My Zona Alfa: Kontraband campaign with my son continues. For context, he’s ten years old and has played wargames since he was 5 or so.

This proved to be an interesting experiment in scenario design. As I play Kontraband/Zona Alfa with my son, I find the game can swing pretty wildly in spawning enemies. Each time you interact with a Point of Interest (POI), you draw a POI card. This comes from a large deck where about a third of the cards are encounters with enemies. On some level, I really like this. You never know what you’re going to get and each map should contain 9 POIs, so you’re likely to encounter monsters. On the other hand, the deck could stack against or for you, creating wildly different scenarios.

To try and solve this, I’ve built more triggers into my scenarios that will always spawn monsters. Or, at least I intended to do that.

This scenario revolved around an abandoned, intact village. Reports have it that it’s full of undead and there’s the sound of static in the air, so piercing that it makes it hard to focus. For gameplay, there’s a single anomaly that is causing the sound, giving players -2 to ranged attacks. It’s hard to focus long enough to line up the shot. So why are we here? Well, the lead scientist whose work we’re pursuing used to live here, so we’re going to search for his house, then ransack it for notes.

Each time you enter a house you roll 1D6. On 1-3, 1D6 zombies are inside the house. On 4-5, you draw a POI card. On 6, you found the right house and can discover the hidden notes. As I said earlier, I’ve built more triggers into my missions to enable monsters to spawn. With four houses, I assumed we would see two sets of zombies. I was very wrong.

The match started simple enough. We split the field and my son took one set of two houses while I took the other. We arrived at the houses with minimal incident. In both cases, we rolled a 4 or 5, drawing a POI card rather than spawning zombies. Those cards further spawned a handful of enemies we quickly dispatched. I landed a wounded man but was able to heal him back up.

It was in our approach to the second set of houses that things went very wrong. We rolled a zone event spawning a BAM Alpha Predator. A big scary monster, ready to stomp our faces in. We hunkered down, prepared, and… my son’s sniper one-shot it. Fair enough: sniper earned his keep!

Next, we approached the second set of homes and managed to escape spawning further enemies. If you’re following, we’ve now fought mutants, rats, a giant mutant, and zero zombies. My son remarked how smoothly everything was going and how few enemies we’ve seen.

At the end of every turn, you roll for a “Zone Event.” That’s what spawned the BAM Alpha Predator. That’s also what now spawned an entire group of enemy stalkers, landing right on my darn head. An intense, if brief, firefight ensued. We resolved it mostly unharmed, then my son found the right house. He searched it, but while searching it we spawned a set of ghouls, which nearly took out his sniper in an ambush. Oops.

We managed to limp off the board, two characters wounded but all objectives secured. My son learned a little lesson in not tempting fate. In total, we fought mutants, alpha mutants, rats, ghouls, and even stalkers—but no zombies. I’m a little disappointed, as I painted a veritable gaggle of them, but I’m actually quite glad to see the system organically craft a totally different story than the one I expected. It was random chance, I grant, but fun nonetheless.

It was also interesting to realize how important Zone Events are. These aren’t a throwaway concept—they’re vital to how the game works. The longer your game goes, the more things go wrong. In fact, you add the current turn to the dice roll and if you get a 10+, you trigger an event. This means by the time you hit turn 9 you’re seeing a new event every single turn. Things go considerably wrong. Between this and the need for Minimum Daily Requirements (MDR) in food, water, ammo, and batteries you actually end up very pressed for time in a totally organic way that emerges from the rules. You need to search the POIs to find your MDR, but you also need to complete the mission and get the hell out of dodge before things get totally out of hand.

I find myself more engaged with these simple systems than expected. They come together a little erratically, I think, yet I’ve had a few interesting games and a pretty cool mini-campaign to date thanks to that erraticism. I’ve continuously told myself recently that truth is in the play—ludoveritas. I’m seeing that here.

Now back to painting buildings. I need a city block ready for our next missions. I’m hyped to finally bring it all together. This has been weeks of work just to put together a rundown Soviet block and I greatly look forward to putting it on the board.