Eighteen months after the initial announcement that Swedish tabletop RPG Mutant Year Zero would be translated into a miniature skirmish game, Mutant Year Zero: Zone Wars has opened pre-orders ahead of its June 4 release date.
Zone Wars takes the post-apocalyptic world and characters of the Mutant roleplaying game – which was recently revamped as Mutant Year Zero by board game publisher Free League Publishing – and pits them against each other in small-scale battles. Each player will control a band of Stalkers patrolling the Zone (a big inspiration from the Strugatsky brothers here) in search of artifacts and resources that can sustain their communities for a little while longer.
The initial factions include mutated humans whose enhanced abilities match their deformed physical forms, animals that have gained sentience and a culture of their own, and robotic entities that long ago replaced their flesh with metal or found the spark of consciousness among all their circuits. A threatening new power wants to stop them from transforming the world back into a promised “land of the dawn,” but everyone is too busy fighting over scraps to notice.
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Free League’s Tomas Härenstam and Nils Karlén teamed up with Necromunda and Warhammer Fantasy Battle designer Andy Chambers to create a ruleset that, according to a press release, “embraces chaos and emergent narrative to create a fun, fast-paced experience.” Zone Wars will use a set of six-sided dice, similar to the Year Zero engine that powers many of its RPGs. Players will need to roll at least a six to hit their opponents, and each figure can push for more hits (and therefore more damage and better effects) if they don’t mind risking their delicate, makeshift equipment.
Zone Wars also features a bespoke initiative system that does away with the activation of standard free-for-all or turn-trading modes. The designers also want to prevent early aggression from tipping matches too early, and have tied some powerful abilities to robotic mutations and upgrades. A loss can be turned in your favor quickly with clever thinking and the use of gifts granted by radiation. You can also let the environment do the work for you: Zone cards representing nuclear fallout, acid weather, and other nasty conditions are drawn each round, affecting all teams equally. The Wasteland favors no one.
Two core boxes will be available at launch: the Core Set and the Robots & Psionics expansion. The Core Sets contain everything two players need to start stalking: two teams of five 32mm miniatures (pre-assembled but unpainted) consisting of the Ark Mutants (humans) and Genlab Tribe (animals), a 36×36” playmat, cardboard terrain, rulebook and ruler, and all tokens, dice, and other items needed during play. Five pre-written scenarios are included along with single-player rules and a character creation guide if you want to bring your RPG creations into the gridiron arena.
The Robots & Psionics expansion includes ten figures from two more factions: the newly self-aware robots of the Mechatron Hive and the psionically gifted and secretive humans of the Nova Cult. All of the same accessories from the game are included in this box, including five more scenarios, but the real draw is the rules and pieces to expand the base game to a four-mode set of shooters, wings, fangs, and massive brain powers.
The miniatures were sculpted by Alejandro Muñoz Martín and Daniel BlueIce and, according to Free League, were sun-painted at the factory. Sun-painting is a technique that allows you to see a lot of sculpted detail on figures that would otherwise be unpainted (or undercoated), meaning you don't have to get out the brushes and pots to get them looking nice on the table.
Pre-orders for the core set and the first expansion box for Mutant Year Zero: Zone Wars are now live on the Free League website. An exact date for when pre-orders will ship was not provided, but it will likely be very soon or even before the game’s June 4 release date.