Greetings, super friends! I have a question that keeps coming up in our play.
A zombie attacks a hero, and uses a special card..say, the card that lets a zombie use a weapon from the discard pile. The human cancels the fight. What happens to the zombie's special card? Does it return to his hand, or get discarded? Common sense indicates it would be discarded...but then, he would have never played it if the human had cancelled the fight first.
So...who should play their cards first? Humans? Zombies? Some other solution?
Thanks!
In your sequence, the Zombie player's card gets discarded.
There isn't a required order for players to play cards in, its not a case of Zombie first then Heroes, rather they are naturally intermingled.
Most often, fight cards are used to change the outcome of a fight. So, the dice are rolled, and then generally its the "currently losing" side that plays cards/effects. This may continue with the current loser possibly staying the same or possibly switching several times. After while neither side want to play any more cards/abilities, and by agreement the fight moves on to the resolution step, in which one side or the other wins. Cancelling a fight bypasses resolution, so no winners or losers.
There are some cards that might take effect even if the fight were cancelled, such as weapon breakage cards, but certainly anything affecting the fight, is lost.
For cards that depend on having won/lost, wait until the resolution step before playing them.
For zombie cards that depend on wounds, wait until fight resolution and the player agreeing to take the wound before playing them.
If for some reason you play a card that really should be played later, eg the player rolls the dice and the zombies are currently winning and the zombie player whacks down a "I feel kinda strange" card, without the Heroes agreeing to move on to resolution (at least implicitly). In this situation, the players can still play dice affecting cards or cancel the fight, since a zombie players getting ahead of themselves shouldn't disadvantage them.
If the card becomes unplayable when the "correct" time arrives, the player just returns it to their hand. They should generally be allowed to change their mind as well, when the "correct" time arrives if circumstances have changed.
Playing a card early is best treated as having foolishly shown the card and telegraphed intent, not as a binding effect. This is necessary because the fast smooth play of the game can lead to many slight instances of skipping ahead and every so often someone need to say, "hold on, I wanted to do X".