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.

Kontraband only adds to the fun, and while it’s not the most polished book in the looks department the content is great and adds more stuff, skills, artifacts and scenarios to uncover in the zone. It also lets you play without interacting with other people if that’s your bag or some sort of worldwide event has you sequestered at home. It’s also one of the only solo games I genuinely enjoy.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. Kontraband retains the basic mechanics of the core Zona Alfa game; D10 dice, the model stat line, the weapon stat line, mission area Threats, Zone Hostiles, etc. Combat is still a major factor but with a new emphasis on exploration, artifact recovery, and solo and co-op play, Kontraband introduces a number of modifications and additions that accommodate more detailed and dangerous game play. (See Section Four for details on additional rules and tweaks) These modifications apply to three main elements: Characters, Setting, and Equipment. The crew head up the board and Sukova (a Scientist) is best equipped to search the anomaly, which she does. Here, a skill roll of 8 would normally fail but Sukova is equipped with a Detector which gives her a +2 bonus and she recovers an artefact, which would count towards a campaign goal. Why Alternating Activation? Simply because I’m not a fan of IGO-UGO turn sequences. My goal is to keep all players on both sides involved as much as possible, acting and reacting to events as they unfold in the course of a game turn. IGO-UGO doesn’t do that for me.

Zona Alfa has optional Point Of Interest cards to spice up your game, and Kontraband expands on this to drive your game forward. You mark points on the board that generate events, and when searching the marker for loot, you flip the first card over. There are many effects this can have, some good, some bad, some weird, and mostly there’s loot to find. And you’ll want to salvage loot. Deep in the Zone you can’t trade at the stalls or with passing stalkers, and you’ll have to make sure you’ll scrounge enough food, water and batteries together, or else your stalkers will starve and their detectors and other equipment won’t work. You always have a chance to react to the events happening though, if you reveal a card you can shoot or run away (provided you get a good roll). 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. The Mission Objective was a cache of supplies in the old factory. There was a Six Turn Limit and no Visible Hostiles in sight. Well I’m obviously going to keep playing, making crews and terrain, and posting Battle Reports. I’m fortunate to be part of a great local gaming group and Zona Alfa is definitely in the rotation.Next, you need the standard fare for a table top war game: miniatures, terrain, dice (D10 and D6), a ruler/measuring tape in inches, blast and teardrop templates, a few tokens to mark a model’s in-game status, and printed character sheets for your models. Like any specialty area of interest, wargames have their own jargon. Here are some terms and concepts you’ll need to know for Zona Alfa. Here’s John’s hardened scavenger moving in to search a decommissioned air compressor next to a derelict pumping station. Tags 28mm 40k army battle report caluphel campaign chaos club death guard dragon rampant dwarves fantasy game night grimdark hobby miniatures narrative nurgle painting post-apoc project saga sci-fi skaven skirmish terrain warbands wargames warhammer workshop 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.

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. 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. Zona Alfa is not tied into to any specific game company or range of miniatures, therefore certain aesthetic elements like in-game hostiles are of the generic, mutated, post-apocalyptic kind. Feel free to use and substitute whatever figures you already have in your collection. There are guidelines later on for statting out different miniatures.

Equipment. Kontraband not only changes some details on existing pieces of equipment, it introduces several new ones. It also adds a new category of gear, Weapon Accessories, which are separate from items that fill Equipment Slots. Details on Weapon Accessories can be found further in. Zona Alfa is my attempt to fill that bill. My first goal was to create a set of solid, straightforward wargame rules for 28mm tabletop skirmishes. I wanted a game that would allow anyone reasonably familiar with miniature wargaming to be able to stat out appropriate figures from their own collection, plunk down terrain, review the basics, and get started straight away. At each turn after turn 1 a D10 is rolled. The die roll is added to the turn number and if the result is greater than 10, a zone event occurs the subsequent turn. No zone event for turn 3. A. It shifts from the traditional player-versus-player competition to a player-versus-the table effort, and as such is geared toward Solo and Cooperative play.

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. These products were created by scanning an original printed edition. Most older books are in scanned image format because original digital layout files never existed or were no longer available from the publisher. 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.

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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! 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. A 2 v 2 game, Other Pat and I faced off against Matt and John. Each player was allowed 12K to form their crews. In typical authoritarian fashion, Matt’s Evil Landlord and a Property Manager Henchman rousted the Serfs, kitted them with AKs and E-Juice (Amphetamines and Vodka) gave them a rousing speech and sent them into battle. The rest of us opted for more balanced forces with a mix of Veterans and Hardened Zone dogs.