Horizon Wars: Zero Dark Review

boardgamequest.com:

We review Horizon Wars: Zero Dark, a solo skirmish game that can use any miniatures you already have on hand. It can also be played cooperatively or even versus.

I’m guessing I’m not alone here in having more tabletop games than the actual time to play them. It’s not a bad thing that we gamers are spoiled for choice now, but as much as I spend building, painting, and learning rules for skirmish games, they just don’t get the table time that I would hope. Always so many new things to play on game night.

However, a while ago I stumbled across a unique option to fix that. It’s a game called Horizon Wars: Zero Dark (not to be confused with Horizon: Zero Dawn) is a miniatures agnostic skirmish game that can be played solo (or even coop/PVP). Solo skirmish games are usually more miss than hit, so does this one actually work? Let’s find out!

Horizon Wars: Zero Dark has a fairly thick rulebook, but the game itself is pretty streamlined. But to that effect, I’m only going to give you high-level overview of how the game is played. The first thing you’ll need do is assemble your squad. To do that, you choose your team (usually 4 heroes) and assign them stat points (Movement, Fire (shooting), Acuity (mental stat), and Discipline). There are other stats like armor value and Electric Weapons, but those 4 are the primary ones. After that, you’ll want to upgrade your heroes with skills, weapons, armor, and traits. Once you’re happy with your squad, it’s’ time to head out to the mission.

The game doesn’t have a round structure, per se. What happens is that you take an action with one of your heroes, and then you flip a card from the deck of cards (you use a standard playing card deck with 2 jokers). The card flip determines what action and unit the enemy soldiers activate.

Standard actions for the heroes are moving, shooting, interacting with objectives, or healing. To make a check, you roll a number of 12-sided dice equal to the relevant stat (Fire stat for shooting, for