Starting a Zona Alfa / Kontraband crew

"So,you decided to sneak past the Cordon, eh? Slip by the patrols and the towers, through the minefield, under the electric fence, to take your chances in the Exclusion Zone?"

I'm starting a Zona Alfa / Kontraband crew.

Zona Alfa is part of Osprey's "blue book" series, and it's a player-vs-player skirmish game set in a Roadside Picnic / S.T.A.L.K.E.R. inspired setting, which means: a vaguely Eastern European country, a mysterious exclusion Zone, radioactivity, monsters, bandits, and bizarre artifacts of possibly alien origin. Your crew will try to recover valuable salvage and dangerous artifacts while dealing with monsters and rival crews.

Kontraband is an expansion for this game, focusing exclusively on solo/coop gameplay. This means it's your crew versus the game. The difficulty of the monsters and dangers is amped up, but to offset this, your crew are all veterans.

Why do I like this game?

• It's fast-paced without cumbersome rules.
• It requires very few minis (about 4 for Kontraband, plus a bunch of bandits, vermin and ghouls).
• The recommended play area (3x3) is ideal for those of us without a lot of space. I'm building a 90x90cm table.
• The setting is unusual and interesting.

Skirmish games like these are ideal for 28mm miniatures. However, I spotted some excellent 1:72 scale minis by Ukrainian brand Red Box / Dark Alliance: their Stalkers 1 and Stalkers 2 boxes, each with 48 minis in 12 unique poses! I like 1:72 scale soft plastic minis because they are small, cheap, and don't break if dropped. Consequently, I decided to use those.

Here's my try at building a crew with them. Just primed with some drybrushing to fake zenithal highlights.

Andy.