Necromunda

Necromunda was one of the games that defined my childhood. It's recent re-release has had both myself and my good friend back to the tabletop for the last couple of months.

The basic game includes all the equipment for Zone Mortalis. Bulkheads, doors, equipment, the Escher and Goliath gang sprues are all included. The Zone Mortalis basic and advanced rules, are all included in the base set. The gang war book(s) are not, so if you plan to run a campaign you will need to pick those up. Oh and I say books because there are currently rumoured to be three Gang War books planned. The Orlock gang has been announced 🎉 along with kits for hired guns — and many other exciting things.

There are now two game types; Zone Mortalis, which is tile-based, and Sector Mechanicus, the classic multi-level terrain-based game. Luckily we have access to the original terrain, which is a great start for this game mode. I've been looking into the Sector Mechanicus terrain, which looks fun to collect.

We started with a few Zone Mortalis games. These scenarios are really easy to play through, and the pre-made gangs are relatively well balanced. The games seem to play through very quickly, and there is none of the pre-match and post-match maintenance which comes with playing the campaign. It's great for beginners, along with the simplified ruleset.

The big change to the game is in how each round is played. Originally, each player rolled for priority and proceeded to undertake all their gang actions at once. Under the new rules, priority is rolled but each player can only activate a group of fighters at a time. The group size is determined by proximity to a gang's champion or leader characters. A champion allows one other whilst a leader allows two others to activate, as long as they are within 3". Players alternate in this fashion until all gang members have spent their ready markers, and priority is rolled again.

In our most recent match-ups, we've been playing Sector Mechanus. We've found the games take much longer — we abandoned the first after two and a half hours as we had been building our gang rosters beforehand. The second match-up was more successful, with my gang taking a beating at the hands of the Escher 😞.

We're going to be playing some Zone Mortalis with our campaign gangs soon, so I'll write up those match-ups. Hopefully I'll have more luck, though I only have three gang members able to fight in my next match 🙄. I'm also going to be painting the gang(s) and terrain so there's that to look forward too!