result of this is one hit plus one shield on the enemy. So we did one hit and one other hit. We do two hits on this zombie unit which isn't enough to damage it at all. It's just but it's carries those two hits with it. We also get one shield. The shield reduces the zombie hits on us from three down to two. Additionally, a named location is a stronger defense point. So that reduces a hit point even further down to one. So at this point we have a choice to whether we can take this hit point, but you can also optionally if you want to retreat one space and remove one hit point instead. So basically concede ground. But I think for this section
we're going to actually just hold our ground here. We'll take the hit point and hold the ground rather than giving up east Ire here which is good. There's two other things to note here. this defiant marker, which means they basically you can't move them in the game until this is removed, gets removed as soon as zombies move into this space. So, we're going to take the defiant marker off, which means now we can activate this unit and delegate actions to it as we would normally for any other unit in our game. Now, the last thing here, if the villagers were alone with the Zeds, if we did retreat this uh civilian defense unit, they would turn into refugees and they would start to run. But because the civilian defense here is still protecting them, basically, they're going to stay here. So, Fifth Street is is holding with the East Iric Village. We've damaged the Zeds. One thing to note here, too, if we had gotten a third hit on the Zed unit, we would have been able to flip it over to its wounded side. And then this also would take three hits to remove it from play. So, this unit is not necessarily close to dying. It's close to being reduced to its half state. But with that, that's a very simple combat example. There's range combat, there's other things, there's a lot of unique abilities for heroes that can come into play. But that's the rough concept behind combat works in Dawn of the Zed's designer edition. And with that, we've seen a pretty good look, I think, now at Dawn of the Zed's Designer Edition.
There are a lot of other counters for some of the special events that happen and different things that can be going on in the game. So, there's another lot of supportive counters that can come into play, but we've seen most everything. Now, with the designer edition, I've mentioned the map and I've mentioned the dice. The cards will also all be vinyl. These are card stock in this prototype, but they're going to be vinyl cards in the final edition. There's also a very cool dice tower that's coming with the game. And I think the player aids too, which are a kind of a a thicker paper right now in this prototype version, are going to be cards stock in the final edition. Uh, so a number of enhancements. There might be a couple of other things I'm not mentioning, but it looks like it's certainly going to be a very beautiful final production. So, I haven't played Dawn of the Zed's Designer Edition nearly enough to give it a full review, but I have played it enough to offer up some impressions, and I want to talk about four things, and they all come together in terms of what I think about my experiences with the game so far. And the four things are emergent narrative, chaos, player agency, and complexity.
And these all weave together into Dawn of the Zed's Designer Edition to make what I think is a superlative gameplay experience. So, first up, let's talk about emergent narrative. This game generates and spawns stories, and each time you play, the story is going to be different. Some of them are going to be tragic. Some of them are going to be heroic. Sometimes you're going to win, sometimes you're going to lose. But you're always going to end up with what can be a fantastic narrative. If you're a player who likes games that tell stories, I think this is the game for you. Now, let's go now to player agency. And by player agency, I mean, does the player have control over what's happening in the game state, or is it just kind of random and you figure like, well, there's nothing I can do. I'm just along for the ride watching what happens. A lot of games that tell emergent stories end up with a very low amount of player agency. But one of the things that I think makes Dawn of the Zed's Designer Edition so good is that it gives you a lot of player agency.
You're going to be making some very hard decisions in the fa as this story unfolds. and what's happening and all the events that are multiplying, you still have a very good decision tree and a lot of interesting tough decisions to makes and make in terms of how you're defending your town city. So, I like the fact that you've got a good amount of player agency combined with this emergent narrative where this game is just telling this really wild story. Add that into the idea of chaos, right? Because chaos is clearly a part of this game. Things are going to go sideways. it can look hopeless and then something can happen and all of a sudden you're like, "Oh, we have hope now and we can do something here." So, there is a certain amount. You're going to play games where the game is just going to beat you down and beat you down. All the decisions you make and everything you do, no matter what you do, you're just going to lose, right? It's it's going to happen. You're going to run into sequences of events that are like, "Well, okay, I did the best I could. I made good decisions, but yeah, this this zombie apocalypse just wiped me out." So, if you're a player who must win in order to have fun in a game, this might be a game that you'll struggle with a little bit because I think this is truly a game where chaos can lead to tragic defeat and yet at the same time you're going to end up with an epic story. And the last thing I think about this, the thing that the foundational element that makes all of this work, which is one of the things that I really like about this particular State of Siege game is the the
complexity. And I and complexity is probably not the right word. Uh it's it's more just the variety, the the wealth of events, the uniqueness of all the units, the heroes, the way things can I mean some every game is going to play out different, right? and and that that that variety, that complexity, all of the different stuff that can happen in your game worlds means that the level of chaos is going to be different, the decisions you're making are going to be different, the narrative is going to be different, and so there is just a very rich foundation of potential elements that can show up in your game, which really raised the level of this State of Siege game to something that I think I'm going to really like to play a lot more. Usually with State of Siege games for me, I find that after I play it three, four, five times, I feel like, yeah, okay, I've kind of played that out and it's time to move on to something else.
This is a game because of that foundational complexity and all the variety of things that can happen with the event cards and the fate cards. I think you can just play this game 20 times and it's just not going to get boring. So, those are really all and you can see how all of those four things weave together in terms of gameplay here. So, I am really excited to play this game more. I think this designer edition with the enhanced components and the artwork and the in I will also say too uh the instructions and the rules are very very good. I haven't talked about that yet, but um the it comes with a rule book. It comes with an appendix appendices book and then some player aids and they're very clear. I've only had one question so far and it was like I was 80% sure what the answer was and 20% I just want to confirm this. Other than that, I've been able to find every answer for everything that I've run into in the game and it's very clear and all the qu the thing I like about the rule book in particular is a lot of times when I'm reading it, I'm like, "Oh, what about and then it has that sentence right after that." That's to me is a really good rule book when it anticipates the edge cases and provides the answer to you right as you're getting to that question popping up in your head. So, yeah, a super thumbs up on Don Zed's designer edition. U I can't wait to see the final version with all of the enhanced components and things like that. It's just a beautiful project here. One of the trademark features I think of Herman Litman games are these chaos and emergent narrative elements.
And if you want to see a game that does this in more of a traditional war game format, I would advise you to take a look at A Most Fearful Sacrifice. I have a playthrough of A Most Fearful Sacrifice on the channel. Here's a link to it right there.