Rift Zone: Contact

The Evolution of Miniatures Wargaming

Rift Zone: Contact is a miniatures wargame that uses your smartphone to enhance your tabletop battles. Use AR on your smartphone to visualize your strategy and save your species!

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About Rift Zone: Contact

  • Augmented Reality

    View the battlefield through your app and see your unit's movement radius, firing arcs, weapon selections, and more!

  • App Augmented Gaming

    Control each unit, select targets, trigger counter attacks and special abilities, all through the app.

    Learn as you play.

  • Real Minis, Real Maps, Real Gaming

    Rift Zone: Contact comes with real minis and maps for you stage your battles.

  • Unit Persistance

    Using RFID to identify them, your units have a name and history. They are scarred veterans of your generalship.

    Don't let them down!

  • Deep Backstory

    This isn't just a bug-hunt.

    The Scry'Ox are not villains. They are a society with a long history and culture, and just as tough and determined as humanity, and have just as much right to this new world.

    What comes later, of course, is tougher, and has much more right to claim what once was theirs...

Backstory

Rift Zone: Contact is a miniatures war game that captures the battle between the United Earth Defense Force, and the Scry’Ox Collective as they battle for the distant world of Proxima Centauri.  As both civilizations, unaware of each other, searched for a new home, first contact between both civilizations accidently a chance chance encounter a dozen years ago as both civilizations searched for a new home erupted into an armed conflict as an encounter between the first human starship and a Scry’Ox craft ended in violence.  

The Scry’Ox and humanity were not prepared for an intergalactic conflict, but the prize of a habitable world was too great to resist.  And so over the next decade each geared up for war, building massive fleets of interstellar vessels.

But something happened that neither side anticipated.  The Scry’Ox faster than light technology, based upon their ability to manipulate gravity, and the human equivalent, which boosted a ship into a higher order dimension where time passed differently, interacted as both fleets blinked into existence around the planet.  Suddenly, rifts appeared in space around them and the fleets were drawn into them, effectively cutting off the forces that both sides had deployed on Proxima Centauri from their home worlds, and leaving them to fight for the future of the planet alone.

So we will pick up with a battle between the UEDF and the Scry’Ox on the planet surface.  Proxima Centauri is a world rich with life whose closest analog is the fungus and slime molds of planet Earth.  There are signs on this world of an ancient alien civilization that appears to have gone extinct thousands of years ago, but some of the ruins of this race remain, and potentially hold the key to victory.

Cast of Characters

Introducing some of the units in the initial release of the game. More will be added later, and their appearance abilities may change as we get closer to shipping.

UEDF

Stormbringer

  • Height 10 meters
  • Weight 1850 kg

The UEDF Stormbringer is one of the purpose built weapons used in the last big war humanity fought with itself.  Built by Universal Dynamics as a mobile missile platform, thousands were built and deployed with great effect over 100 years ago.  When the Scry’Ox were encountered these were some of the first weapons that were pulled out of mothballs and sent in small numbers to Proxima Centauri.

Although the Stormbringer is only moderately armored, and prone to damage due to its exposed warheads, it can unleash multiple devastating waves of direct and indirect fire missiles.  Fabricators at the UEDF colony on Proxima Centauri are kept busy resupplying the missiles for these long range weapons.

The Stormbringer has both heavy direct fire missiles and long range indirect fire missiles.  It also has twin high velocity gatling guns that can be used to defend itself in close quarters.

Scry'Ox

Scarab

  • Length 5 meters
  • Weight 400 kg

Second in the collective hierarchy are the ScryOx E’Menbras, a stout laborer that while significantly less intelligent than the Asprias, are the second most populous species in the collective.  E’Menbras perform most of the menial tasks for their society.  As members of the Tsski hiveclan, they participate in mining activities by constructing mining gantries, carrying ore, and maintaining the Maulers.  

After encountering humanity on Proxima Centauri the humble E’Mendras were modified to be heavily armored with their projectors modified to project weaponized nanites and a large plasma cannon grafted onto their back to create the Scarabs.

Not as fast or as dangerous in close combat as the Reapers, Scarab’s are a powerful force on the battlefield, able to strike from a distance and take tremendous punishment.  In close combat, a Scarab can grapple an opponent holding it helpless until their companions can destroy it.  

UEDF

Space Ranger

  • (Average?) Height 2.5 meters
  • Weight 165 kg

Trained for zero G combat and armed with hyper velocity rail guns, these highly capable infantry are able to adapt to almost any environment.  Their metal-ceramic powered armor gives them enhanced strength and damage resistance giving them a fighting chance..  

Most space rangers have spent their lives between worlds and follow the motto “vires in unitate”, meaning ‘Strength in unity’ translated from Old Terran.  Capable rangers are promoted to man the other mechs and armored units of the UEDF.

Scry’Ox

Reaper

  • Length 4 meters
  • Weight 200 kg

Reapers are a modification of the dominant species of ScryOx in their home world, known as the Aspiras, and the one from which the ScryOx queens ascended.  Because of this, they are the most populous of the combatants fighting for the collective and the most capable of taking on a wide range of challenges.  Intelligent, fast, and with dexterous three fingered hands to compliment their deadly claws the Reaper is a heavily modified version of the base ScryOx with much of its body rebuilt to incorporate organic machinery and weapons including deadly corrosive nanite projectors.

The other members of the ScryOx collective strive to ascend to have their essence placed into one of the Aspiras by the ScryOx queen they are pledged to, with great accomplishments and contributions to the collective weighing in their favor.

UEDF

Excalibur

  • Height 10.5 meters
  • Weight 1200.kg

Originally designed as a loader and construction mech called the APCM (All Purpose Construction Mech), these powerful machines were used to build the UEDF Colony on Proxima Centauri.  With only limited numbers of heavy weapons like the Stormbringer and Juggernaut available to the UEDF colonists at the start of the conflict with the Scry’Ox they applied their ingenuity and machine shops to quickly retrofit the APCM from peacetime operations to an effective combat system, renamed the Excalibur.  Each mech carries a high speed heavy gatling gun that unleashes tremendous punishment at close to medium range.  Additionally the Excalibur is equipped with a shield and an advanced alloy arm blade that can be superheated cutting through even the toughest Scry’Ox carapace.

The Proxima Centauri colonists continue to build and optimize Excaliburs to improve their fighting effectiveness and are researching how to longer range weapons systems to give them a fighting chance against ScryOx Stalkers.

Scry’Ox

Mauler

  • Length 12 meters
  • Weight 5000 kg

Originally used for mineral extraction and strip-mining, Maulers are modified from their original form to be better suited for combat. Incredibly effective, they are widely regarded as some of the most dangerous weapons in they Scry’Ox’ arsenal. Because of this, they are often easier to avoid then to face head on, exploiting the Mauler’s achilles heel: its speed. The slowest on nearly any given battlefield, their creators hoped to solve this by increasing the range of the Maulers’ gravity shears and anchors, allowing them to lock down and drag in enemies. While partially effective, the Scry’Ox as always seek perfection, and rumor of an in-development new and improved Mauler has been sending shivers down the spines of Space Rangers for some time now.