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I have always thought it was the english name for "guerre urbaine" (cities of death).
But now, I know this is called "Cities of Death".
So, I got a little informations, and it is a forge world expansion ? And the sell tiles etc...
But I don't really understand what they are, they don't look like buildings.
Did you try it ? Is it fun ? How do you compare this with Cities of Death ?
Thanks !

It's essentially a 40k version of Space Hulk. Small point levels, infantry-only, tight spaces and close ranges.

It's a maze for either inside a space ship or underground facility. Just throws a spin on it with random events like a hull breach or cave in. It is a lot fun and actually restricts the game to something like pre-5th Edition units. No Deep Strike, few Bike shenanigans, no Flyrants. It's best for narrative missions though. Invading a ship to take over a 'command station' or some similar goal.

It's pretty good fun. We've had a few games of it.

The game is VERY bloody - and the difference between units which are designed for the environment (terminators, for example) and units which aren't (Devastators) is very pronounced. A chaos terminator squad with a heavy flamer will butcher several times their points in 'normal' marines.

Make the board as tight and windy as you can. Just putting a load of books on a flat table and having corridors between them works for a quick and easy board.

Choke points are very important - especially I'd advise making no more than ~50% of passageways wide enough to admit a dreadnought or centurion warsuit - because that in turn gives other, lighter units their advantage of maneuverability.

It also gives units which can't realistically hurt a walker (and there will be many!) the option to run the hell away - but only at a cost of having to avoid any choke point the dreadnought can control.

The reaction fire rule is another thing which makes a big difference - and it's actually one of the biggest reasons to take cheap-ish HQ characters - if you can increase your initiative by a couple of points, you massively improve your odds of Reaction Fire - essentially full BS overwatch. There's a lot to be said for a captain with primarch's wrath leading sternguard rather than a guy with a sword trying to stab people.

There's actualy a mini-campaign rule set in one of the horus heresy books for boarding assaults on starships - essentially a 'forced entry' mission, 1-4 'objective' missions, and one 'run the hell away it's all on fire' mission.

I can't add much, other than to say, FW put the rules up on the website:

http://www.forgeworld.co.uk/resources/fw_site/fw_pdfs/Warhammer_40000/Zone_Mortalis_Expansion.pdf

There is very expensive tiles you can buy from FW (and they do look very nice) but if you want to play it without spending vast sums of money it is quite easy to make something out of card or plasticard to represent the inside of a ship or building.

I'll add my support for trying it out! Aside from all that's mentioned above, here are a few extra reasons why you should give it a shot:

- It feels totally different to 40k. Movement is much more important, and it's much more claustrophobic. I believe the Forge World PDF linked above also has optional rules for 'blips', essentially representing that classic horror/sci-fi trope of seeing 'something' on the radar screen and not knowing what the hell it is until too late. Instead of deploying units, each player places counters that correspond to a unit, and these are only replaced by models when you have LoS to them. So your squad rounding a corner might run into half a dozen Grots, or a unit of Nobz in Mega-Armour that will chop them to bits.

- It's great for small forces. 500 points provides a much better game of ZM than standard 40k, since the overall board space you can occupy is much smaller, no units bigger than 10 men are allowed, and thus smaller units that might be somewhat irrelevant in a pitched battle are very important here. Take a 5-man Tactical Squad with a Flamer, it's going to pull its weight a lot more in ZM than when lining up against an army in a full game.

- Similarly, ZM combined with Kill Team is awesome, and Horus Heresy with ZM goes together like cheese and Marmite or Lego and Star Wars!

- It's free, so you've nothing to lose!