Zona Alfa

What is Zona Alfa

Zona Alfa: Salvage and Survival in the Exclusion Zone is a skirmish game by Patrick Todoroff, published by Osprey Games in January 2020 as number 25 in the Osprey Wargames series. Osprey describes it as “simple, fast-play skirmish rules for scavenging, exploring, and surviving in a near-future, post-apocalyptic Eastern European setting.”

You play bandits, mercenaries, or military units fighting over the Exclusion Zone and the artifacts left behind in it. You kit out your fighters with weapons and specialisms to build your own Zone crew, and the book adds rules for campaigns, character progression, terrain, and environmental hazards.

It’s a 64-page softcover with color illustrations by Sam Lamont. There’s no official miniature range. Todoroff wrote it with 28mm figures in mind, and says 15mm or 20mm work just as well.

How it plays

Four stats. Every model has Combat Ability (ranged and melee both), Armor Rating, Movement in inches, and Will, which covers nerve under fire. Weapons have their own firepower (how many dice an attack rolls), range, and damage.
Alternating activations. Todoroff dropped a traditional turn sequence so both players stay involved, “acting and reacting to events as they unfold,” in his words on the Osprey blog.
Troop quality sets your actions. Rookies get one action per activation and no special abilities. Hardened fighters get two actions and one skill. Veterans get three actions and two skills.
d10s for everything. Shooting and looting both run off ten-sided dice.
Six factions. In a guest post on the Osprey blog, Søren “Bloodbeard” Bay counts six factions and built his crew from the independents. The book’s bestiary runs from light, medium, and large critters to zombies and human bandits.
Campaigns. Your crew carries over between games, picking up progression and rewards along the way.

Solo and co-op: Kontraband

When the book came out in January 2020, Bloodbeard played it solo with his own house rules, noting that official solo rules were still in development. Todoroff went on to self-publish Kontraband: More Salvage and Survival, an expansion “designed for Solo and Cooperative games.” It adds more detail for player characters, new equipment, new enemies, and mission objectives, plus a five-part sample campaign called Zone Ravens. It isn’t a standalone game, and you need Zona Alfa to use it.

In a review for Brigade Models, the expansion’s anomalies get the most attention: you search them for artifacts, and a search gone wrong can catch your models in a gravity field, electrocute them, blast them, or teleport them away. Crew members there are either Stalkers, who are good at combat, or Scientists, who are good at technical tasks. The same review suggests playing a few standard Zona Alfa games first, since the threat level is high.

There’s also Hunter-Hunted, a ready-made narrative campaign for Zona Alfa and Kontraband, also built for solo and co-op play.

How to start

Get the book. Osprey sells the paperback for $20 and the PDF or ePub for $16.
Pick up the free sheets. If you’re heading for Kontraband, the designer’s Kontraband page has a free stat sheet and QRS and expanded Point of Interest cards.
Find your crew. A crew is four to twelve models, in 28mm or in 15mm or 20mm. The Zone also needs something to throw at you: critters, zombies, or human bandits from the bestiary.
Build a small table. A 3’ × 3’ or 4’ × 4’ board is enough, and a game runs one to two hours. Bloodbeard’s prep post shows how he dressed post-apocalyptic terrain with Russian signage and weathered military vehicles to get the Eastern Bloc look.