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Majesticon Day 2: Zona Alfa

Posted by Comrade on September 17, 2021
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The second day of our mini-game con kicked off with a morning session of Zona Alfa. Astute readers of this blog may recall my general infatuation with Stalker-inspired gaming, and that is what Zona Alfa delivers in spades. The game was released in January 2020 and Comrade’s Wargames got its grubby paws on an advance copy to read and review.

I was pleased to return to Zona Alfa for this session — and to incorporate some exciting elements from the new supplement Kontraband.

I designed our session as a cooperative scenario that tasked four groups of stalkers with traveling the length of the infamous Khimbruk Road deep in the anomalous Exclusion Zone. There were a several points of interest along the road, and each crew also had its own unique goal that they could work toward.

The road, as you might imagine, was fraught with both threats and potential rewards. Only the hardiest crews would survive to reap the benefits and return home with packs bulging with salvage.

Zona Alfa and Kontraband both use a system to generate random bad guys and loot when players interact with “points of interest” on the map. We had 7 such points of interest on our map, each corresponding to a particular Good Thing or (more likely) a Bad Thing.

The first firefight erupted when John sent his commandos tiptoeing up to a leaking chemical tank. Turns out it wasn’t just a chemical burn he was risking…

A swarm of nasty rad bugs surged out to attack the crews. Thirty years ago their descendants might have been locusts and cockroaches skittering around the irradiated ruins of the Zone, but today they were fearsome chitinous monstrosities that had to be dispatched with brutal prejudice.

While this was happening, Paul’s tunnel scavengers hoofed it to the roof of a nearby outpost and looted another objective marker — drawing the attention of a nearby band of raiders in the process! They popped out of cover and began pouring automatic weapons fire into the unlucky crew! We’re not alone, comrades!

Nearby, the crews noticed a swirling, pulsating energy field that seemed to warp the laws of physics. This could only be an Anomaly — one of the enigmatic hazards that frequently occur in the deepest reaches of the Zone. At great personal risk, the crews moved in to explore the Anomaly.

Well, they didn’t die! That much is certain. Will they sprout vestigial third limbs a few weeks from now? Perhaps. Only time will tell.

The crews continued to battle their way down the pockmarked asphalt of the Khimbruk Road. The presence of enemies ebbed and flowed as points of interest were searched and bad guys dispatched. Rad bugs continued to be an ever-present threat. Thankfully, Vince’s warband was comprised of medics led by a doctor, so there was a limited supply of first aid on hand to keep the injured on their feet.

By turn 6, the warbands had nearly crossed the entire length of the tabletop and had achieved their individual objectives. Remarkably, nobody died — though we had several close calls that required med-kits to patch up warriors in the heat of the moment.

Special props to Vincent’s sniper, who scaled a tower early on and provided pinpoint fire support throughout the game. I doubt the outcome would have been quite so favorable if not for the guardian angel watching over them from above.

As with our previous game, we planned lunch at the conclusion of the game. I had prepared a Russian-themed meal to reward the stalwart Zone explorers. Hearty dark rye bread, gigantic dill pickles, and cold salami — a fine spread to be eaten whilst squatting in the dirt at the end of the Khimbruk Road. Давайте есть, comrades!

Zona Alfa: Kicking the Hornet’s Nest

Posted by Comrade on January 31, 2020
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The gang got together earlier this month for our first game of Zona Alfa, the new Stalker-inspired post-apocalyptic skirmish game from Osprey. (Click here to read my review of Zona Alfa.)

What started out as a simple introductory game quickly swelled to a two-on-two team slugfest, as players signed on with their scrappy crews, lured by the promise of illicit salvage in the eponymous Exclusion Zone. I rode herd on this motley assemblage as impartial (some would say sinister) gamemaster. I was pleased to get such a robust turnout for this game. Here’s a goofy photo as we prepared to brave the dangers of the Zone.

Zona Alfa draws inspiration from the crumbling, abandoned Cold War industrial heaps that you might find in the hinterlands of Eastern Europe. Players muster crews of stalkers, scavengers, and mercenaries and pit them against similarly motivated bands on the battlefield. But the Zone itself plays a huge role in each game … Zone hostiles can appear at any moment, and the very environment itself can suddenly erupt in violent fashion.

Narrative gaming is the heart and soul of Zona Alfa. For our games, we decided that the crews had heard a rumor of an abandoned supply truck parked in the shadow of the Khimbruk Electrochemical Combine, located about a mile inside the perimeter of the Zone. Surrounded by the decaying detritus of the derelict factory, the cargo truck promised a payday of salvage, loot, and more. Here’s a look at the objective.

It’s just right there, for the taking. Yeah, right…

I created some basic starting crews for the players, and then we got started. We set up a 4×4 foot table, slightly larger than the 3×3 size recommended in the rulebook, due to our surplus of players. Each side alternated by activating one figure, performing actions, and then passing play to the opposing team. The first couple of turns were focused on learning the basic game system and moving out of our deployment areas. But before too long, the players got close enough to begin exchanging some ranging volleys of automatic rifle fire as they slipped through the ruins.

We placed three hot spots on the battlefield, in addition to the main mission objective, for a total of four focal points for game action. Hot spots (and the mission objective) trigger Zone hostiles when figures get close enough (typically within 6 inches), but Zona Alfa includes a mechanic to allow players to toss bolts or rocks to trigger hot spots from up to 18 inches away. This is a mechanic that come straight out of the Stalker video game, and it gives players the chance to exploit hot spots from afar and then watch gleefully as their opponent dealt with the ensuing bad guys.

The first hot spot yielded a pack of wild dogs that had spent a little too much time digging through the radioactive slag pile behind the electrochemical plant. They were a ghastly bunch, snarling and covered in bleeding sores. Dan’s troopers paused in their advance and expertly gunned them down.

From there, the game developed into a series of running gun battles as the players lobbed grenades and laid down overlapping fire to cover their advance. John’s crew triggered the next hot spot and was able to take cover in a ruined building as a mob of giant rats scampered toward them.

Here’s another look at the battlefield a couple turns into the game.

Lawrence found himself pinned down by accurate fire from Mark’s band of mostly rookie snipers. He kept his guys in cover and advanced slowly, but Mark was able to toss a bolt and trigger a hot spot, which sent a mob of horrifying zombies shambling down the street towards Lawrence’s dangerously exposed leader.

We found that the rules for Zone hostiles were satisfying but not overly oppressive. This was probably because we were playing at Zone Threat Level 1, the “easiest” setting in the game. As you get closer to the Zone’s enigmatic center, the threats become much more dangerous. Near the perimeter, the Zone hostiles were just a nuisance. But those zombies definitely tied up Lawrence’s leader for a good portion of the game!

Elsewhere on the battlefield, savvy players were using the distraction provided by the Zone hostiles to move forward and secure other objectives. When a figure searches a hot spot, the player rolls randomly to see what has been uncovered. Often it’s salvage worth cold, hard cash outside the Zone, but occasionally you’ll run across equipment or other gear.

Here’s John’s hardened scavenger moving in to search a decommissioned air compressor next to a derelict pumping station.

Likewise, Dan wisely looted this rusted generator, stripping off any useable parts and bagging them up to be hauled back to civilization. His exploration roll resulted in an anomaly — a strange electromagnetic (or was it supernatural?) disturbance that, in this case, disintegrated his hapless trooper. Better luck next time, comrade.

The final clash of the game came when Dan’s crew approached the supply truck during a lull in the fighting. As his poor (doomed) trooper crept closer, the bandits that had been hiding in the rear of the truck sprang their trap, dropping the tailgate and coming out with AK-74s blazing. This was the result of a particularly potent roll on the Zone hostiles table. The bandits took out the trooper, then began blasting in all directions as the other crews closed in.

As the players began to strategize a way to neutralize the scavengers, Dan took it upon himself to deliver the coup de grace. His leader climbed onto the catwalk of the nearby electrochemical factory and tossed a grenade right into the midst of the bandits. Problem solved, comrade.

After that, we tallied up our loot totals and performed the after-action stuff for crew members who had been knocked out during the game. Zona Alfa has a nicely developed campaign system where players can track the acquisition of loot as well as the inevitable degradation of your crew, as repeated forays into the Zone start to take their toll on even the hardest soldier. Best to dismiss such unfortunate souls from your crew and bring on fresh recruits, if you want my advice.

The gameplay of Zona Alfa was easy to pick up after a couple turns. We loved the simplicity of the activation system, and how the Zone hostiles system scales with the overall Threat Level of the game. Basically, those same zombies will be a lot more menacing when you encounter them at Threat Level 3, instead of Threat Level 1. Overall, the mechanics were best described by one of the players as a “toolkit approach,” where the author provides a solid core rules engine with the implicit idea that players will tack on house rules and put their own spin on the game as time goes on. Despite being a casual playgroup, we were still able to punch a few holes in the rules as written and find some loopholes that could be exploited. Again, that’s easy enough handle, but groups should discuss their expectations and approach at the outset, to ensure a fun experience for everyone.

We all agreed that Zona Alfa is a superb catalyst for building terrain, painting up some fun, tacti-cool squads of Cold War antiheroes, and playing out some pitch-perfect adventures in the Zone. We’ll play this one again soon!

ZONA ALFA Review: Get in the Zone, Comrade

Posted by Comrade on January 7, 2020
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ZONA ALFA, the new skirmish wargame written by Patrick Todoroff and published by Osprey’s beloved “blue book” imprint, is a peculiar and delicious take on post-apocalyptic tabletop gaming. Inspired by the crumbling visuals and moody storytelling in video games like STALKER and Metro 2033, ZONA ALFA provides a toolkit for players who want to recruit a crew of men and women forged in the crucible of the Cold War, equip them to explore the enigmatic Exclusion Zone — braving the otherworldly anomalies and inhuman adversaries therein — and hopefully see them return to their favorite watering hole with riches and stories to tell.

Osprey has kindly provided Comrade’s Wargames with an advance copy of ZONA ALFA, which will be published in late January 2020. This review will touch on what you can expect in terms of tone, setting, and gameplay. I’ll also sprinkle in some photos of games I’ve played in the Zone over the years.

On a personal level, I’ve been enamored with STALKER-inspired wargaming for more than a decade. I’ve followed Todoroff’s blog, the aptly-named Stalker7, for most of that time. The unique aesthetic of this style of gaming is inspired by the decaying urban and industrial landscape you can find in real-life places like the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, where detritus from half-remembered Eastern Bloc facilities and bunkers lies abandoned, often reclaimed by vegetation and punctuated by supply caches and cast-off military equipment. Tabletop games set in the Zone are heavy on exploration and risk-taking, and you can be assured that the places you choose to send your crew will certainly be populated by horrific things that need to be dispatched with terrible prejudice. The rulebook is peppered with short, two-sentence lore snippets, dripping with Soviet fatalism, that hint at the dangers and wonders of the Zone.

Truly, the milieu that Todoroff has captured in ZONA ALFA fires the imagination in a way that few other post-apoc settings do.

It’s also a hobbyists’ dream. I’ve spent the last decade gleefully collecting any 28mm figure wearing a gas mask, reasoning that it will be only a matter of time before they, too, get tapped to go on a Zone run. ZONA ALFA doesn’t have a dedicated miniatures line, and Todoroff encourages you to use whatever figures you wish in your games. Personally, I’m enamored with the pitch-perfect offerings from Lead Adventure Miniatures’ The Last Project line of post-apoc scavengers, as well as the gritty near-future troopers available from Pig Iron Productions. Likewise, the Zone offers an opportunity to tackle all manner of terrain projects, from crashed helicopters to ruined buildings to rusted machinery.

From a gameplay perspective, ZONA ALFA offers a toolkit approach best suited to friendly, narrative-style skirmish games on a 3×3 foot table (or 4×4 for larger games). Players build “crews” composed of scavengers, trespassers, adventurers, loners, killers, explorers, and robbers and then send them on daring runs into the Zone. They’re nominally opposed by one or more competing players, but more often than not the players will find themselves squaring off against “zone hostiles” — NPC enemies spawned at various points on the battlefield and controlled by a basic AI system. Avoiding, defeating, or exploiting these roving packs of horrors create some of the more innovative gameplay elements in ZONA ALFA.

For your crew, individual models are rated based on their experience level: rookie, hardened, or veteran. Obviously you’ll pay more to recruit a crew member with more skill, but in general players should expect to field between 5 and 10 figures in a typical crew. ZONA ALFA is meant to be played WYSIWYG (“what you see if what you get”), and the wargear rules are streamlined to support this — no fiddly point costs for red dot sights or climbing ropes. Just choose your figure, note his experience level, and fill out your (initially limited) slots for weapons, gear, and skills.

On the battlefield, players are encouraged to develop scenarios that challenge their crews to accomplish specific goals on the tabletop, rather than simply doing the default “kill ’em all” scenario that plague so many wargames. Example scenarios might include crossing the map to reach a crippled truck, going door-to-door in an abandoned village searching for survivors, or fueling up a generator so your crew can activate a pressure hatch and descend into a subterranean bunker.

While ZONA ALFA probably qualifies as “rules lite” (and thus, by default, wins endorsement from Comrade’s Wargames), this ruleset definitely features some crunch. With a relatively low number of figures and a fairly dangerous tabletop environment to explore, ZONA ALFA goes all in on the tactical options. Most figures have just a handful of stats, but the tabletop itself adds quite a few options to the mix. For example, there are four different levels of cover provided by terrain, plus another modifier for being elevated, plus (usually) a modifier if the model has some basic camouflage. That’s quite a bit to keep in your head, and it’s a good reminder that terrain matters in this game — a lot!

Likewise, ZONA ALFA provides rules for things that I would otherwise handwave away in a typical skirmish game. Things like climbing and jumping rarely matter much in my games, but they’re described in detail in the rulebook.

Lastly, the gear list tends toward the “tacticool,” with more than a few options that are straight out of popular video games. Again, this is understandable given the subject matter that Todoroff is exploring.

Combat is d10-based and features familiar mechanics like attacks rolls and armor saves. But ZONA ALFA takes this one step farther by adding a tier of outcomes for attacks that wound but don’t kill. The “pin” mechanic is simple but dangerous…pump a few rounds into that low concrete wall, and even if you don’t hit the guy behind it, he’s liable to hunker down for a turn or two and try to crawl into his helmet.

Taken together, you’re left with a rules lite game that nonetheless packs a lot of options into the nooks and crannies. Players who want to try out real-world tactics like moving through cover and blind-tossing grenades through doorways will find a lot to chew on. I’m looking forward to exploring the game system in more detail in our first play-through.

So far, we’ve discussed the basics of a solid near-future skirmish wargame. Where ZONA ALFA really shines, however, is how it models the Zone and its savage inhabitants. Before each game, the players jointly describe the overall Mission Objective and the Zone Threat Level, then they place one or more “hot spots” on the battlefield. These are locations outside of the scenario’s Mission Objective that provide additional opportunities for exploration and salvage. As an example: in our game, we decide that we’re going to see who can retrieve the crate of grenades from the abandoned military outpot. The crate of grenades is the Mission Objective, but we put down two additional “hot spots” which represent additional areas to explore, if the players are feeling brave.

Exploring both Mission Objectives and hot spots always triggers “zone hostiles” — everything from rabid dogs to howling mutants. To see what you get, you’ll need to roll on the table that corresponds to the Zone Threat Level of your battlefield. Once spawned, zone hostiles are controlled using a basic AI system to direct their movement and attacks. Savvy players will find ways to steer these baddies toward their opponent, leaving them free to ransack the battlefield while their opponents are blasting away at zombies and radioactive centipedes.

After a few Zone runs, you may find your guys acquiring loot and improving their equipment. The game has a well developed campaign system … with an actual victory condition for your crew! Accumulate the equivalent of 10,000 bucks, and your guys can retire to a dacha in the countryside. How about that?! Of course, a grisly demise in a forgotten patch of forest is a much more likely outcome…

In conclusion, this game is a really remarkable example of one author’s singular creative vision and his ability to bring that vision to a wider audience. I shouldn’t be surprised, really, because Todoroff is also a speculative fiction author, so he’s well versed in both creating content and hitting deadlines. Just reading the rulebook has got me fired up to build terrain (good thing, because there’s a terrain-making competition running this month over on the ZONA ALFA Facebook group).

Well, that’s my report. It’s getting late and I can hear thunder in the distance. Lean in close while the fire’s still warm, comrade. I’ll take first watch tonight.