Each counter represents one survivor or one zombie. You choose your star, your “mini-me” if you will, and arm him or her with one of four weapon types. But you’re not alone as you then recruit a few other survivors to form your group.
Then it’s off to explore a beautifully detailed map representing deserted cities, suburbs, and rural areas. But are they really deserted? Not if you count the zombies, the seemingly endless hordes of zombies. But soon you realize that the zombies may be the least of your worries as you run into other survivors. Are they friendly or hostile? Well, the game mechanics determine that. With luck you can recruit them to use in future games. But sometimes it spins out of control
Which leads us to combat. There’s two ways to have combat in ATZ. Trust me on this; shooting is what you want to do. Yes, when facing one zombie it’s easy to handle him in hand-to-hand combat but get them in bunches and that’s when they are really dangerous. Better to shoot them from afar. Better to shoot survivors too.

ATZ is built around the Reaction System. Simply put, when something happens it causes you to react immediately. This reaction causes the enemy to immediately react. The reactions go back and forth until it is resolved. For example, one member of your group steps around a corner and comes into sight of a hostile survivor. This triggers a reaction test to see what the hostile survivor does. The hostile survivor scores high on the In Sight Test and fires back, but he misses. This causes your group member to take a Received Fire Test and he returns fire but misses as well. The hostile survivor now takes a Received Fire Test and ducks back out of sight, breaking the reaction chain.

ATZ can be played as a one-up game or as a campaign where you link the adventures of your group together to tell your story. The more missions you go on the more experience you gain. As your experience grows your characters increase in ability while increasing the size of their group. In the beginning the goal of ATZ was to survive. But now as you grow in numbers and skill it’s time to rebuild the world except maybe this time with you in charge.