Zona Alfa: Salvage and Survival in the Exclusion Zone: 25 (Osprey Wargames)

Product Information

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! Troop Quality is the final support. To reflect varying expertise and experience, there are three kinds of soldier in the Zone: Rookie, Hardened, or Veteran. Each has corresponding ability to act in battle.

This covers a better way of dealing with wounds than the original rule book, there are new weapons and accessories with better options for melee combat. Zone hostiles can be made more dangerous and the concept of fatigue and obsessions are introduced. In Zona Alfa, progression is covered from Rookie through to Veteran. In Kontraband, crew members can add sixth sense, extra toughness, and an additional skill after a number of survived missions. Rookies have one action per activation, no special abilities and a limited amount of gear. Hardened soldiers have two actions per activation, have learned a skill, and can use more equipment. Veterans can perform three actions per activation, have two vital skills, and can equip themselves with useful items for themselves and their weapons.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.

C. It introduces new levels of detail to the player characters, equipment, and the mission areas, and as such, modifies some of the original core rules and introduces new game components. Kontraband is not a stand-alone game and so first and foremost, you need a copy of the Zona Alfa rule book. Kontraband is the first expansion for Zona Alfa, and leans fully into the co-op/solo play. Instead of starting out with a starter band, you get 4 vets that either belong to the scientist or stalker faction. Each faction has its own types like smuggler, bounty hunter, field agent that have their own skills and specialisations. The reason you enter the Zone with a bit of a head start is that like Zona Alfa, Kontraband is just as deadly, and in some cases, very hard. Rookies have no place in the heart of the Zone. Scenic items, tokens or chits to mark the important Points of Interest locations on the tabletop, as well as ones for the strange and dangerous micro–rifts in reality known as Anomalies. Whatever you choose, they should be distinct and easily identifiable to all players.Those three elements form the core of Zona Alfa game play and should allow anyone to form a crew and start exploring the Zone. The combat ability, which covers both melee and shooting, gets worse the greener you are. You roll under combat ability on a D10, so a Vet with combat ability 6 will have a better chance than a rookie with 4. A roll of 1 is a natural success, which should give hope to players like me, who shouldn’t really be playing wargames with dice. Turn Three and Four saw both sides scrupulously avoiding any more secondary Hot Spots, moving wide around them to avoid the triggering radius, and trading fire, trying to Kill or at least Pin their opponents. The race to the Factory was on. At this advanced stage of my hobby-life, I meet plenty of people who enjoy gaming but don’t have the time to invest in large, painted armies, terrain, or learn a complex rule set. They want fast and fun games with a high coolness quotient, lots of adventure, a bit of competition, and an excuse to hang out and eat pizza with friends. The Searcher (Ali) has the scrounger skill so can search the POI twice, He secures rations, water and ammo which the crew will need for the next mission – in the game you have to think about the future as well as the present.

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. 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.

Osprey Wargames Series

The objective of the game is to search Anomalies to retrieve artifacts (the recommended goal for a campaign being 12 artifacts). It is recommended that the play area for a game has 3 Anomalies to search. The rules for anomalies are fleshed out and there are options for different area effects if the anomaly search goes wrong – four ways to die. Models can be caught in a gravity force field, electrocuted, blasted or teleported away from the anomaly. 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. As far as anything left out, no. Zona Alfa is meant to be a simple, reliable system. Over four decades playing table top wargames, board games, and RPGS, I never ceased to be amazed at the imagination and creativity of the gaming community. I felt the best thing I could offer would be a set of tools for people to stat out their miniatures, form salvage crews, and undertake their own missions in the Exclusion Zone. The Zone event roll results in another Alpha predator arriving. Things are not good for Spassky. He takes the full force of the Zone emission, he’s pinned and wounded and it takes all his actions to recover. Nimzo gives him an action to go on alert. The rest of the team move round to deal with the Predator when it enters.

Four members of the Cape Cod Wargame Commission spent Saturday afternoon playing Zona Alfa. We decided on a Factory Raid in a Threat Level Two area – four Hot Spots plus the Mission Objective. Zona Alfa: Salvage and Survival in the Exclusion Zone leans heavily into the fictional STALKER/METRO 2033 settings. If you’re not familiar, think Post-Apocalypse Soviet-style, in and around Chernobyl, Ukraine and other parts of Eastern Europe. There’s a dark, brooding feel with contemporary tech, and a hint of unnatural menace. Zona Alfa is the latest iteration of my fast-play house rules that were titled ‘Cleared to Engage’. I’d been using them for years here to introduce people to miniature war gaming. It’s a skirmish game that uses D10s and was made with 28mm miniatures in mind, but 15mm or 20mm will work just as well. A fairly simple system, it’s played in a 3’ x 3’ or 4’ x4’ area with a set turn limit, so games typically run one to two hours. For those who want to dive into miniatures gaming, or have short narrative games with a low model count, the market for miniature skirmish games is in a golden age. There’s a plethora of rulesets and settings to choose from out there depending on your taste, but if you’re a fan of the S.T.A.L.K.ER. or Metro 2033 video games series, you can’t get much better than Zona Alfa. People who like slow Russian movies – like the ones that inspired those games! – can also apply. In Zona Alfa, players start by forming crews of 4 -12 miniatures, each with special gear, weapons, and abilities, with the intention of salvaging valuable items and artifacts in the dangerous and eerie quarantined area known as the ‘Exclusion Zone’. Game play rests on three pillars: Streamlined Game Stats, Alternating Activation, and Troop Quality Levels.The game is played on a 3×3 or 4×4 space depending on scenario, and lots of scenery is necessary as it is unforgiving for idiots who stand out in the open. So the more scenery, the better. You’ll need some models of course, and about ten per side should cover that if you want to run a gang of fresh-faced noobs. Zona Alfa was an extension of my interest in the computer game, STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl. That was the first ‘open world’ game I ever played and it was fascinating. It was so different from the frantic, run-n-gun games I had previously encountered – the landscape, the pace, the mood, the enemies, the missions… all of it. I immediately set about trying to recreate it on the table top, converting some of The Assault Group’s modern Russian figs with gasmask heads from Pig Iron Productions. I painted up squads from every major faction and started running skirmish games with them. Part of my squad angled toward the factory while the Sniper and RPK looked for good angles near the fuel tanks. Other Pat’s Veterans leap-frogged between the Conex containers and the Office.