STALKER board game announced, from the team behind Nemesis, ISS Vanguard

polygon.com:

STALKER: The Board Game is currently in development by Awaken Realms, the same developers behind the Nemesis series, ISS Vanguard, and This War of Mine: The Board Game. The announcement was made Tuesday during an online streaming presentation, along with several other game announcements. No release date was offered, but a crowdfunding campaign will launch on Gamefound by the end of June.

The STALKER series of video games tells the story of fictional armed factions that take up residence within the area surrounding the Chornobyl nuclear power plant in northern Ukraine, which melted down in 1986. The series, which began with the release of STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl in 2007, is well-regarded as the forerunner of the modern open-world first-person shooter genre. Sequels included STALKER: Clear Sky and STALKER: Call of Pripyat. A modern reboot, titled STALKER 2: Heart of Chornobyl, was announced in 2018, and is expected some time in 2023.

GSC Game World, the creator of the STALKER franchise, will help Awaken Realms co-produce the board game. The 1-4-player cooperative strategy game is described as a “zone-crawling” experience — a take on the popular dungeon crawling genre, which includes titles such as Gloomhaven, Star Wars: Imperial Assault, and Descent: Legends of the Dark. Much of the early materials contain placeholder text, however.

From Tuesday’s news release:

Each story will consist of 2-4 scenarios to play through, and players should expect to spend approx. 2 hours per scenario. Scenarios will include stealth missions where you quietly move between unaware enemies while scouting new locations, tactical gunfights, retrieval missions, artifact hunting, navigating through dangerous anomalies, fighting mutants and