Zone Raiders is the brainchild of Tony Xiao, taking you into the world of Matroshka where your teams fight for survival against each other and other deadly adversaries in a campaign-based skirmish game.

One of the key aspects of the game is that its emphasis on cinematic combat where your characters can leap, jump, slide and dive around the board as they fight, giving you the feeling of playing a stylish computer-based shooter.

The game brings together various elements that people love about tabletop games, namely a campaign element where your characters grow and develop over time as well as different playstyles including solo, co-op and of course adversarial modes.

Here are some of the selling points that the Zone Raiders put forth for those interested in the game...

•  Rich, Easy to Learn Rules - Combine easy to learn core gameplay with mechanics that reward tactical positioning, manoeuvre, and applied firepower to outfox your opponents. Practical rule design ensures that no decision is without appropriate consequence.
•  Tactical Team Skirmish - Build a Raid Team of 6-12 hardened survivors in your quest to endure. Equip each one with different weapons and specialized skills and watch them grow... or die.
•  Dynamic Movement - Feel the mobility of our unique Dynamic Movement system, where your Raiders can be equipped to parkour, wall-run, grapple or powered vault across broken terrain and lethal gaps. Smash opponents off tall ledges, or create forcefield walls to trap them in place!
•  Deadly Environments - Your opponent is not the only threat on the battlefield. Protecting ancient relics and scavenge are automated exterminator machines, psionic mind-scorchers, fierce nano-contaminant storms and radiation fluxes. When the lights vanish or unexpected snipers arise during a Dark Emergence Event, can your forces adapt?
•  Diverse Factions - Command 7 unique factions with engaging playstyles, from the regimented Reclaimers, the agile Technomads, cunning Zone Stalkers to the evolving robotic NthGen, each force is dripping with flavour and tactical options as well as unique researchable doctrines and equipment.
•  Campaign System - Lead your team beyond a single battle, but to victory in a campaign where your strategic decisions have great importance. Will you build up your team's tech skills, or abort the mission to retrieve an ancient cryo-pod? Should your team construct a mighty industrial robot, or develop maps of the battleground for a tactical edge?
•  Asymmetric Missions - Winning a battle isn't the same as winning a war. Players can elect different goals during a mission, from capturing prisoners to hacking an automated train. Perhaps it's worth it to cut your losses during a failed mission, or even change objectives mid game as a new, more valuable prize is discovered!
•  Exotic Equipment - Featuring over 100 different types of weapons, armour and survival gear, you will have numerous options on how to equip and defeat your foes.
•  Merciless AI Enemies - The Immunocytes are merciless machines that are anathema to all intelligent life. Destroy or outmanoeuvre their AI-controlled agents during battle, or perhaps even trick them to tie up your opponents!
•  Cooperative Play System - Sometimes the enemy of my enemy is my friend. Join forces with other players to take on thrilling Cooperative Missions, where you must employ speed and stealth to defeat overwhelming numbers of AI foes to accomplish cinematic objectives as either single missions or campaign play.

It sounds fascinating and could well be something folks need for those expansive collections that we never do anything with! Having an Open-Model system means that anything can be used when playing this game, giving a unique look to every faction that gets brought to the tabletop.

I really like the actual artwork that the Zone Raiders team have worked on from the book which hits that note of classic Sci-Fi but with it own unique feel to. It's disparate enough as well to invite you to invent and tweak to your heart's content.

A Demo Encounter has been added into the mix by the folks behind the game HERE. Make sure to give that a look and then dive back into the project itself as I bet this is going to chime with a lot of folks.

What do you think?