Great Games You're Not Playing: Deadzone (Part 1)

Good day folks.  I'm Robert Allen, and I'm here to talk to you about

GREAT GAMES YOU'RE NOT PLAYING*
* - unless you are, then great!  You can espouse why you like them in the comments.

Today's GGYNP is:  DEADZONE by Mantic Games.




Deadzone is a 28mm skirmish wargame set on quarantined worlds in the Great Galactic Co-Prosperity Sphere - a realm of space dominated by the Corporation, who believe that they are its rightful masters.

But occasionally contagion hits one of the worlds in the Co-Prosperity Sphere, and there is but one choice to quarantine the nightmarish things that mysteriously develops from alien disease-spreading artifacts.

Like these guys.

LOCK THE PLACE DOWN.

When the Corporation places a planet under Quarantine, several things happen, all of them very quickly.

1.  All traffic to and from the planet is halted, and all Communications are cut.  The Corporation doesn't want panic to spread, so Denial is their best weapon.
2.  The Corporation's best of the best, the Enforcers, are raced to the planet to hunt down and eliminate anyone and anything infected by the Plague.
3.  The opportunists move in.

Oh, you mean like US?

DEADZONE is a game of urban combat where desperate factions clash over the backdrop of a world in crisis.  Rebs and Marauders furiously loot for supplies while the Enforcers try to maintain quarantine (with extreme prejudice) all the while a mysterious alien virus creates the Plague, whose entire purpose is to kill and/or infect every living thing on the planet...and beyond.

Deadzone was one of the biggest game releases from Kickstarter in late 2013.  The base game included two factions (Enforcers and Plague) but also releasing at the same time were the Maruauders (militant Space Orx, frequently mercenaries but are often renegades from the Corporation overlords) and the Rebs (rag-tag collective of humans and aliens who are sworn to fight the Corporation...and generally live on its fringes as scavengers).  In the game, each faction has its own motives and therefore its own missions - while the Plague generally have brutal missions focused on destruction, the Rebs are much more interested in getting into a zone, grabbing anything of value for the cause, and getting back out alive.

Plus have you seen the terrain that comes with this game?

Try telling yourself that's not cool.  

Next time we will take a look at how the gameplay operates.  But if you want to skip ahead of the class, you can check out:

http://www.manticgames.com/games/deadzone.html   (the home of the game)
http://quirkworthy.com/deadzone/  (the designer's website)