The latest Journal Tactica for Warhammer The Horus Heresy is up for pre order today, this time taking the fight to the close and cramped confines of the Zone Mortalis. In this full review we’ll be checking out the contents of the book and diving into how to play games of Zone Mortalis, while also having a look at the new units that are added in the book!

Massive thanks to Games Workshop for sending us over a copy to check out on the site. If you would like to support the site then why not order your Horus Heresy goodies through our affiliate Element Games and save yourself some money too?

This isn’t the only Horus heresy content up today though, as we’ve also got a full review of the new Maximus Battle Group box which you can check out here too

We’re also planning on doing a Zone Mortalis Battle Report in the near future, so keep your eyes peeled to the site…

Zone Mortalis Journal Tactica Review

Today’s pre order is an exciting one, as it brings claustrophobic and cramped combat to the battlefields of the Horus Heresy. ZM has been part of the Horus Heresy game for a long time, but 3rd edition brings it to us in a dedicated supplement for the first time.

Now it’s worth pointing out that a lot of this content was previously available as a PDF allowing you to try this game mode, though the new Journal Tactica does build on that and fills the entire page count of the Journal with Mortalis content!

Previous Journal Tacticas have seen a split between narrative and gaming content, with a lot of the page count dedicated to background. So this is probably the first one that is entirely dedicated to gaming content.

We open up with the core Zone Mortalis rules, and this at first glance looks very similar to the previous PDF.

Battlefields are ideally built around 12″ squares such as the plastic Necromunda tiles or the original Forge World tiles, and the rules support these in map size and rules for placing the wall and door segments. While there are a recommended density of walls, doors and other terrain pieces, theres no hard set layouts, so whatever terrain you have you’ll be able to create a fun environment to fight over – just remember that tight confines and limited movement are part of the experience, you want choke points and bottlenecks to fight over. Some of the rules such as Confined Space represent this too – there will be some areas of the Zone Mortalis were vehicles or units with a specified value of Bulky cannot pass through – again this makes for some nice battlefield story telling with certain units able to make an escape through a narrow corridor, leaving the chasing Dreadnaught to take the long way round.

As you can imagine, a lot of core rules are changed to represent how they work in these cramped environments. Fly is a no no as all the environments we are fighting over have ceilings (as an aside, Zone Mortalis supports multi level combat too – so you don’t need to stick to the strict one level maps as seen with the original resin tiles – you can use your multi level Necromunda set up to have some exciting and interesting battles), in addition barrage cannot be fired indirectly and blast weapons have the potential of scattering into a wall and exploding on impact. Battles in the Zone Mortalis are also mentally and psychologically taxing, so routed units can cause nearby units to become routed themselves as they flee blindly down the corridors!

There’s some nice interactivity in Zone Mortalis games too – doors can be opened or closed to allow units to pass (with smaller doors stopping certain bulky units from passing through them), models can be squished with closing doors, and units can even use their intelligence stat to try and hack into computer systems in order to do a number of different abilities.

Reserves work quite differently in games of Zone Mortalis – before a reserves roll is made on a unit you need to pick one of 6 Reserves Strategems that dictate how that unit arrives on the battlefield.

Reinforcements is the most simple – on a 3+ they can enter from their board edge. The next is basically a push your luck version of this, Forced March allows the reserves to turn up on a 2+ but they have to take a test to not be pinned when they arrive. I suspect most would just use Reinforcements, but if you desperately need someone to arrive you can risk this. Encirclement is harder, triggering on a 4+ but this allows you to bring your reserves on from the enemy’s edge of the board! Flanking Force does what it says on the tin, allowing the unit to come in from the edges, it triggers on a 4, but you get +1 to the roll if you have outflank! On the board there will be some areas designated as elevators, and Mass Elevator is a 3+ roll that allows your unit to pop up on one of your choice. Finally Teleport Strike can be used on your non-anti-grav Deep Strike units to teleport them onto the board, this triggers on a decent 3+, but a roll of 1 results in a mishap! Interestingly, there’s a new Prime Advantage that can be used to give a unit Deep Strike, which is really cool!

The book also includes two new Zone Mortalis specific Advanced Reactions, Take Cover is very reminiscent of 2nd edition, allowing a unit to gain shrouded when shot! Bypass Cogitator on the other hand allows your unit to take an intelligence test to try and open or close doors on the board – the higher your Battlesmith rule the more doors you can activate with a single reaction. I really like this one as makes units with Battlesmith really important to have to alter the state of the board.

In addition to the full Zone Mortalis rules, the book also contains a full mission pack of 6 scenarios along with special rules, new army construction detachments suited for the 1500 point battles we are playing here – what’s nice is that you don’t have to use these new primary detachments (you get 3 that favour different unit types) you can instead just use the regular one from “full” Heresy too.

These are very aggressive and bloody missions, with the main way of scoring victory points by taking out units, but there are secondaries for controlling areas of the board and for winning challenges – this should make for some interesting games and it really forces you to try and engage the enemy rather than just hiding behind a door on an objective.

These missions have a number of different layouts and differing numbers of “sectors” that can be fought over to get secondaries – there’s even a mission with two Mass Elevators in the centre of the board that can be used to bring troops into the heart of the battle using the new reinforcements rules.

They look really good fun and I’m really looking forward to putting together a force specifically suited at taking on these missions. With points being given up for a destroyed unit, but points scored for also holding sectors you’ve got to find a nice balance between lots of small units and a few big ones – a mix of both is probably what you want and armies get a couple of new units in the book that are suited to games of Zone Mortalis.

The Mechanicum gain Castellax Infernus, armed with a shoulder mounted S6 Breaching flamer and a pair of flamers on the fists – lots of panic inducing and perfect for flushing units out of tight corridors.

The Solar Aux get a new Veletaris variant called Raiders armed with stun causing Shotguns with the option to swap them out for combat shields and mauls. These are actually pretty good, and the combat shields give them a little more protection when going into a fight with anything tougher than a guardsman. They can even form up into a shield wall in order to increase their toughness by 1!

They also get a new Technician unit, that are able to use the Bypass Cogitator reaction even though they don’t have battlesmith. I picture these guys as being Hudson from Aliens using a data pad to bypass a door and open it allowing their troops to pass through.

Finally the book contains 2 new Veteran squads for the Marines – Despoilers and Breachers. These have all the usual perks you’d imagine from Vets, just with access to the loadouts of the two unit types. Again, these are really nice for games of Zone Mortalis.

Summary

So what do I think of the new Journal Tactica Zone Mortalis? Well, I know a lot of this has previously been in free PDFs, but we have finally got a dedicated ZM supplement packed full of rules for running games in these tight environments. I’m a sucker for a hardcopy book rather than a PDF, and I’ll be picking up a hardcopy myself rather than my digital review copy! Zone Mortalis is a great game system and it gives players a completely new way of playing games of Warhammer The Horus Heresy. There’s some really nice rules in here and the additional units are also good fun, making this one a must buy in my opinion. It’s also good to see them use the entire page count in order to give us the full ZM package, rather than this maybe being split between a couple of books that contain 20 pages of lore each.

Journal Tactica Zone Mortalis is up for pre order today and is released Saturday 11th July

Games Workshop supplied Sprues & Brews with a free copy for review purposes.