I'm sure there is a really neat game here. The mechanics sound clever and the flow of the hunt sounds really fun, but sadly the layout of the rules is so bad, I gave up before I could find out. As a fellow game designer, making your ruleset understandable to others is oftentimes harder than creating the game itself.

Building a Hunter and pact is by no means straight forward and the rules for doing so are scattered all over the place. For just one example, the weapon sets section makes mention of a difference between "Guild rank abilities" and "two dice bonus". What is this two-dice bonus and why is it nowhere specified in the prior guild section, or here? The author has assumed you know what this means. To find what this means, you have to reference the "playing the game" rules in chapter 2. Assuming your reader has remembered a key rule for building out your group from a prior chapter is bad layout design, and makes for a frustrating experience.

A little gem of fast and furious skirmish Mission Critical is a condensed and sharpened version of Hostile Takeover, with only 3 units per side (Ronin, Razor and Specialist) fighting for the control of Tactical Assets on a battlefield of limited size (2x2). It is the perfect game for those times when you look for serious wargaming action but have only limited time and limited space. Dice mechanims are the usual ones in Patrick Todoroff's universe (3 actions, D6, D8, D10 - success on 4+). They are both simple and elegant, and allow for fast moving games. The three units are well differentiated and it rapidly appears that protecting the Specialist (who is best to interact with the Tactical Assets) rapidly becomes an objective in itself. Although probably designed with competitive play in mind, this set of rules is equally pleasing in a narrative style of play. Ease of play, elegant mechanisms, tactical depth... What else can we ask? Highly recommended to all the skirmish fans.

Great fun, an engaging solo/co-op game that gives you alot of freedom for your fun

My favorite action/cyberpunk skirmish game. Excellent for solo, it's fun and plays fast. The focus is not on hacking and there's no cyberspace, it's more of an scifi action/heist moment -- that moment when shit has hit the fan and everyone is guns blazing.

Support from the author is great.

An EZ expansion is always welcome, doubly so if it's a campaign.

This is a short campaign of 5 interlinked missions, centered on an abduction-- er, "rescue" and attack/defend missions. It also has some destruction missions, and even features an enemy Agent. There are no real rules changes, which is ok for me since I don't need them.

The AI generated artwork is nice and evocative; I guess it's only fitting a cyberpunk game uses AI artwork!

Like others have mentioned in the discussion forum, this would probably benefit from having a "printer friendly version", since most of the pages have a dark/black background. It currently only has a full color PDF.

Insurgent Earth has become one of my favourite "alien invasion" games for solo play, and it's definitely catching on with my gaming freinds too! "String Bet" ups the ante from the original "Insurgent Earth - Resist or Die" core rules to allow a really cool co-op style using the same characters that you've generated already in a properly narrative way!

As a five part mini-campaign "String Bet" brings in new character types, along with a couple more alien enemies which just adds to the mayhem... I mean fun, sorry... element of the game as a whole.

If you like your games fast and furious with a minimum of stat tables and admin then give this a whirl... you will need the core rules to get things rolling though!

This is an excellent expansion for an already excellent game. This volume adds solo and cooperative play to ZA, as well as numerous new pieces of equipment and new rules for dealing with the Zone. If you are a fan of ZA, then this is a must. The author also actively supports Zona Alfa via his Stalker 7 Facebook page.

Suppliment adds solo/co-op play, along with the possibility of playing as a team of crack STALKERs or Scientists. This is along with everything else listed in the description.

Would be 5 and a half stars if Zona Alfa finally had all the stuff featured in both series, in the game.

Like other games by Patrick Todoroff nigthwatch is a wonderful sandbox for players who no longer have the time to devote themselves to longer games, or like me have no regular opponent. The rules are simple and you quickly immerse in the history of your miniatures. I like the freedom to be able to adapt the game to my collection. My advice if you don't like a rule, change it. Your adventure, your rules.

Comme les autres jeux de Patrick Todoroff nigthwatch est un merveilleux bac a sable pour les joueurs n'ayant plus le temps de se consacrer à de longues parties, ou comme moi qui n'ont pas d'adversaires réguliers. Les règles sont simples et on se plonge rapidement dans l'histoire de nos figurines. J'aime la liberté de pouvoir adapter le jeu à ma collection. Mon conseil une règles ne vous plait pas, modifiez là. Votre aventure, vos règles.

Big fan of patricks previous titles, but was honestly a little dissapointed with Nightwatch.

its just too abstract in some areas with a few limitations that dont really fit, a turn limit for example has no place in a coop game with a plot, by all means crank the difficulty up the longer it takes but failing a campaign because of something so forced is not good.

The dice system used is actually pretty good, with player characters having a action pool of 3 with 3 dice (D6,D8 and D10) usable on whichever action they like against a target number of 4 with modifiers. If the action is one the character class is skilled in they roll 2 of the die and take the highest result.

Equipment is sadly very basic, even more so than similar games (Rangers of Shadow Deep, 5 leagues from the Borderlands) and aside from ranged weapons granting a ranged attack, typically provide a once per turn ability that are a mixed bag. Polearms for example allow you to attack from further away, but only once per turn despite having 3 attacks. A personal peeve carried over from Zona Alfa is present here too in which grenades can be thrown further than firearms.

The enemies are the biggest disappointment. In a game centred around hunting monsters, there are no monsters, or at least beyond whichever miniatures you choose to use. There are 3 levels of lesser enemies with the only major thing differentiating them being the die they roll. Every mission sees the group fending off waves of minions while completing basic objectives until they reach the final mission which is to hunt the big bad, which again has no unique stated adversary but the same stat as one of the human player characters with a few abilities to jazz them up a bit.

While I dont doubt fun can be had with Nightwatch and it is a game thats quick to play, it feels like there's a lot missing. There's no tracking mechanics, no equipment to exploit vulnerabilities (silver bullets, holywater etc) and while I understand the enemies are intentionally simple to aid the agnostic nature of the game, it leaves very little depth which is only exacerbated by the non random spawn tables.

I should mention that throughout the book does mention houseruling things as you like.

This game has been taking all my solo time for a little while, now. It does a fantastic job of playing out the moment when the job goes sideways.