a pursuit of fruitless endeavors and endless refinements

Walking Dead Wednesday: Solo Scenario Sessions

Lately, I’ve been troubled by the lack of challenge in the Walking Dead: All Out War scenarios.  I played through the Days Gone Bye scenarios and only found them challenging when “role-playing” a character to do non-strategic moves or artificially inflating the challenge like adding the Night Fighting event card.

I decided to give the next crop of scenarios one last shot before I start making some sweeping changes.

Starting up with Chapter 1: Clear the Road from the Miles Behind Us expansion, we have 6 survivors: Rick, Glenn, and Carl in the upper corner and Tyreese, Julie, and Chris in the bottom corner.  Everyone is outfitted with melee weapons as I don’t see a big need for guns in most solo scenarios.

In this scenario, we have to move a bunch of blocked cars from the road to clear a path for our caravan.  I like how the scenario crams a lot of walkers in the tight road corridor and making survivors burn actions to move the cars should be interesting.  Julie and Chris are the weak links in the scenario as they have Low nerve values. Interestingly enough, the scenario doesn’t care how many survivors die as long as you can end the turn with all four cars moved off the road.  This is likely just an oversight though.

Tyreese, Rick, and Glenn all move out to engage walkers while Chris, Julie, and Carl sneak forward to stay with the group.

A Pandemonium event card is pulled and brings more walkers to the fray, engaging Tyreese and Chris.

In a pretty round of combat, I take down three walkers and even Chris knocks one over.  This happens even with Tyreese rolling too few dice.  His character ability grants him another red die when outnumbered two-to-one but I’d forgotten about it and never used it for the rest of the scenario.

At the end of the round, the walkers that were knocked down stand back up. Already the survivor side of the board is looking clear.

Rick and Glenn make it over to the first car and push it off the road.

Carl searches and pulls the first Lurker supply card.  Luckily it doesn’t hurt him.

Tyreese, Rick, and Chris all engage walkers and again, I drop two and knock down a third.  Julie and Carl pull threat duty and use Hold Your Nerve actions.

With most of the starting side clear, the survivors start to move across and sweep the next part of the road.

Glenn runs to the truck but fails his stealth test and pulls in a walker.

Everyone else moves in and engages walkers as we kill two more.

Walkers are almost cleared out and our threat has been kept down easily with the unoccupied survivors always spamming Hold Your Nerve actions so we push on.

Rick is able to search before Glenn helps push the truck off the road.

The kids then swarm a lone walker while Glenn holds his own against the walker that just won’t drop.  Tyreese is a walker killing machine and downs another.

The survivors fan out and go on a zombie stomping spree wiping another three walkers off the map. A car alarm starts blaring but there are no walkers in the vicinity so it just adds threat.

With only one walker left standing, we all run for the remaining two cars.

Rick searches the truck to find the second lurker supply card and gets a scratch for his trouble.

Both cars get easily moved off and as Chris curb-stomps a downed walker and Tyreese knocks the other down.

We cruise to victory having wiped out twelve of the fourteen starting zombies. Road done be cleared!


This scenario turned out to be another cakewalk.  I know that I had some really nice attack rolls but I never really felt like there was any threat.  I’ve decided that I’ll change some of the rules for solo games to help make them more of a challenge.

Hardcore Mode:

  • When a card says to move or select a walker, choose a survivor and select the closest walker to that survivor. That walker then activates or moves to the nearest survivor.
  • When walkers enter play, choose a character and place the walker as close to that survivor as possible per the normal rules (not within the survivor’s killzone).
  • If a character takes the Hold Your Nerve action, it is the only action the character can take that turn.

Hopefully, with these changes, it’ll make the scenarios a little tougher.

Since I still had everything set up, I decided to take another shot at the scenario using these new rules.

I still placed walkers out randomly but this time they seemed a bit more dense on my starting side.  No matter, my overall strategy would be the same- secure my start side and then sweep left.

Again, my fighters move out to engage in the walkers but a Walking Dead event card brings even more to the fight.  I’m using Tyreese’s full compliment of dice at this point.

Glenn is the only one to do anything as most everyone just barely passes the combat rolls, even Tyreese with his handful of dice.

We’re able to secure the first car again but threat is now creeping up on my weak links, Julie and Chris. The fighters move out to control the center and do a little better this time.  Several walkers drop but aren’t removed from the board yet.

We’re able to move the second car and drop a lot of walkers. I get lucky on the end of the round prone rolls and almost all the walkers stay down.  I know that won’t last long.

A “They Won’t Stay Down” event card pops almost all the walkers back up but several are getting out of position.  The threat is too high now at Medium so Julie sticks with Tyreese and Chris uses his paper bag item to calm down.

I decide I can risk it so we bring everyone in to move the last two cars and then square off against the remaining walkers.  Rick goes to Carl to help and everyone is able to survive the end of the turn.  Scenario Complete!

The threat count in this game was much tougher to mitigate and made for some interesting decisions where Rick sat out a lot trying to knock down the threat counter.

Even though the result was the same: Scenario won and all survivors were ok, it felt harder and made me think more about how I would approach the stituation.  I think the new “hardcore” variant is solid enough that it should hold through the rest of the Miles Behind Us scenarios.

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4 Comments

  1. Russ Spears

    I like the look of how those red dice stand out in the pics 🙂

    I’m still in the base/1st pass of the solo-only rules, but did I read that in one of the expansions the walkers no longer stop when running into an obstacle but instead slide (around, to the end?)?

    I’m still playing like a newb – about 50/50 on winning the early scenarios. Granted, I’m not the best strategist.

    • Christian

      Yeah I like those dice on the stark b/w board. Regarding walkers, I think that is in the wave 3 and 4 expansions but I thought it was only talking about walkers moving indoors. I haven’t gotten to that yet so I’d have to double check.

      Regarding the challenge, it may just be dice, event card draws, and how things are set up. If I find that I’m not winning any of the other scenarios, then I’ll know I’ve pushed it too far.

  2. Sean Gewecke

    Looks like a fun play.

    I have not felt the games to be too easy. I find them to actually be pretty tough. I wonder if I’m doing something wrong.

    Fun read. Keep the reports coming.

    • Christian

      Thanks! Regarding the challenge, I think it depends on how you are losing, if you are losing because the threat goes too high, then it might be that you have to dedicate more survivors to using the Hold Your Nerve action and not shoot guns as much (assuming you are using guns). If you’re losing because walkers are eating your face, that may be dice or getting into bad spots where you get overwhelmed. Event card draws can really screw you up too.

      Of course, I could be the one totally messing something up! 😀 I think as long as you’re enjoying it, I’d keep the rules the same. The system seems flexible enough that the game can push and pull to make the right experience for you.

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