For those who want to dive into miniatures gaming, or have short narrative games with a low model count, the market for miniature skirmish games is in a golden age. There’s a plethora of rulesets and settings to choose from out there depending on your taste, but if you’re a fan of the S.T.A.L.K.ER. or Metro 2033 video games series, you can’t get much better than Zona Alfa. People who like slow Russian movies – like the ones that inspired those games! – can also apply.

The objective of the game is to search Anomalies to retrieve artifacts (the recommended goal for a campaign being 12 artifacts). It is recommended that the play area for a game has 3 Anomalies to search. The rules for anomalies are fleshed out and there are options for different area effects if the anomaly search goes wrong – four ways to die. Models can be caught in a gravity force field, electrocuted, blasted or teleported away from the anomaly. 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. From there, the game developed into a series of running gun battles as the players lobbed grenades and laid down overlapping fire to cover their advance. John’s crew triggered the next hot spot and was able to take cover in a ruined building as a mob of giant rats scampered toward them. Zona Alfa draws inspiration from the crumbling, abandoned Cold War industrial heaps that you might find in the hinterlands of Eastern Europe. Players muster crews of stalkers, scavengers, and mercenaries and pit them against similarly motivated bands on the battlefield. But the Zone itself plays a huge role in each game … Zone hostiles can appear at any moment, and the very environment itself can suddenly erupt in violent fashion. 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.

Scenic items, tokens or chits to mark the important Points of Interest locations on the tabletop, as well as ones for the strange and dangerous micro–rifts in reality known as Anomalies. Whatever you choose, they should be distinct and easily identifiable to all players.

Characters. With a focus on a single squad of individual characters rather than larger gangs or crews, Kontraband players can choose to venture in the Zone either as Stalkers or Scientists. Generally speaking, Stalkers are stronger at tactical skills while Scientists excel at technical ones. Details about each character class, specializations, and a list of new Skills can be found further in. 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.

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Part of my squad angled toward the factory while the Sniper and RPK looked for good angles near the fuel tanks. Other Pat’s Veterans leap-frogged between the Conex containers and the Office. 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). The Zone event roll results in another Alpha predator arriving. Things are not good for Spassky. He takes the full force of the Zone emission, he’s pinned and wounded and it takes all his actions to recover. Nimzo gives him an action to go on alert. The rest of the team move round to deal with the Predator when it enters. 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. Because Zona Alfa is miniatures-agnostic, t hese are intentionally broad and abstracted so players can generate values for the wide range of models in their collection, then select categories of body armor and personal weapons.

Here’s John’s hardened scavenger moving in to search a decommissioned air compressor next to a derelict pumping station. 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. What it comes down to is a sandboxy feel where you can do anything that’s more or less realistically possible. The shooting action reflects this pretty well. You modify your shot by using red dots or scopes, but a shot is harder to take if there’s cover or the target is obscured. 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. When you do hit, there are armor saves. Depending on what you pulled from a dead stalker or bought in the stalls, this will drastically improve your chances of survival. Some weapons or ammunition are also better at penetrating armor. If you fail this save, you’re down unless you have a med kit. If you do make the save, you have to take a Will test to see if you have to change your underwear after getting plugged with a 7.62.

Crew members can either be Stalkers – good at combat or Scientists – good at technical tasks, a further option is to include a dog companion for which there are detailed rules and additional rules for Hazmat suits. Each crew member can have different equipment or skills so it’s worth spending the time to make them complementary. 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. Zona Alfa is the latest iteration of my fast-play house rules that were titled ‘Cleared to Engage’. I’d been using them for years here to introduce people to miniature war gaming. It’s a skirmish game that uses D10s and was made with 28mm miniatures in mind, but 15mm or 20mm will work just as well. A fairly simple system, it’s played in a 3’ x 3’ or 4’ x4’ area with a set turn limit, so games typically run one to two hours. 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. So, you decided to sneak past the Cordon, eh? Slip by the patrols and the towers, through the minefield, under the electric fence, to take your chances in the Exclusion Zone.