Into The Combat Zone Pt. 3 – The First Battles!

Winter has come to Ye Olde England, and with it the desire to shift game night from the shed to the more civilised and centrally heated realm of the kitchen table – and when one chooses to sacrifice space for warmth and ready access to the drinks cabinet, that means smaller skirmish games become the order of the day.

In anticipation of this – because, as it turns out, winter actually happens every year – Dan & I acquired a game we’d long tried to hunt down, EM4 Miniatures’ Combat Zone, and after our YouTube debut and painting the forces of the Corporate Troopers and the Ginger Ninja street gang, it was high time to get these lads out on the table top and start working our way through the mini-campaign outlined in the rulebook. And so, for your delectation, here is a run down of the first couple of games! The plot (such as it is) centres around the street gang trying to ensure their survival by acquiring some new heavy weapon-toting robots, and in the first two games the Ninjas would be trying to break into the warehouse where a damaged machine was being stored with the intent of nicking it.

Game 1: Operation Security Strike

This would involve two mobs of gang members trying to shut down the alarm system in oder to allow their comrades to get into the robot warehouse, with the Corporate Troopers of Bionetica Inc. trying to stop them:

The photos are a bit of a jumble on this one, but basically one mob tried to keep the Troopers heads down while the second made a dash for the alarm – unfortunately for the gang, the Troopers were a bit too well disciplined and devastated the first group resulting in everyone piling hell for leather into the area where the alarm was, with the surviving handful of gangers attempting a desperate and fruitless last stand… ending with a wonderfully cinematic moment when Trooper Wyler, whose mate Staples had been the first to fall to ganger fire, swooped in and shot the sole remaining ganger through the head at point blank range!

The Ginger Ninjas attempt to engage the Troopers from behind cover..

Troopers hit the deck (the ones lying on their front are Dropped Down, lying prone – but poor old Staples takes one through the chest and goes down hard!)

As the casualties pile up, the gang decide to hell with the plan – everybody forward!

Into the warehouse – the objective is in sight…

Trooper Zukovik goes up close and personal!

It’s too much for Ringer, who bottles it and Routs!

“Eat this!” Sergeant O’Connell brings the pain to Klingfilm (seriously X-D)

An illustration of the efficacy of Ganger supporting fire….

Klingfilm goes down – that double denim look just doesn’t cut it out on the streets

It’s all over – Sergeants O’Connell and Anderson survey the scene… 3 troopers down but the Ginger Ninjas are annihilated!

Game 2: Robot Robbery

Despite the failure of their comrades to stop the alarm being sounded, there was no going back for the Ninjas, and the second game had them trying to get one of their three Techs (Nancy, Wing Nut & Hard Drive) into the warehouse where the damaged Enforcer mech was being held… we managed to do an even worse job on the photos here, suffice it to say once again it don’t go well for the Ninjas who left most of their number on the battlefield.. still managed to drop a couple of Bionetica Corporate Troopers but by the time the Techs had made it to the warehouse, they were pretty much on their own…

Having activated the Enforcer, Nancy climbs up on it’s frame for cover as her remaining gang members fall to Corporate Trooper fire…

It takes the combined fire of three Troopers at close range to bring her down, but bring her down they do!

So that’s 2-0 to the Troopers and given how badly mauled the Ninjas got, I’m wondering how well playtested these scenarios were… but s till, it was great fun to play and when you’ve got your head around the mechanics, Combat Zone is a LOT of fun as a pick up and play skirmish game – so we’ll be making our way through the rest of the campaign and seeing how it all unfolds as the nights continue to draw in and get colder…

Stay thrifty out there, we’ll be seeing you soon!

Into The Combat Zone Pt. 2 – The Ginger Ninjas (& A Test Game)

As we wipe the sweat from our collective brows after last month’s rather epic battle report, let’s change scale, period and game type back into some (presumably) near future dystopian sci-fi skirmish as we show off our progress through the surprisingly comprehensive Combat Zone box set from EM4 miniatures… for the price of a cheese sandwich or a kiss on the kips with no tongue from GW, you too can own.. MANY miniatures, a rulebook, dice and scenery, everything you need for a campaign (which is also contained in the box.)

We’ve already covered the first squad of Corporate Troopers, so in this post we’ll be taking a look at the OPFOR, the Gangers.. in this instance the notorious Ginger Ninja faction – so named because all members have to show at least some bright orange in theor clothing, and the more orange you show, the higher your status in the gang.

This obviously presents it’s own tactical issues as there are few environments where this is going to be effective camouflage, but given it’s strong association with US prisons I thought it made for quite a good basis for an “outlaw” faction. Plus, of course, South Park:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-nA54LxibLI

As with the Corporate Troopers, I started off with grey priming, washed with thinned Smokey Ink and drybrushed with bone craft paint.. this should give a nice 3D surface to paint on, with shadows and highlights already taken care of in the underpainting stage. That way, nicely thinned paints should simply colourise your underpainted shadow/ highlight combination and you’ve already got the hard work done.

Should. I’m still not entirely convinced that it did.

Still, I’m quite pleased with the results – check them out!

Our glorious leader – “Go over there or I’ll cut you!”

The classic “Sword in the ponytail” look.. “What you say? I’m trying to shoot someone!”

There’s a fair bit of double denim going on here, but when you’re packing an automatic shotgun I doubt anyone’s going to call you on it..

The crew ready to roll out.

Orange was the Vallejo Hot Orange/ Red Ink combo, blues done with Wilko’s (RIP :-/) Duck Egg Blue overpainted with blue craft paint, browns with Vallejo Filthy Brown washed with Brown Ink.. a final very light drybrush with bone craft paint to make the highlights pop.. I also gave all the metallics a Vallejo Smokey Ink Wash to give the weaponry a dirty, beaten up look. Baddies don’t clean, what are you, a narc?Basing was the same recipe as the Corporate Troopers, so follow the link for that one.

We also managed to get the test game in (on an urban board that has seen better days, sadly :-/)

A pretty good ding dong back and forth, ended by a highly cinematic shootout and heroic charge into single combat by the Ginger Ninja’s leader! Once you’ve got your head around a couple of slightly counterintuitive basic points, the rattles along nicely – it will be interesting to see how this scales as we work through the campaign included in the box though, moving to larger battles.. still, only one way to find out, eh?

Stay safe and thrifty, and a belated happy Flag Day – SLAVIA UKRAINIA

Into The Combat Zone Pt.1 – Musk’s Marauders!

With the gaming shed now more or less organised, it’s time to jump back on a project we started earlier in the year when, in an uncharacteristic move, we actually bought a brand new starter set – EM4’s Combat Zone, a near-future post-apocalypse-pre-another-apocalypse sci fi skirmish game. The box contains two factions, the Corporate Troopers and the Gang members who, according to the blurb, are sworn enemies…

There’s a fair bit of plastic in the box, so it was the work of a solid evening to get everything built & primed, particularly the robot models (the bases don’t fit so you have to snip the pegs off the feet to fix them down) – but is that something to complain about? Hardly…

The quick play sheet gives you a set up for a first game – 5 gang members and 4 corporate troopers, and that seemed like a pretty achievable goal. First on the block – Corporate trooper squad from the Tesla Megacorp, “Musk’s Marauders”!

After building the models with superglue, I painted PVA across the bases and dragged them through the Garage Floor Dust (TM):

before spraying them with grey primer and then trying the zenithal highlight with a can of white primer:

Then I gave them a dunk with my take on the Midwinter Minis signature wash – dab of black paint, Smokey Ink, PVA, matt medium and a little bit of water. This sealed the models, made sure there were no bits of exposed plastic or primer, and gave a nice 3D surface to paint on with grey craft paint as a base for the uniforms:

(another terrain project in the back there…)

Speaking of uniforms, I went with an urban camo scheme – mid grey craft paint flecked with off white (Wilko Granite Dust) and craft black, black for the boots and leather details, Vallejo Filthy Brown washed with brown ink for the leather patches.

For the visors I used Wilko Duck Egg Blue over a white base coat and washed it with a thin coat of blue craft paint, and then it was on to basing – I painted the bases black before drybrushing up with the same palette we used for the urban board, Duck Egg Blue followed by craft red, followed by three shades of grey up to Granite dust before dusting lightly with a mix of flock and dried earth crumbled to a dust texture, and touching up the base edges in black.

I then hit the whole thing with an isopropyl alcohol spray, a spray of 1 part PVA to 10 parts water from an old Windolene spray battle and once that little lot was dry it was off to the shed for varnishing – thankfully the hobby gods were feeling well disposed and I wasn’t hit with frosting.. so, pics!

Squad leader rocking an assault rifle!

The lads on patrol…

And the rest of the box, built and ready for priming…

And that would be a #zenithalprimingfail…

Next up are the Gangers and then we’ve got ourselves a nice tidy little force for the first game of the campaign in the Combat Zone box set… be interesting to see how these lads scale against GW plastics too..

As always, stay thrifty out there and we’ll see you soon!

Forgotten Classics – Combat Zone

It’s almost lunchtime, so I guess that’s time for a new edition of Warhammer 40,000 then…

Honestly, it doesn’t seem but five minutes since 9th rolled up but that’s age for you, and while we’re honestly quite jazzed for 10th – the free data cards and rules, and the apparent abandonment of Codexes as a “must have” mean we might conceivably be looking at the first genuinely playable free edition of 40k – we all know that whatever the speculation about the contents of the box set, it’s going to COST.

It’s also a racing certainty that whatever the rules rewrites, it’s still going to be hamstrung by the phased IGOUGO turn system, and then a lashing of special rules to negate the inherent clunkiness of said system. We’ve written before about the design constraints that 40k appears to be under, and the reason why they can’t simply scrap it and move to something more elegant and free-flowing (our opinion, of course- YMMV).

But what if they could? One of the best systems I ever played as a nipper was an unassuming small unit skirmish set that came with an A5 dot-matrix printed rulebook and about a dozen miniatures in a nondescript cardboard box, set in a cyberpunk future of the early 21st century – I know, you have to smile, right? That said, they don’t mention COVID or Twitter…

I’ve been racking my brains for months on and off trying to remember what it was called – little did I know Jim had got his considerable Google Fu on the case, and so for my birthday rocked up with this:

Combat Zone from EM4 miniatures! He reckoned he was 90% sure this what I’d meant and after having played a couple of quick pickup games to figure the rules out, he’s nailed it, this feels every bit as fast and fun as I remember from circa 1993!

So much so that I was inspired to do (drumroll please) an “unboxing” video, as these seem to be all the rage on YouTube- hopefully I can figure a way to post it here…

Thanks to Jim for helping me sort out… Ooh look, we’re YouTubers now!

Shades of Mad Max, Aliens, Robocop… all the classics!

Rulebook – full colour and pretty nicely done

It’s a bleak vision of the future, but notice the lack of COVID…

Definite shades of 2nd Ed 40k in the production values..

There’s the plastic crack!!! Gangers, Cops & Mechs…

Bases and dice – a mix of D6, D4s and D8s

Press out cardboard scenery – again, capturing the 2nd Ed vibe

Quick reference rule sheet – we should do one of these for Apocalypse Earth (no, we haven’t forgotten about it..)

Roster sheet – we actually did do one of these, if memory serves….

Templates and status tokens, again all pre-punched cardboard

And there’s your starter scenario!

So, onto the game itself- players alternate model (not unit) activation (although overwatch is a tactic you can use), and each model has a set number of Action Points that they can spend doing various things – the better your troops, the more action points they get. The instructions on firing are a little convoluted, but a couple of read throughs and you’ll be good to go.

Interestingly, the focus is on individual models for things like Panic reactions – a model only panics if they get hit, but are apparently fine seeing their friends gunned down all around them.. which I suppose matches the tone of 80s action films.

Like any system, it’s a bit clunk initially but by our third game just pushing the models around the kitchen table using books and salt shakers for terrain we were getting right into it – now with the models assembled and ready for priming, you can expect a few battle reports as we play through the campaign in the box.

If you’re in the mood for a quick blast of sci-fi skirmish.. and arguably what Necromunda should have been.. I thoroughly recommend throwing the £25 or so down to get this box set, you’ll enjoy it. And I’m pretty certain you could stat up basically any 40k army for this, and if you really wanted to the models in the box would make a fair set up for Necromunda itself at a fraction of the price!

Stay thrifty and see you soon – Combat Zone can be found on the EM4 site here