Cyberpunk, the very specific trademarked intellectual property, not the overall genre, has hit a welcome point of critical mass.
High-quality spin-offs shall be combined as the hugely successful Netflix show from CD Projekt Red and Studio Trigger will join forces with the innovative Combat Zone skirmish game from Monster Fight Club. If you watched Cyberpunk Edgerunners and thought, “I would love to take this goddamn rollercoaster of a tv show and the characters I love so much and watch them duke it out on the mean streets of Night City in the miniature form,” then you are in luck. The heart-wrenching mini-series is being converted into tabletop form by the delightful folks behind the Cyberpunk Red: Combat Zone game that launched last year.
Combat Zone quickly became one of my favorite skirmish games due to the smooth flow of combat, no-nonsense rules, and overall accessibility of the design. There is little waiting involved in these fights as the alternating activations and React system mean there is always a reason to pay attention and plan your countermoves. The central mechanic that makes the game so easy to pick up is the color system. The “Limiter” that is used to measure distance, all your character skills and abilities, and the dice themselves all work on a simple three-color rule. Just roll the red, yellow, or green dice that match your chosen action to see what happens.
Monster Fight Club is also boxing clever on this project. The base game comes with the rulebook, a scenario book, a gameboard, some terrain made from high-quality cardboard, character cards, relevant loot and gear cards, and all the tokens and Limiters you need to play. On top of that, it includes 24 full-color acrylic standees of your favorite characters from the Santo Domingo Edgerunners or some of Araska’s most powerful goons, led by Adam Smasher. This will keep the price down and make it very accessible for folks out there who might be drawn to tabletop gaming for the first time.
If, like me, you enjoy poking pigment around on plastic, there will also be a full range of miniatures available. I obviously can’t speak for the quality of those minis just now, but I am extremely pleased with anything I have purchased from Monster Fight Club to date, including the Cyberpunk Red: Combat Zone base game and some additional gangs. All in all, I’m pretty stoked for this release, although details on how it will be coming to market are currently thin on the ground. Based on the usual MFC business model, I would assume a Kickstarter campaign will be likely.