Gameplay

3-6 players choose characters, co-create the locations, and together tell the story of their journey to the center of THE ZONE. Over 2-3 hours you will describe the wonders and horrors found inside, the grisly (or sublime) fates of all but one of your characters, and the ultimate nature of THE ZONE itself.

This is a GM-less storytelling game, so players collaboratively share the load, with a philosophy of “play to lose” where “winning” means telling the best tragic story.

The vibe is hanging out with friends around a campfire, trying to creep each other out with the darkest and most uncanny stories you can think of…

What the game is like to play

• The journey into THE ZONE is represented by a spiral of Location cards
• Players take turns narrating the story, with 50+ Scene card as prompts
• Players each have a character with a strong Motivation, Phobia, and Temptation, whose Fate is decided at the start (when they die, players become THE ZONE)
• There are no stats or dice rolls. When a player wants to do something difficult, they resolve it by drawing a “Not So Easy” card (a hack of Archipelago)
• At the end, the surviving player will ask The Center to grant their wish… and players will together create the way this doesn’t go quite as planned

These aspects make the game lighter weight than most roleplaying games, while still providing enough structure to make storytelling approachable for anyone.

Themes

• Campfire stories
• Adventurous journeys
• Uncanny things beyond human comprehension
• Self-destruction, mutation, and loss of humanity
• Playing to lose

Inspiration

THE ZONE is inspired by classic books and movies like Jeff VanderMeer’s novel Annihilation, Arkady and Boris Strugatsky’s novel Roadside Picnic, Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Stalker, the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series of games, H.P. Lovecraft’s short story “The Color Out Of Space”, and every horror game where a group of unlucky souls go into a place they can’t possibly understand and end up picked off one by one. 😉

UPDATES