Not many miniatures games start with Fortnite. Zeo Genesis doesn’t use the battle royale as inspiration for its mech-based skirmish warfare, but its creator, Danny Block, worked at Epic when Fortnite exploded in popularity. A lot of the funding for his miniature-based passion project came from that enormous hit.
“I basically wanted to make a miniature game for most of my adult life,” Block tells me over video call. It was only when Fortnite’s success allowed for an early retirement that he set about chasing his dream. But Zeo Genesis isn’t your average miniatures game. Block has spent the past five years establishing a plastics manufacturing plant in the USA, complete with mills and injection moulds, so that everything about the game will be made in-house.
As for the game itself, Zeo Genesis is a mech-based skirmish game for which you’ll only need a handful of models to play. Launching via GameFound on April 29, There won’t be any £50 rulebooks, either; it should be fun to pick up and play right out of the box.
“You just want to make something that’s actually fun,” Block says of his design philosophy. “You want to make a game people actually play. And that is the core of everything. We want to make miniatures people actually enjoy putting together, actually enjoy painting. You want to make a game that people actually enjoy playing. And we want to tell a story that people can engage with one way or another.”
To help realise his dream, Block got two former Games Workshop staff, Andy Chambers and Gav Thorpe, on board to tackle the game design and narrative respectively.
When I asked why they wanted to join Block’s team, Chambers explained that the founder’s passion and commitment were enough to get him on board. “People make games for different reasons,” he says. “Some of them want to try and make money – they’re the genuine madmen. Some of them actually make it work. But most are driven by passion for the topic at some level, and that’s very much on display here.”
For Thorpe, it was the chance to build Zeo Genesis’ world from the ground up. After working with Workshop’s established IP for so long, he’s excited to create something with a more personal touch, especially when the game aligns with his personal interests so closely.
“I’m a big fan of anime and, to a slightly lesser extent, manga, and particularly big armoured suits and things like that. So it was already within my sphere of interest,” he explains.
This sphere of interest seems relatively untapped in the small-scale hobby. While Trench Crusade is proving popular for fans of grimdark alternate history settings, and Games Workshop has the monopoly on both far future and fantasy, mech warfare seems to be overlooked. Recent T’au releases for 40K have veered away from the battlesuit aesthetic and Gundam has announced its own miniatures game, but for the time being, this seems like a relatively untapped niche.
I had to pose the team ‘the Trench Crusade question’. After the undeniable success of the skirmish game’s Kickstarter campaign, does this make it easier or more difficult for other small games to follow in its footsteps?
“Whether people realise it or not, it is the Golden Age,” Block says. “When we talk about a thing like Trench Crusade, everyone says, oh, look at them, they made so much money. I’m like, no, they have 30,000 people who just said, please let me play your game. I’m interested. I’ll give you some money to buy some miniatures or a rule book. 30,000 people said, I absolutely want to play Trench Crusade at one time in a short, less than a year span. That tells me that it’s the best time ever [to make a miniatures game].”
Of course, for every Trench Crusade, there are a dozen independent miniature games that don’t make it. It being a so-called Golden Age doesn’t mean every game will be an automatic success. If that was the case, Elon Musk would have bought a miniatures company instead of Twitter.
But Zeo Genesis has an interesting way of ensuring that players keep coming back to it, and it’s a “live-service mentality” taken from Block’s experience working on Fortnite. Don’t worry, it’s not a battle pass.
“There is something that gives you, the person who cares enough to care about our world, something to do each week,” he explains. “If it’s a new snippet of story, if it’s a rules update, if it’s a whatever, there’s always something. And it’s not always tied to whatever the new miniature releases. It’s not always tied to commercial product.”
Block gives other examples, including STL files to download for prototype upgrade kits that will eventually make their way onto plastic sprues, or free webcomics. It’s something that Chambers also has experience with from his time at Games Workshop.
“I always go back to the White Dwarf factor,” he says. “It’s replicating that, which we unconsciously did without ever realising we were doing it back in the ‘90s when I was at Workshop. We had a monthly magazine, we had to fill it with something. So we were constantly adding extra new bits. Some of them were tied to the miniatures, some of them weren’t, some of them were painted armies [or] new color schemes.”
Zeo Genesis has a lot going for it. The triple-activation design piques my interest, and Thorpe’s small-scale approach to storytelling is vastly preferable to any galaxy-spanning crusades with aeons of lore. A “miniatures-first philosophy” and commitment to keeping players updated with new stuff on a weekly basis is all well and good, but the game, world, and miniatures have to grab players initially in order for any of that foreplanning to matter.
“If you’re a games designer, you’re not trying to recreate 45 years of Games Workshop, because you’re just not going to do it,” Thorpe says. “So create a game that’s interesting and fun.” With the amount of time, effort, and money invested into Zeo Genesis already, hopefully players will find it is just that.
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