Mutant Year Zero: Zone Wars has a problem with your favorite wargames, but that's why it works so well

Mutant Year Zero: Zone Wars has a bone to pick with your favorite wargames.

The trouble is, most of them don't do 'short.' They aren't always keen on more than two players battling it out at once, either. That's why this chaotic skirmish game from Free League flips the bird at tradition. Almost literally – Mutant Year Zero: Zone Wars is a beginner-friendly, "party skirmish game" featuring everything from mutant ducks to robots set after the apocalypse.

"We wanted to create a skirmish game that is very accessible, and has everything you need in one box," Free League co-founder Nils Karlén tells me ahead of the Zone Wars' launch. "That was the first design goal we had. And the second one is that we wanted specifically to make a game that is made for multiplayer. Almost all skirmish games out there always presume you're [playing with just] two people. And personally, when I play skirmish games, I always play in a group. We have lots of fun. It's a very fun, social type of gaming. So we wanted to make a game that kind of plays against [two-player modes]. We wanted to make an accessible, laugh-out-loud, chaotic, cinematic skirmish game, paced fast, and you can set it up and play another session, you know, in one-and-a-half hours or something like that."

"A beer and pretzels kind of skirmish"

We put this to the test at lunchtime on launch day to see if we could smash our way through a match before returning to our desks. And honestly, its gameplay lives up to that promise even if we didn't succeed – Zone Wars careens along at a breakneck pace once you know what you're doing. In fact, the only reason we weren't able to fit it all into a single hour-long session was because we spent a good chunk of our time assembling the game's cardboard terrain and double-checking rules as we got to grips with it (something that happened surprisingly fast). Now everything's set up and we know what we're doing, I'm confident we could rattle through a match in a single lunch break or in the hour after work. As Karlén says, this is a "beer and pretzels kind of skirmish" rather than a tactical epic that'll take an entire afternoon.

That momentum is partially thanks to Zone Wars saying "fuck it" and throwing everything at the wall. Because you're playing on a smaller 3ft-by-3ft board, there's no tiptoeing into range; unless you're careful during deployment, your troops can be seen and shot right from the word 'go.' It doesn't take long to cross the map and start slapping each other about either, particularly in missions that encourage you to hunt down the artifact tokens strewn across it. (True to the game's chaotic nature, these are dropped onto the board from a height to ensure random placement.) When you throw in random 'Zone' effects that include everything from unexploded bombs to the brilliantly stupid Land Shark which chows down on your warriors unless they pass a Survival check after moving, Zone Wars is like sessions of the best tabletop RPGs that fly off the rails in the most memorable way.

The game's speed is also because of its aversion to faff. According to Karlén, "one thing we wanted to do was keep bookkeeping minimal. We played a lot of more involved games and a lot of indie games [during development], and we liked that indie games like Space Weirdos… often focus on not having a lot of bookkeeping, which I think is neat. So in this game, we didn't want to have a pen and paper. Lots of games, lots of good games, they have a little character sheet and you cross out health points and so on. In this game, we wanted to make the numbers a bit smaller. And also, we want to make everything physical, like a board game. So you have tokens for it, you have a card for a character, you have a card for your weapons."

Cardboard kingdoms

The Zone Wars models being pre-assembled and primed grew out of a similar desire. According to Karlén, the team "wanted to make a game for people that aren't necessarily into painting and glueing and all that stuff, which is, I mean, that's fun. I enjoy that too, but, but we wanted to bring a little bit of miniature magic to people that may or may not be scared of the hobby."

That's why Mutant Year Zero: Zone Wars includes all the cardboard terrain you need for your matches. Karlén isn't spinning marketing fluff when he says that the core box has got everything you need; it actually does. And if you add the Robots and Psionics expansion, you're set for full four-player matches.

"I think personally, a lot of games skip over the terrain part when they do start boxes," he says. "They do the figures, the rules, and they do bits and pieces, and they maybe add one piece of terrain, which is never enough. So… using only the core [Zone Wars] box, you should have enough terrain to play a full game. And using both [the core and expansion] boxes, you should have enough terrain to play full multiplayer."

It's difficult to break into the wargaming industry at the best of times, but Zone Wars carves out a niche for itself with this kind of accessibility. It remedies a lot of hang ups that can keep gamers from taking the dive into this hobby, and it's unusual in that it doesn't feel as if it's nickel-and-diming you for add-ons you need to play a basic match.

Sure, Mutant Year Zero isn't necessarily the most well-known IP. It's never going to topple something like Warhammer. But it's not trying to – and that's precisely why it's so appealing.

Want some recommendations on what to play next? Be sure to check out the best board games or our guide to the best card games.