This Is A Test Of The Emergency Zone Raiding System

As mentioned in my last post I was looking forwards to trying Zone Raiders. I put together some profiles based on some models from the Infinity Operation: Cold Front box:

The bruiser

The sniper

And three cheap (identical) grunts.

The idea was to have a few rules to play around with (reloading, mobility, armour piercing), but not too many so we wouldn't be overwhelmed. I duplicated the profiles for both Pan-O and Nomads to make sure there would be no balance issues in these introductory games:

The first game I played with Speedy. He took the blue Pan-O and I ran the red Nomads. We basically didn't bother with any of the mission or environment rules, to keep things simple. I forgot to take pictures until the end, so you'll see the final board state at the top of this post. We used the Cold Front tokens: regular order tokens represent wounds while irregular order tokens tracked command points, face-down tokens stood in for out-of-ammo tokens, and the frowny face indicated downed models. During the game my armour saves were hot; the Mobile Brigada pretty much refused to die until late-game when the Sniper finally managed to take out his armour. I believe my own sniper was taken out a little early though, and eventually my grunts were overwhelmed.

I then played my friend Watcher (who's not into wargames but has been dragged into a couple before). This time my armour saves were not so hot, and perhaps more importantly my survival rolls were cold too, with models often dropping the moment their armour was breached; my Mobile Brigada went down quite quickly due to my overly-aggressive attempts to get him into combat early. Meanwhile his Orc was on a long flank behind the building on my left, so he arrived untouched late in the match and starting punching my last few models to death.

Obviously this simple demo games don't paint the full picture, but I'm liking the game system so far. I quite enjoyed the pacing created by the alternating model activations; it meant each player got constant quick breaks, but never had to sit idle for very long. I did find that constantly passing control back and forth meant that (in addition to really wishing we had a second measuring tape) I sometimes lost track of which of my models had activated in a round; I think we might start using tokens to track activations.

Which is a bit worrying because there's already a lot of tokens on the table, following each model around. I might discuss placing some tokens on the model cards instead of the on the table, but obviously that would make some things easy to forget, so I think it should be for the less important tokens (like the aforementioned activation tokens, and maybe for wounds) if at all. Also, we all agreed that replacing downed models with a token rather than leaving them on the table would be better, making it much easier to take in the table state at a glance. Obviously each model would need a token that's unique to it, but that's easy enough.

One thing that worried me a bit, and still does, is that the large number of possible actions available each activation could make the game harder for new players to pick up. Watcher seemed to be doing OK though, and personally I found it very enjoyable to have those options; I found it far more interesting than the typical "move-attack" pattern of some wargames. The fact that some actions have added restrictions like ending your activation is an added complication, but I think it's an important balancing factor and I don't think it will take too long to get used to.

Command tokens were a surprisingly fun resource management element: having that extra chance to land an important shot or save a model is a comforting ace to have up your sleeve.

The movement system was a bit more restrictive than I had expected, which is not a bad thing because it means choosing armour with better mobility options has genuine value. I'm a fan of games with a lot of movement, so I'm happy that it feels like the movement and elevation rules will lead to some cool three-dimensional gameplay, though obviously you will need the right terrain to support it.

I was initially afraid that having to keep stopping to reload would feel cumbersome, but in practice I found that I didn't actually mind it too much. Activations were quick enough and rounds short enough that having models duck down to reload didn't feel so bad, plus it's kind of cinematic when you think about it. It also creates meaningful decisions in target prioritization and how much to commit to an attack, and I think it can lead to more movement as turns when you can't shoot encourage you to move around, rather than just stand still and keep shooting, which I like.

The rulebook is pretty good, but there is some room for improvement. The lack of a proper index means that some rules can be a bit hard to find, at least mid-game. Obviously the reference pages help a lot, but there were still some rules I couldn't find in the middle of the game and just gave up on searching for.

Also some rules could use some more explicit language, and/or some actual examples. The cover rules, for example, seemed simple at first but we quickly ran into situations that we weren't sure how to resolve. I think we're going to have to discuss some house-rules for a few things, at least until they get clarified by an errata or something (there don't seem to be any forums and I'm not on Facebook so I don't know what kind of official or unofficial rulings might be occurring).


Overall I'm looking forwards to using the rule set to run some narrative campaigns. It's going to take a lot of prep work though, as I'm going to need to put together some terrain and other stuff. Fingers crossed it will all work out, because I have really high hopes for this game system.