By Ed Fortune
Mantic are one of the most exciting games companies coming out of the UK at the moment. Their product range is an interesting mix of cool tie-ins such as HellBoy The Board Game and original material such as the fantasy naval battle game Armada or the sci-fi wargame, FireFight.
Deadzone is their entry into the crowded market of quick-to-play sci-fi skirmish games. Wargames that focus on a small number of units, tactical use of terrain and are fast to play let gamers with busy lives squeeze in an extra game or two in the evening and are thus very popular.
Deadzone’s third edition benefits from extensive play. It uses a gridded battle map and terrain to allow to judge distances and ranges, meaning there’s a minimal amount of faffing about when it comes to movement, attack range and so on. It’s also very 3D in design; during a game, your team will be scrabbling up ladders and ducking around the cover. Fortunately, the terrain provided is very modular, and there’s a lot of it. The play map is well designed (and has notes on it for new players), and set-up is fairly quick though you should pre-build the terrain first to save time.
Combat is quick, easy to figure out and uses an ‘exploding dice’ mechanism. Basically, the more times you roll eight on an 8-sided die, the more dice you roll and the greater your actions’ effect. Reference cards would be handy here, but as the units don’t change that much, it’s easy to make notes. A little bit of prep work goes a long way, especially if you’re playing multiple times.
We get two factions in the starter set, as it’s a two-player game. The Veer-Myn are alien rat-men. We get 13 models in total. Ten smaller plastic Nightcrawlers, who carry a variety of weird weapons and mostly wear respirators. We get two Nightmare, massive heavy weapon-wielding rat monsters and a resin Pack Leader, who has monstrous rending claws. These are fun to put together, and the hard plastic models are easy to modify, with the resin model being a little trickier to assemble.
The other faction is the GCPS, human beings in combat armour, similar to the sort of troopers you see in media such as Firefly or Starship Troopers. We get 11 models, one of which is a commander who is a little tricky to assemble due to the fact that they’re made of resin and are awkwardly posed. The two sets of units are well-matched. GCPS are good all-rounders, Veer-Myn hit hard but break easily, so it balances out.
Overall, a great starter set, especially if the models from the Fall of Omega VII starter set don’t appeal.
