Army Of Zero Variants
So you might have noticed via a Twitter announcement earlier in the week, or via the link on this site’s home page, that we posted some alternative rule variants for Army Of Zero this week. You can read them here.
These are rule variants for the basic game. We’re still (yes, still!) working on a co-operative Army Of Zero game, using the existing cards but pitting players against a common foe, but it’s been hard to get the thing working as well as we wanted, so I’m afraid you’ll have to wait a bit longer for that. But have a look at the new, optional rules for the existing game, and see if you like them.
You can pick and choose which ones you want to incorporate into your games, but I confess that my favourite is the one we’ve called the “Champion” variant. In this version, you don’t have to pre-order your characters and play through them in that order - you can choose any character from your hand to go into battle. We’ve found that if you play the game this way, it’s much more natural to develop favourite characters, and as a player you become rather more involved in your characters’ struggles. You feel it more when they lose, but you also enjoy it more when they are victorious. We like this variant so much that we used it almost exclusively at Game ‘09 in Manchester last weekend.
At Game ‘09, we also used the “Skirmish” variant, where each player receives five cards instead of the more usual ten. We opted for this to make the games shorter, so we could get through more rounds with the show visitors who wanted a game, and it worked pretty well. We didn’t use the “Carnage” variant, which replaces the game’s six-sided dice with eight-sided ones, because the standard game only comes with the six-sided dice. We just wanted to present the game using whatever was in the box.
