There aren’t many games, of any kind, that I find I want to pre-order or buy on release day. I’m the kind of person that would rather keep their powder dry and see how others take to a game before committing. Why put your money down and take that risk when you can let others do that for you? Especially when games are going to cost at least £50 (usually) to get started with everything you need.

Why, then, did I pre-order Zona Alfa? Partly due to a little hype, as the theme is one that’s not been tapped into all that much. The cost, £12 for the book and the ability to essentially use any old minis that would fit the bill, also made things interesting. Lastly, I was buying a birthday present online, and getting Zona Alfa at the same time meant I’d get free shipping. It’s nice when things come together like that.



Zona Alfa (ZA), written by Patrick Todoroff, is the latest in Osprey’s series of concise wargaming rules. Not being written in conjunction with a line of minis, the games are generally quite streamlined to broaden appeal while fitting into their snug page count. They’ve got loads of rulesets out now (23 to date) for different periods and styles of play, and I tend to think that these would make for great ‘entry games’ for people new to the hobby, as they practically cover everything by now. As ZA is the freshest recruit to the lineup, let’s see how well it runs.

I’m going to very unashamedly base my scoring off the‘Little Wars TV’reviews found on youtube. I like the weighted numbers, and if it works why change it, so let’s see how we get on. They also do the best videos of games around, in my opinion. The criteria and weightings are:

Presentation (10%) Playability (30%) Mechanics (30%) Historical Flavour (20%) Support (10%)

Note – This is an ‘initial impressions’ review of the rulebook. I’ll write a brief follow-up review once I’ve played a few games with friends.

Presentation

It’s probably no surprise that ZA scores highly on presentation. Osprey’s wargames rules have got a tried-and-tested format now that’s concise, easy to follow, and accessible. The book is full-colour glossy softback. Though these short books stay light on fluff out of necessity, the artwork made for ZA is captivating and adds a lot of flavour; the full-page pictures are particularly inspiring. There are pictures of miniatures and games in the book, but these tend to be for dramatic purposes rather than diagrams of play. It would be nice to see both, but that’s not something I’ve seen in many Osprey books. There isn’t an index in there (nor in any of the series, I believe) but the contents are broken down well enough and the page count small enough for it not to be an issue whatsoever.

Score: 8

Playability

ZA is very explicit in being a game that doesn’t require hours of prep and mountains of tokens or ‘cheat sheets’ and this is music to my ears. Combined with the short format, I was able to read through the basic rules and be confident that I could run a simple skirmish without any difficulty after an hour or so.

Unlike a lot of wargames, ZA uses D10s as its main dice, rather than D6s – the book states each player will need about 8D10 each. This fits in neatly with the ethos of the games’ design, which is better explained in the mechanics, but it does place a hurdle in the way of playing – most wargamers who don’t play many RPGs aren’t likely to have more than 1 or 2 D10 at most. Easy enough to pick up a bunch on Ebay, but that’s still an extra bit of prep prior to starting. Similarly, ZA should be played with ‘character sheets’ that those new to skirmish-level games won’t necessarily be used to, but the stats are self-explanatory and there’s no fixed format for these, so there’s little barrier to entry. Some blank sheets are provided at the back of the book too, which would be easy enough to recreate.

Some templates are required for the game, too, including a teardrop-shaped flamethrower template, descriptions for which are included. I’m not crazy on this for an Osprey ruleset as it’s unlikely that plastic versions of the template will be released and I don’t really want to have to make my own from paper. Circular markers aren’t an issue as you can simply mark a centre-point and figure out who’s covered by it with a tape measure, but I can see myself house-ruling flamethrower templates into something simpler.

One element of ZA that is driven home repeatedly is WYSIWYG – ‘what you see is what you get’. This essentially boils down to ‘the mini has the same equipment in-game as it is modelled as having’. I’m not a huge fan of this for such a niche title, as chances are your choice of miniatures for the game are going to be quite limited, and unless you’re a master converter the scope for new equipment is easier said than done; it seems crazy that no matter how much I upgrade a character they’ll never wear body armour unless their mini has it. Again, if this was a GW game with manufacturing support and a nice broad variety of plastic minis then fair enough, but there aren’t that many ZA-suitable minis out there to begin with, and to my knowledge they’re all metal. This can always be house-ruled, I suppose, and I see the benefit of this in regards to getting right into a game, but it limits the long-term options you’d have if you play a campaign. Maybe I’m just bitter that my idea of a team in soviet NBC ‘womble suits’ will be really constricted by this, though.

Where WYSIWYG shines, though, is that it essentially means any ‘random’ monster miniatures you have can stand in as ‘zone hostiles’ with no real alterations. This is helpful, because there are quite a lot of different monsters (there are 7 types) needed to run ZA, some of which appear in groups. You’ll likely need to either do a bit of scrounging through your collection and/or order a couple of extras to get everything needed.

One downside to the compact style of this book is that the scenarios in the book are very bare-boned. There aren’t really any maps or direction – it’s assumed that players will come to an agreement on what the scenario will be, and while that’s fair it’s nice to have a bit more guidance at times.

Score: 7

Mechanics

The majority of ZA’s mechanics revolve around the use of D10 to resolve outcomes. Most stats will have a score of 1-10, and the player must roll under this value to succeed. I like this for keeping things moving and straightforward – you look at a stat and (handful of modifiers aside) you know straight away what numbers you’re aiming to hit.

The turn sequence is classic ‘I go, you go’ with players taking turns moving individual minis. When players can have as few as 4 minis in their crew this is a good way to keep the game moving and feel dynamic, though it may make the turn length bog down in larger games. There aren’t any ‘friction’ mechanics in the game that aren’t controllable – a character can become ‘pinned’ when fired at, which stops them from doing anything at all, but there’s no test to remove pin markers – the unit simply spends its actions removing them. Friction is a love/hate issue in wargames, but i feel like a few ‘exclusion zone’ related friction effects would have added a lot to the flavour of the game – I recently read ‘Metro 2033’ and so many encounters in that book are defined not by the gunfighting but the psychological effects the world around the characters are subjected to.

There are ‘neutral’ monsters in the game found around objectives that spawn semi-randomly. The AI used for these is straightforward and sensible enough that, again, it’s fast to pick up and get playing, but has ways for players to ‘trick’ spawning and cause problems for their opponent. It’s a simple mechanic but has enough nuance to be utilised by clever players, which I love.

ZA’s abstraction on the rules side of things feels just about right. The author highlights that they’re not going to go into the finer details between an AK-47 and an AK-74 and that’s something I appreciate because they’re going to mess you up regardless. This is one of the major exceptions to the WYSIWYG rule, and one I think the game benefits from greatly. Similarly, details like cover have enough detail without becoming granular, and feels like an application of common sense. Combat feels pretty lethal, I should add – most minis can only take a single hit before they’re incapacitated.

The way characters show experience and capability in ZA is through the number of actions they can take in a turn. The lowest-quality units can only do one action in a turn, and the best can do three. This will make your green units feel like cannon fodder, perhaps a little too fodder-y(?!) but that’s probably the point. It may also just be that I’ve missed it in my read-through, but it seems that characters can’t be killed in campaigns, only incapacitated (and earning some potentially negative traits) which seems in opposition to the ethos of the game, but is likely a concession to keeping campaigns ticking along.

There is a campaign system in the rulebook which is nice and straightforward again. The campaign system reminds me of a scaled-back modern version of Mordheim. It’s set out to achieve a game that can be jumped into relatively quickly and the mechanics prop this up appropriately.

Score: 7

Historical Flavour

A bit of an odd category in this regard, as ZA isn’t historical. That said, we can take a look at the tone of the content and see if it fits that Metro 2033/Stalker vibe well.

The images in the books are superbly picked; there’s a strong sense of eastern Europe in their design, and this is echoed in some of the Russian terminology dotted throughout, such as khrabrost (character level.) It’d be nice to see a few of the mechanics reflect the environment a little more, but it’s not too hard to picture that happening in ‘theatre of the mind’ instead of having it spelled out for you.

It’s difficult to say how the game reflects its tone through mechanics, though I would say the high level of lethality is a good recreation of that ‘Exclusion Zone’ tone. The WYSIWYG mechanic is part of this – you’re told to model your ‘hostiles’ on whatever monstrous minis you have to hand, for example – and as a result your sense of atmosphere will be dictated by what you have to hand. That’s always going to be the case with any game, though, so it’d be unfair to judge ZA on that in this regard.

Score: 6

Support

This is hard to gauge as the game is fresh off the presses, however the Osprey games have a history of needing strong author involvement post-launch to have any kind of dedicated support. ZA is very much a labour of love from Todoroff, who has run his own site all about this mini-genre for quite a long time. Todoroff has already released quick reference sheets and scenarios via the game’s Facebook page, which makes me think further support will be on the way. My hope is that maybe we’ll see a few house rules get fleshed out into bigger mechanics via the page and help ZA grow into a larger game.Score: 8

Total Score (with weightings): 70/100

As mentioned above, Zona Alfa reminds me quite a bit of Mordheim, and that is certainly no bad thing. I’m left wanting to see parts of the game expanded more, but that isn’t due to a lack of content: I want extras because I’m so keen on what’s in front of me. Much like Mordheim, Zona Alfa is teetering on that line between RPG and Wargame, and Todoroff’s ‘no nonsense, get into the game’ approach has laid down a broad foundation for a solid wargame; I want to see the RPG element fluffed out as time goes on. Whether that’s by the community or the author, I don’t mind, the key takeaway is Zona Alfa leaves me wanting more of this setting and this game, and that’s no bad thing.