Mutant: Year Zero is getting a skirmish miniatures game from Necromunda’s lead designer
And it’ll let you use your character from the RPG.
Mutant: Year Zero, the latest incarnation of classic Swedish tabletop RPG Mutant, is being turned into a miniatures game.
Zone Wars is a skirmish miniatures game set in the post-apocalyptic universe of Mutant: Year Zero, the 2014 update to the long-running Mutant series of tabletop RPGs that first began in the early 1980s. Mutant: Year Zero previously inspired a video game adaptation, Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden.
The upcoming miniatures game is being developed by Free League Publishing, the current publisher behind the Mutant: Year Zero tabletop RPG, which plans to launch a Kickstarter campaign for Zone Wars on November 1st.
Behind Zone Wars’ gameplay is veteran Games Workshop designer Andy Chambers, known for his work on both Warhammer Fantasy Battle - aka original Warhammer - and Warhammer 40,000, as well as being the lead designer of Warhammer 40,000 spin-offs Necromunda and Battlefleet Gothic. Chambers will be joined by Free League co-founder Tomas Härenstam, designer for Mutant: Year Zero and the studio's Alien: The RPG.
Zone Wars will see players take control of groups of stalkers - the universe's term for mutant scavengers - competing in the setting’s irradiated wasteland of The Zone to retrieve artefacts left behind by the universe’s mysterious pre-apocalypse inhabitants, known as the Ancients.
Two, three or four players will be able to play at once, controlling small bands of figures in keeping with the skirmish genre.
In its announcement of Zone Wars, Free League described the game as being “all about embracing mayhem and emergent narrative to create a fun and fast-flowing experience”.
Zone Wars will be compatible with the Mutant: Year Zero RPG, allowing players to use their character from the roleplaying game in a skirmish scenario or play out the aftermath of battles from the miniatures game within the RPG.
Zone Wars’ Kickstarter campaign will offer two sets including the game’s rules, plus miniatures, paper terrain, dice, cards and everything else required to play. The Kickstarter will also offer a “fully playable” print-and-play version of the game, which will be free to download.
Free League specified that the game would not require “assembly, glue or paint”, indicating that the models will come pre-assembled and painted. Dicebreaker has reached out to the publisher for confirmation.
Update 21/10/22: Free League has revealed to Dicebreaker that Zone Wars' miniatures will not be fully painted, but will be 'sundropped' - a method of washing the models with ink that provides a greater level of shading and detail than a standard figure, but without extending to the colourised finish of a full paint job. Free League provided the below image as an example of the miniatures included in Zone Wars' box.
