What are you, a statue? If you’ve got a collection of modern military miniatures, play Zona Alfa. If not, take a hike.
Zona Alfa is probably the best use of your Ariadna minis outside of playing Infinity. Even smoke templates make an appearance – anyone can have a smoke grenade!While the rules themselves are fine, we were disappointed by threadbare scenario rules. This seems to be a thing we encounter more and more recently. Ask your local game designer to add scenario rules.On the flip side, the army building rules are probably some of the fastest we’ve ever seen. My main gripe is that you never really have to make tradeoffs between range and power, as shotguns and SMGs are classed in melee weapons and thus don’t take a ranged weapon slot. Not very hard-scrabble of us to run around with multiple guns!Another Zone Alfa thing is exploring Hot Spots. They will spawn enemies, you just never know how many (you can nudge the table result a little if you previously threw a bolt at the spot). The dice on the table are there to determine how this pack of wild dogs will be arranged. The black circle is one of my wounded troopers and he’s in major trouble.The dogs themselves are in major trouble here as Cassa’s character has been specc’d for melee. Seeing how he went with a smaller team of all Hardened (highest level) troops and this guy has an SMG atop of his melee attack skill, he’s unstoppable.Yet Zona Alfa character can still be halted in their tracks by pin markers. My sniper on the right earned one for critically failing a shooting check. Each pin takes an action to clear, meaning that Hardened (3 actions per turn) soldiers are much better at it than Rookies (1 action).In conclusion, both of the podcast hosts think that Zona Alfa is a neat game that could be improved with a little more internal balancing between the guns and having a more robust scenario system.
