Apocalypticum is a post-apocalyptic game, essentially a modified version of Ganesha's Mutants and Death Ray Guns title, which is itself inspired by Song of Blades & Heroes, our club's favorite fantasy skirmish game. So you can see how Apocalypticum seems tailor-made for a game group such as ours.
Mutants and Death Ray Guns seems inspired by a Gamma World-type vision of the post apocalypse, with robots, mutant plants and other wierdness. Apocalypticum, on the other hand, is a darker, grittier setting like those imagined in films like The Road Warrior, The Road, The Book of Eli, The Stand and others, where it's mostly desperate bands of humans fighting each other for survival.
It's worth noting that Apocalypticum's force lists are designed specifically around the post-apocalyptic miniatures produced by Lead Adventure, though forces can be custom built as well.
Here are the forces used in our playtest.
Ruin Raiders, painted by me
Tunnel Cutthroats, painted by Patrick
We used a 4x4 layout featuring a burned out city with trenches running through it from a long-forgotten war.
The game scenario involved two computer terminals in the center grey building and right black building. The team would have to reach a terminal, open the computer and then download 10 bits of information (a d6 roll at the beginning of each successive turn indicated how much info was retrieved).
My opponent, Tim, and I both went after the computer in the middle of the board with our opening moves. This picture shows Tim closing in on the front of the ruined multi-level building housing a computer core.
A few lucky activation rolls and I was quickly at the computer and had it open. Here's my one gang member who in the process of downloading data while the rest of the group moves off to defend the building.
Tim came head on to the building, but we found that Apocalypticum's rules for opening doors made it quite difficult for his gang to enter the building.
Sending my gangers up to higher levels, my leader then tossed a frag grenade down on Tim's Cutthroats. The grenade didn't do much, but it did send a few of his raiders scrambling back over the side of the trench.
A few rounds of fire between the forces on the roof and those on the ground resulted in no casualties.
Tim tried again to breach the door, this time with a group effort, but was unsuccessful. The rules for forcing doors are really tough! Must be all the skulls.
My raider at the console grabbed enough data to complete the necessary 10 bits and win the game. The leader rejoices.
Here are a few observations about the game and the rules. Some of these notes will make more sense to those familiar with Song of Blades and Heroes (SBH), Mutants and Death Ray Guns, and other Ganesha Games products.
- Black Rain — Apocalypticum takes place in a very specific setting: Black Rain City, a radiation-soaked, ruined urban metropolis inspired by any number of crumbling Eastern European cities. As a result of the apocalypse, black storm clouds hover over the city most of the time, periodically disgorging toxic sludge onto the terrain below. When the rules call for it, Black Rain appears or disappears every time a player rolls two failures in activation and passes the play to the other player, called a turnover. The phenomenon causes a -1 penalty to shooting and makes weapons more likely to break. While it didn't seem to have a huge effect on shooting, Black Rain came and went 5 times throughout the game.
- Lethality in combat — Our game was not very lethal, and none of our characters was knocked out of action. Most of the characters had relatively low combat scores which were enhanced by the weapons we were using. Bonuses from terrain and hard cover on the tabletop negated most of the weapons' bonuses — and since terrain was plentiful in our game, we had lots of knocked down or recoiling characters, but no outright kills. In SBH, which is mostly focused on D&D-style melee combat, characters that are knocked down don't tend to survive very long. In a shooting-focused game like Apocalypticum, it's much harder to finish off a character who has been injured. Other clubmates who played the game earlier that evening tried other tactics, such as stepping out of cover to gain a better line of sight on enemies — something we didn't do, as all our characters were shooting at each other from buildings and trenches.
- Turnovers — Between the two of us, Tim and I rolled a lot of double failures when activating our gangs. Most of our characters were more difficult to activate compared to our fantasy warbands in SBH, making failures more frequent. The turnovers did slow gameplay a bit, and caused the Black Rain to come and go frequently throughout the evening.
- Abstracted weapons — In the playtest draft we received, there were only a handful of firearms listed, and all were prone to jamming or breaking. I liked this aspect of the rules, as it enhances the scavenged post-apocalyptic tone, where everything is held together by rusty nails and a prayer.
Overall, I enjoyed this game immensely. It feels like a ruleset that is focused more on scenarios than kill-em-all battles, and terrain is very important to survivability. I also like the fact that the rules are based on Mutants and Death Ray Guns, and not Ganesha's modern-combat ruleset Flying Lead.
Flying Lead was not a bad game, but it had far more granularity in its approach to firearms, and there were many more variables in terms of shooting modifiers and results of firing. I prefer the more streamlined Mutants/Apocalypticum approach. That said, there are an impressive number of special rules in this game that really can make a character unique. For this game, we used stock characters from the book, but I look forward to making our own custom characters in the future.
Our next trial for the game comes in two weeks, when we will hopefully be able to try out some of the vehicle rules. Check back for more updates!
— Karl, Chicago Skirmish Wargames club member
