Showed some more folk how to play the new DZR last night over at Mantic. One game was Pathfinders against Veer-myn, the other Plague against Enforcers. I didn’t get a lot of pics of the Pathfinders/Veer-myn game as that was very fast and bloody (and I was busy explaining rules), with the rats getting wiped out as a penalty for being a little too bold. Anyway, you can see it going on in the background on the blue buildings.
In the foreground they’re playing on Ronnie’s scenery – a Secret Weapon board with Mantic’s battle zone buildings and some Antenociti scatter terrain. I think RR’s done a nice job with it.
Below you can see a low angle shot from the Enforcer side. Nice to see both sides clambering about on the ruins.
I can’t give you a blow-by-blow account as I was flitting between the two battles, explaining the rules. However, Ronnie and Dave were being rather more cagey that the others, so the game went on longer. Dave’s Stage 1A took some wounds really early on, but then spent a lot of time sulking in the shadows so he didn’t go down. Here he is later, having emerged from hiding again.
A final general shot of the game. It was a close fight, but the Plague won a narrow victory in the end.
The core rules are pretty slick now and run nice and smoothly, so the games played quickly with very few questions even though 3 of the 4 players hadn’t played before. Which was nice. I think the public beta will come when I’ve got a set of army lists finished off and Mantic have made it look pretty 🙂
Meanwhile, to one side was another game going on, this time Dungeon Saga. So it was a busy night 🙂
Quirkworthy 
Hi Jake,
glad to see you had some fun.
Are there a lot of counters used in the game, Pic 3, top left they appear to be piling up. can the number be reduced?
looking forward to the beta.
Cheers Philip
To explain – each mdoel was carrying an item (little white squares), were perched on an objective (green square), one had been wounded (red circle) and activated (blue circle). You could have a model as the objective, and probably remember most of the others – but me and Ronnie were scatter brained and needed such things spelling out for us.
Dave’s right. The objective markers need to be on the board as something, though they could be models. That would look cool.
Similarly, the random loot items need to be on the board somewhere, and if you had models that would be good.
The other markers are to show that model has been activated this turn and is wounded. Both of these states need to be tracked, and there’s no off-board card to track each model on so it’s either relying on your collective memories (dubious) or using counters.
I’d personally prefer to have no counters, but then that would make tracking a model’s changing states very hard. Or, require the same space as the battlefield to hold cards for each model. Or you could not have this level of definition. Out of those three options, I think a few counters are the least objectionable. Remember too that this is an unusual grouping. Most cubes have neither objective nor loot in. Most models aren’t wounded. Activated markers build up over the turn, but start at zero models with them. It’s not as bad as you think.
and those 6 sided dice that we keep seeing on the sideboard ?
Command Dice. I’ll get to them this week at some point 🙂
“Stage 1A took >some< wounds", so some beings are going to resist multiple injuries before going down. Interesting.
Mr. Renton has nice looking terrain, are those Enforcers his too? Really nice to see leader of a company to be actually doing hobby stuff.
This is starting to get me as much excited as I were during the time between first DZ kickstarter and actually getting the game. But I try to restrain myself from constantly asking "are you ready yet"?
Yes, some critters take multiple wounds.
Not sure about the Enforcers. There are lots of toys lying around at Mantic, and we just raided what we needed 🙂
I noticed this as well. Will normal grunts still be Healthy->injured->dead?
Yes.
that would be healthy switch for the dz1 very tough ? instead of being kind of super armour, you get a capacity to withstand multiple wounds.
nice change
There’s both. Sort of.
Looks like fun. So is DRZ going to be compatible with the AI cards?
I’ve not tried it yet.
Youll have to think of something for the cunning cards, maybe sort something out for command actions if theyve vastly changed. Most other stuff seems generic enough to work even with major mechanical changes.
That is what I was thinking. I’ll guess I’ll wait for the beta.
I didn’t mind the original rules, so if I want to play solo I may just stick with them as well.
Hard to gauge purely on pictures but the faction sizes seem to have remained about the same on the Enforcer/Plague game which I find interesting the general impression I got from the DZI kickstarter -granted that was before you had sent off Dungeon Saga for print and had even looked at Deadzone again I am guessing – was that there was going to be a slight creep in model count. Regardless I am looking forward to getting ahold of those beta rules and having a go at the revamped system the new composition stuff sounds great!
I think there is a slight increase in model count, though only slight. perhaps not as much as we initially thought for a one mat game.
However, because the game goes so quickly, I’ve started to experiment with a two mat (side by side) option, and that would probably require a significantly larger force.
I would be interested to see how that effected game time and complexity. Our attempts at scaling up Deadzone 1 beyond the reasonable code 13 were fairly game breaking (three mat capture the Flag just turned into an extended game of murder checkers 🙂 )
I’ll keep you posted.
Jake, are the Martians and Humans from MA going to be redone to fit with DZR? I use both in Deadzone and would like to think that will be able to continue.
I don’t expect them to be in the core book. However, unless there’s some licensing reason why not, I’d expect them to get added in due course.
Well we have the Faction Decks making them playable from the original Kickstarter that are available for purchase via Mantic now, so that is a good start.
How much balancing you expect may be needed to move them into DZR (I know you won’t be able to answer with specifics), but do you remember how much work it was to move them from MA into DZ in the first place?
As they’ve already been done for DZ I think it should be fairly straightforward.
Then again, as my grandfather used to say (in a put-on broad accent) “you know what thought did? Followed a muck cart, thought it were a wedding.”
So there’s that.