Hit Z Road

11th June 2019.

Gaming Tuesday continues at 'The Sovereign'

Next up is 'Hit Z Road'.

Have you ever thought about what you would do during a zombie apocalypse?
If your first thought was. "Well, I'd design a game about being in a zombie apocalypse!". Then this might be the game for you.

Hit Z Road is designed to look like a game made by a child during an apocalypse, made from bits and pieces of other games etc. Some of these are other actual real games.
So Hit Z Road is a game set inside the game you are playing. Omg! There goes the 4th wall!

In Hit Z Road you play a small band of survivors travelling through a zombie infested apocalyptic landscape towards a safe haven.

What's in a game?

In particular the art direction of this game is superb. Many of the components are designed to look like they came from other games (some real games and some fake). The rulebook looks handwritten. There also human and zombie meeples.

There are 3 different types of currency/resource in the game, (Ammo, petrol and adrenaline. These will be explained below.). The game plays homage to Fallout by using bottle caps as the different currencies and they look cool. 

You can't fault the production values here.

How's it play?

Hit Z Road is a relatively simple game.

Your band of survivors travel from left to right dealing with the obstacles encountered.

There are basically 3 phases in a round.

Routes

• ​Each turn begins with several different routes being laid out in the playing area. Each route takes the form of 2 cards.
• Each card represents a potential encounter that a band of survivors may come across in the order they are laid.

Auctioning

• Now that the different routes are visible to all players, the auctioning can begin.
• The auctioning process differs to most auctioning games in one very important way. Everyone who participates in the auction has to pay for their finishing bid, even if they are last. This is very important as the order of play is determined by finishing positions in the auction. This also has a profound affect on game play and is explained in further detail below.
• Players bid with their bottle caps. When paying the auction, players can choose which types of repirces they want to use - a bottle caps have the same value for an auction.
• Whoever wins the auction can choose which route they want to take, who comes second then gets to choose their route next and so on until everyone has a route to take.

Travel

• Now that the routes are chosen, each player must deal with the encounters ahead as indicated in the cards.
• Cards are dealt with one at a time, going from left to right.
• Most cards will contain zombies, some cards will give you victory points. Some force you to spend resources or grant additional resources.
• This is where resources become very important.
• A player can spend 2 petrol bottle caps to bypass the encounter - which is discarded.
• Once an encounter begins, the active player collects any available resources. If there are zombies present the player may choose to spend ammo bottle caps to attack the zombies at range. The player gets 2 combat dice for each ammo token spent. Ranged combat is resolved by rolling the combat dice. Any kill results will kill a zombie. Any bite results are ignored - as are adrenaline related results. Thus ranged combat consumes resources, but represents the safer way to deal with zombies.
• If zombies are still standing after ranged combat, (Or there was no ranged combat.) then plays proceeds to melee combat. For melee, the active player rolls a number of combat dice equal to the number of survivors they control. Adrenaline bottle caps can be used to alter combat here. Some of the dice results allow you spend adrenaline to avoid having a survivor bitten, (And thus killed.). Some allow you to spend adrenaline to dispatch additional zombies and so on. This is how you use adrenaline. If there are still zombies or survivors standing after the affects of the dice have been resolved. The active player rolls the combat dice again.
• The encounters on the cards get harder as you progress. You can even encounter harder zombies to fight. These take the form or other dice that have less beneficial odds for the players.

And that's pretty much it for the rules. The game continues until all the encounters have been played and dealt with. Upon which any remaining survivors reach their destination and points are 
Points are earned in a few ways.

• Points on cards beaten are scored.
• The player with the most survivors earns bonus points.
• The player with the most of each of the 3 resources scores points for those resources.

The player with the most points wins. ​

Overall

Hit Z Road is a fairly simply game (Which is not necessarily a bad thing.) that will give players a couple of meaningful choices to make every turn - which is a good thing. A bad choice of route can cost a lot of resources.

But the game's problem is the auctioning mechanic, to reiterate:

During the auctioning phase, players bid to create a turn order in which to choose which route to take.
Everybody who make a bid, must pay for the bid they made. Thus it's not a good idea to to try and 'run up' another player's bid, (because your own bid and cost would almost be as high.).
The problem here is 2-fold.
Firstly, the player with the most resources can always go first. This means that they can always have the choice of the most optimal route which will gain them the the most (Or lose them the least.) resources. The remaining players will be bidding (And spending resources.) over the remaining sub-optimal routes which are less beneficial. Essentially, they'll end bidding over the scraps.
​
Secondly, when most of the players have either spend too many resources or realised they can't bid against the player with the most resources. Then they'll stop bidding. And when no one bids, the turn order does not change. This means that the dominant player doesn't even need to spend any resources to stay first or continue dominating.

The results of this is that all the players bar one will be put on to the back foot and will find it very hard to get off it.

This ruins the game. I know why it was done - they didn't want auctioning reduced to 'Auction winner goes first, play proceeds to the left'. But still, it ruins the game.

I've looked online and found I'm not the only person who thinks so. I've seen that this is called a 'Runaway Leader' problem.

This is the harshest I've been about a game in this blog. I've played games I didn't like or care for. But I consider this to be a bad game, no two ways about it.

In the end I look at the game's excellent production values and can't help but think. 'Maybe the designers got their priorities mixed up.'.