Killing Zombies for Fun and Profit

Time for an update on the Zombie Game. If you'll recall, last time we discussed it the game was undergoing some serious rules revision. After a couple playtests, it's clear that there need to be some even more serious revisions before we get anywhere with it. Quick recaps: the first game featured a surprise attack by the United States on the Arab League. I know, shocking, right? The game went poorly, due in large part to the fact that we didn't have a decent board at that point. So, a couple weeks later, we tried again. Inspired by the previous surprise attack, I, as the Arab League, launched a surprise attack on Russia, for the same reasoning as previous: their lands were wide open. The counterattacks were not unexpected, but the nuking was. The zombies won soon after that.

So, in the third game, we decided to see what would happen if all sides went after zombies exclusively. Short answer: they'd win, but it takes too long for it to happen. After about seven or eight hours of playtime we eradicated most major concentrations of zombies with several sets of minor outbreaks on the board.

Instead of doing the full recap here, I'm just going to outline some positives and negatives I happened to notice.

Positives:
1. Killing zombies is still really fun.
2. The special abilities the nations have are also a lot of fun.
3. This game is going to be the only time I ever get to say "man, suicide bombers are totally awesome."
4. Making fun of the UN never goes out of style.
5. Rolling 30+ dice at once and still needing to roll more? Also good.

Negatives:
1. Hard to kill zombies fast enough.
2. In a regular game, the zombies are probably going to win.
3. Lack of rulebook meant that half the time we weren't sure how to rule on something.
4. After a while, rolling more than 30 dice can get kind of annoying.
5. Right now, the only way to wipe out all the zombies is with nukes. I'm not opposed to this, but I dislike it being the only option.
6. The event cards are, in general, too uniformly negative, which in a zombie world, might be to be expected. Even so, I think it needs a change.

I think that's about all I've got right now, I might discuss specific changes later now that I've got these going on.