Entering the Exclusion Zone

 

Watching a recent video on the Tabletop Minions YouTube channel, I was reminded of Osprey Games' "Zona Alfa" - a skirmish game released earlier this year, involving gangs of scavengers negotiating the dangers of an eldritch "Exclusion Zone" in the Soviet Union, filled with weird radiation, the walking dead, mutants and worse threats.  Author Patrick Todoroff also released a free document through Osprey at the beginning of the Pandemic covering solo play.  

I dug my copy out and started reading it - I think I'd initially bought it to harvest ideas from for Wiley Games' Wasteland Warriors, but reading it I find myself liking it more and more as it's own thing, and the solo rules are, to be perfectly frank, just the thing right now.  Cases of COVID-19 are rising in my county and right now, I don't leave my apartment except to get groceries every other week because people just don't follow the rules to keep us all safe.  I speak especially of my upstairs neighbors who are throwing parties every weekend.  

I happened to have some Grenadier "Future Warriors" figures, now released through Moonraker/Forlorn Hope Games, based and primed, and some Copplestone "Future Wars" figures ready to prime.  I got the latter into the primer box and took advantage of what are probably the last decent priming days of 2020 to get them mostly spray-primed (I'll be touching them up with brush-on primer).  The former, however, I quickly got some paint on this week. The troopers in NBC suits will be my team for solo games, and the bikers will serve as bandits on the "Zone Hostiles" list.  "Big Nick" is going to be a stand-in for the bandit leader "Big Nicolai" in one of the sample scenarios in the rulebook.