Zero Dark - 8 Things that Might Change in Second Edition

A second edition of Horizon Wars: Zero Dark has always been the plan. And the plan was always to give the game a minimum of five years in the market. So there's no need to discourage people from buying it, y'hear?

But if I'm going to embrace the idea that my games need to take longer in development to really be the kind of quality of design I'm aspiring to, Zero Dark II (not the official title) is going to need to start being brain-stormed here and now. So I thought I'd list some of the things I think could be better, given the years of playtesting and, now, actual game-playing I'm getting in.

1. Emphasize the PvP Game

Zero Dark is too often described as a solo game and, whilst this was a selling point during lockdown, I think it's struggling to be seen amongst the herd of PvP games. So I think the second edition will put the PvP game a bit more front-and-centre in terms of presentation. The solo game, however, will still be part and parcel of the core rules.

Part of this re-emphasis will involve taking a new approach to PvP missions - at the moment, many PvP games seem to involve the player cooperating to neutralize the Red Force before turning on each other in the endgame.

2. Balance movement

The movement rules of Zero Dark are one of its unique features, but I think we need to deal with the balance between cautious, normal and urgent movement. 90% of movement in any given mission seems to be cautious, because everyone wants those bonus actions. And urgent movement turns up once in a blue moon to get characters to an extraction point and, other than that, barely at all (it does have value in other scenarios, ofc, but they come up quite rarely). ZD2 needs to balance this out to alter the tempo of play.

3. Sharpen the players' choices

When I designed ZD, it was supposed to take about 45 minutes to play a solo game, and about an hour to play a PvP game. But, in practice, games tend to take about two hours as players hum and haw over their options. I think balancing movement will help quite a lot, as it should encourage players to move heroes more swiftly around the tabletop, but there are other areas in which we can compress the amount of time it takes to play that I need to look at.

4. Inject more coordination

Whilst the bonus actions permit a limited amount of coordination between heroes, I think we need to dial this up a bit for immersion purposes. I am thinking about - conscious of my previous point about players' choices - giving players a new choice between activating a single hero (and then activating a single bogey) or activating multiple heroes in a single action (which would then activate multiple bogeys in return).

Good odds that I'll write up rules for this for you guys to take for a spin.

5. Procedurally-generated missions

I'm planning on using Midnight Dark as a bit of test-bed for this, much as I used Over the Horizon to test solo rules that I used later in ZD.

I tried to do procedurally-generated missions in New Adventures and, whilst I stand by the concept, I think I ultimately just gave players too much pre-game admin to do for many people to show a lot of interest in this approach.

The idea I have to trial (and, again, this might show up in pre-beta form here, in due course) is for a PG mission to have mission "steps" - like a CYOA book, you would, for example, generate a deployment state with a simple mission but, once you complete that part of the mission, you would generate a new step. I'm vaguely thinking of a "push your luck" mechanic kicking in after a minimum number of steps, after which players either keep adding new steps and trying to achieve them or they bug out and call it a day.

6. Factions

I'm on the fence about this one. Obviously, I want to retain the miniatures-agnostic/setting-agnostic heart of ZD, but I'm thinking of expanding the total menu of possible upgrades, but then spreading them out across a set of relatively-generic factions for the hard-ish sci-fi, post-apocalyptic setting.

This has two advantages: first, it reduces the choices a player has to make when devising their teams, which should reduce cases of analysis paralysis in the army building stage of the game. But it also offers me the chance to add new factions and sub-factions to the game as extra content.

7. Robots

Robots just... aren't that popular, as far as I can tell. If people take a synthetic character it's almost always a drone or an AI. Whilst robots offer some strong advantages, I think people see not having 100% control over the behaviour of a hero as a stronger counter-incentive than I had expected.

8. Digital Support?

In the interests of making play faster and more fluid, I am very keen to talk to an app developer of some sort to create an app that will manage a lot of the game's functions. The game won't require an app, but the app could certainly speed things up if you wanted, for example, to be able to know exactly which bogeys to activate and how at the touch of a button, rather than flipping a card and cross-referencing one of several tables to find the right Red Force action.

What would you like to see changed?

Let me know what you'd like to see me take a critical look at over the next few years as I build up towards ZD2. Is there a particular upgrade you'd like to see the back of? Or one you think should be included? Or is there something more systemic, like the lack of long-range sniper firepower that you think needs addressing?