Mutant Year Zero: Zone Wars review - "One of the most approachable skirmish board games out there"

My very first game of Mutant Year Zero: Zone Wars had me tensely setting up foliage to weigh the odds in my favour, picking out the perfect team of mutated animals to cover as much ground as possible, and weighing up opponents to know who will shoot first — then I fired a warthog directly into an enemy sending their buildings crumbling down with it. 

Off the back of a successful Kickstarter campaign managing to pull in over £100,000, Mutant Year Zero doesn't just pay aesthetic homage to its source material, but it takes particular note of the series' tone, characters and more. If you like Mutant Year Zero, this is a great companion piece to the series. However, it needs to do quite a lot to pull in a more casual observer.

I could say Zone Wars is the most approachable entryway into the skirmish genre there is right now, but that might set you up to believe that it's an on-ramp for more complex and longer-form board games for adults. Zone Wars makes a fantastic argument that it is both the start and end of its genre, and mostly pulls this off. 

Features & design

• Surprisingly generous starter set
• Has easy-to-make cardboard terrain
• Expressive, characterful models
• Packing away components can be a struggle

The box for Mutant Year Zero: Zone Wars is super compact, containing 10 miniature figures split out over two factions, over 100 tokens, 10 custom dice, a game mat, cardboard terrain which snaps together, a rulebook, and over 80 playing cards. It's one of those board games that is so tightly packed in that getting it all back in the box without a little overflow is a struggle in itself. However, once you figure out where each component goes, you could feasibly pop it into a bag and play it over a (maybe slightly long) lunch break. 

The figures themselves are highly detailed, with defined wrinkles on coats, shading around creases, and expressive faces. They are as charismatic as the characters they are based on, and perfect for trying to paint yourself. The box does not come with paints, so painting is more of a side project for fans of Warhammer rather than the main appeal of the minis.

Every card, die, and figure in the box has a distinct visual identity — dark yet fun, pretty and also kind of gross. Each fits into its own compartment and it's relatively easy to put away.

The one cog in packing up the box smoothly is the terrain, which is split up into small slithers of cardboard. You pop these out of a bigger sheet of cardboard at the start, which means you are left with technically less in the box after the first time but the awkward cardboard shapes make it a little harder to fit together. 

The game mat is of a high enough quality that I never felt like I'd accidentally rip it and, though it looks a tad generic with mud and grass art, it serves as a good basis to place the terrain on. Everything feels high quality but not necessarily flashy. 

Gameplay

• Doesn't take too long to play
• Fast-paced gameplay
• Wonderfully silly emergent moments
• Lacks the depth of competitors

Your first 20 or so minutes with Mutant Year Zero: Zone Wars will be spent flicking through minis (and just picking the coolest one anyway) and putting together terrain. Individual sections of terrain are labelled with a letter and number, with all those sharing the same letter going together. It's an easy process that can be a lot of fun with friends. Building your own terrain isn't just a way to get the size of the box down but also your own little recon mission to plan out the field before taking on your opponents. Once everything is put together, you go through one by one placing terrain basically anywhere it will stand still – yes this sometimes means stacking or tying routes between two different buildings.

The twist? You don't get to pick your corner until after all the terrain is down, and it is randomly decided who gets to pick first. This means you are encouraged to make the field as fair as possible — or you can choose to trap one corner as much as possible and leave the rest of the field open. This touches on what makes Zone Wars work so well. From its aesthetic to its creatures and the world it so lovingly borrows from, Zone Wars is a joyous skirmish game that centers fun above all else. It's one of those games you can't help but do ridiculous things in. This is encouraged by the turn order system. 

Once you have grabbed your characters, a token is placed in a cup for each one and players must reach in and grab one out. Whichever faction is grabbed first gets to pick their corner and the rest of the table follows. This basic system determines much of the game so you have to get used to it quickly. 

Once your characters are placed in the right spot, players once more seek the guidance of the cup to decide which player goes first. If your luck is particularly bad (or good), this could end up in one player getting three turns before anything else, and then sitting out for the following six. 

One last gambit to shake up combat are Zone cards, which are essentially random events that cause you to do a roll. On a success, it will often hurt your enemies. On a failure, you will take the brunt of that damage. In my first game, this loop led to me taking a sniper shot to the face, and immediately hitting back with a warthog, crashing intricately placed terrain and hurting all three of an opponent's creatures. This is both awesome and Zone Wars' biggest departure from a more traditional strategy game. No matter how hard you think about it or how well-placed your terrain is, sometimes a land shark will come in and mess you up anyway. I frankly love this setup as it fits so wholeheartedly into the world I first explored with Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden back in 2018. Sometimes, things just go wrong. 

This can, unfortunately, make Zone Wars feel a little less deep than its competitors in the space — though I can't think of anything that works quite like it does. A more serious board game group might get tired of handing everything to the fate of the dice and I definitely started to feel this after a little while, but this is the only skirmish-style game I could feasibly tackle in an hour and feel that itch to restart right after finishing it.

It even comes with a solo mode, where you play out multiplayer scenarios with just you and an opponent… who also happens to be controlled by you. Each character type has a mindset you can read in the manual and this gives you a template to control them. In certain moves, you have to pick the option which feels right, which can feel a little like playing against yourself in chess. However, if you can get into it, there's fun to be had here too, which adds a lot to the replayability value.

Perhaps one of the things that most enunciates Zone Wars' more quick-paced action is how its health works. Rather than carrying around a pencil or holding a board where you push health up and down, you receive heart tokens for damage taken, which you place directly on your character card. If you can count to five, you can track health. Your characters will die, and this is part of the fun of it. 

Should you buy Mutant Year Zero: Zone Wars?

Mutant Year Zero: Zone Wars feels like a game almost any kind of person can play and get some enjoyment out of. Approachable enough to explain easily, yet detailed and fun enough to convince a strategy game die-hard to play, it's the kind of game that makes you and your friends guffaw as a building collapses. 

Coming with just two sets of teams in the box, you immediately have to fork out the price of the expansion to get them all playing at the same time though, and a little bit of that amazement may wane the more you play. Despite this, it's such a unique experience that it's worth the rather hefty price of admission.

Buy it if...

Don't buy it if...

How we tested Mutant Year Zero: Zone Wars

This review was put together after hours of playtime in both multiplayer and solo skirmishes. We also played the base game with the Robots and Psionics expansion to get a feel for all four teams.

You can find out more in our guide to how we test board games, or the general 12DOVE reviews policy page. 

For recommendations on what to play next, don't miss our guide to the best board games or the best tabletop RPGs.