THE ZONE: Surreal Play-To-Lose Horror RPG (is quite good)

It’s been a Zone Of Alienation time of year as the computer game people enjoy their lovely STALKER 2. But what about those of us who prefer the soft friction of paper, the frisson of GMless role-playing and/or digitially simulated boardgame interfaces? Eh? What about us? Well,the answer came up over on the TEETH Discord. There is actually a Stalker RPG, which I own but have never played, but there’s also THE ZONE. And I have played that, and even wrote about it.

A version of this article was originally published on the TEETH Newsletter and The Zone itself came out several years ago. But it’s still worth a look, because look at this gorgeousness:

Also you can play it online. But anyway:

THE ZONE

It’s more than fair to say that TEETH RPG is, along with much of my work, heavily influenced by the concept of The Zone Of Alienation. It was inevitable then that we should play Ralph D’Amico’s narrative card game, THE ZONE, which boasts a very impressive online implementation which is currently free to play. The physical version, which is even more impressive, is $80.

The Zone is a zero-prep narrative card game of collaborative story-telling which you can play with a bunch of people in your browser (there’s a Discord if you don’t have chums available, too). It teaches you to play, and the whole thing takes less than three hours. We rather raced through it coming in at under two hours, but I’ll come to that later.

To head into The Zone the players take on the roles of individual, pre-defined characters each with their own backstory and “phobias”. What happens next is reminscent of games like Fiasco, where there is a GM-less process, that is to say one with no single controlling player, or story told, with everyone contributing to what happens to the cast of characters. What makes The Zone far more approachable than, say, Fiasco or its cousins, is that everything in The Zone is prompted by cards – both the location cards which are laid out in a spiral to the centre of the zone, and in a series of prompts that help decide how things will play out. The game leans heavily on the abstract concepts of directing a movie, with each of the rounds being explicitly called scenes.

All of this is set up via the cards, which mix a bunch of descriptions with actions, allowing both some chance in what happens, but also a great degree of control and self-determination among what the players can make happen.

This means that there’s little of the umming and ahhing that goes with people trying to think up what happens next in these sorts of games, because there’s always something immediate to spark off for the next moment. There’s also a rotating role of “director”, so while there’s no GM as such, each person gets a turn choosing some of the variables for each location. As director you’ll describe what happens in this new location, and others will chime in on what their characters are doing with that. Once this is in motion a second round of cards emerges, giving rise to a “something’s not right” round of pushing the mood towards horor. This is followed by a “not so easy” round of describing the escalation of events that mean that things are more complicated than they first appeared. Your characters might want to scare away a mutant at the zoo, for example, but that action might attract the attention of even more horrors. This card will decide whether what you wanted to happen actually takes place, or whether what happens is something worse.

All these events give rise to mutations in the players, which become both fodder for later scenes, but also allow you to accrue points for the finale.

You see, only one player is going to get to the center of The Zone. Only they will get to ask the wish-granter what they will of it. And it’s the other players who will help decide how that unfolds. The deaths of the other players are prompted by the game itself — it’ll tell you when your time is up — but the other players don’t have to accept that, and can dive in to take your place at the last moment, creating narrative twists as the game unfolds. It’s all quite sparky stuff, with events emerging quite naturally within the flow of play.

I think we didn’t quite linger long enough with all this, as we got through the game in a couple of hours, and could have done more to expand scenes in specific locations. Most importantly, perhaps, we didn’t quite develop the sort of drama between characters that might have made it feel like the movie it seems to want to invoke, and I suspect that will take the sort of practice that several playthroughs would demand.

If I had a specific issue with this game, it’s that the mutation aspect hasn’t been filled out as much as we’d have liked. As we played we mentioned that we’d like to have seen it more formalised on the interface somehow, so that it was more ready to hand for all players to riff off as the created the scenes.

Nevertheless The Zone is an extraordinary accomplishment, and one of the best implementations of a card game I’ve seen online. That the free online version is all done in a browser with no executable is just what I’d been hoping to see in the future of this sort of game and it’s an exciting implementation. I’m keen to give this another go, not least because I think our first run meant we’d only just got the hang of it, but also because I am keen to see what other locations and other prompts end up throwing into the mix.

Jim’s retrospective editorial note: the success of our time with led me to look for other card-based RPGs in following years, and I did pick up the PBtA-derived Atma games, which I then didn’t get along with at all. As GM using the cards to construct the game I actually found myself sort of limited by what was on the cards, rather than assisted. And that led me to thinking that actually the relative GMlessness of The Zone, and the fact that it’s a collaborative game by virtue of the cards perhaps means that the card-prompt system is ideal for stuff like this, and less use in more traditional GM-led formats. Until I play a game that contradicts that conclusion, of course.

[image credit]