Final Day! Final Stretch Goal
almost 3 years ago – Sat, Jun 12, 2021 at 04:31:18 AM

Today is the last day of school (for my kids at least) and the last day of the Kickstarter.  Thank you to all the new backers who helped us unlock these last few stretch goals.  I've put together a final Stretch Goal for us. Do you think we can do it?

The Legacy Pack

I'm calling this stretch goal the "Legacy Pack" and marking it as Kickstarter exclusive because the contents of the cards will be spread out between Wasted Wilds, Time Traveler Expansion and the Few and Cursed Expansion.  Let's start by laying out some of the promos:

• The Norse Modir will be used as an Alternative Hunter character promo card.
• Redhead/Curse Chaser Ally and Other promo card. I have to talk to Felipe but perhaps we can add some additional characters as Allies as well (like Jebediah).
• A Fascist Soldier / Nazi lodge tile

In addition to the extra goodies above, I'll include a monster spawn deck (~50 mini cards).  These cards would simulate and replace the dice rolls but also include cards like Ambush, Surrounded, Draw 2 more spawns, Safe, etc.  I know I've rambled in our BGG thread a bit about this, but adding this deck will allow us to add some very interesting legacy elements to the campaign (by manipulating the cards - removing numbers, adding safe cards etc.) as well as smoothing out dice roll randomness.

In addition to this deck, we will also include a bunch of downloadable PDFs so that you can play through the Frozen Wilds, Scorched Wasteland, Original Maximum Apocalypse or Gothic Horrors campaign with these optional legacy elements. These PDFs will include a mission debriefing sheet where you can record your progress and more importantly character sheets that bail you out of tough situations and let you character evolve over time:

Since damage will be cumulative over the campaign, these sheets will include a bunch of bail out items in your backpack.  You can use the first few for free, but then will need to spend XP to continue to use them.  We will also have a bunch of permanent perks that you can spend XP on to permanently change the monster spawn deck or improve your characters.  Perks will include things like:

• Carrying over your equipment between missions
• Increasing the size of your starting hand
• Increasing your storage slots for gear
• Increasing your stealth
• Increasing your maximum health

I hope this grab bag of random items suffices as a final stretch goal. Thank you so much for your support and making this Kickstarter so successful! There's so much work ahead, but I'm so excited to do it.  Thank you for your passion, ideas and feedback along this wild ride.  If you want to help us out, read yesterday's update and help spread the word.  As always, I'm happy to answer any questions you have in the comments.

Happy Friday!

- Mike

Less than 36 hours Left! Much Excite!
almost 3 years ago – Thu, Jun 10, 2021 at 10:46:06 PM

Hello everyone and welcome to all our new backers, we've surpassed 2700 backers which is extraordinary. Thanks to the newcomers, we've unlocked a couple stretch goals (a new campaign supplement and an expansion of the Wasted Wilds campaigns) and are approaching adding the Underground Monsters! As of writing this, we have a little over 36 hours left and I'm excited to see where we end up.

How can you help?

We are so close to unlocking all of the final stretch goals I've been planning for the game.  I probably should have done this earlier in the campaign, but this update will be the only one I send during this Kickstarter where I will ask you to help share the project to get us over the finish line.  Here are several things you can do to help:

• 1. Please like and share this post on Facebook.
• 2. Please like and retweet this tweet.
• 3. Please thumb, vote and subscribe to our BGG thread.
• 4. Visit the project through the Kicktraq page.
• 5. Anything else you can think of! Post in your favorite Facebook groups, on your favorite websites, and spread the word!

If enough of us work together and do this today, then I will be forever grateful for your help and we should be able to finish off these last few Stretch Goals and go out with a bang.

Comic Strip

Another thing we did to boost our grand finale here is commissioned a second comic with SemiCoop.  This time we asked for them to focus on highlighting the new hot/cold campaigns. I think they did a great job and hope you enjoy it:

Going Digital

Thanks to your support for the series, I took the leap and have partnered with a Mega Cat Studios to start working on a digital version of the Maximum Apocalypse. We are still very early in development. I still haven't played it, but they did send over some early screenshots. As a long time diehard video gamer, I am very very excited to see this come to fruition and I think you can tell that we're aiming for more than just a mundane simulation of the board game.

Bonus Extras

If you haven't been involved in our threads and comments, you might have missed some of the extra goodies that we're throwing into the game.  They're too dinky to call stretch goals, but we do have some nice bonuses for you as a thank you for supporting us:

• We will be including either stickers or tokens to mark your old tiles as indoors (see BGG thread to vote)
• We had some great fan suggestions about giving each tribe an affinity for a particular good, so we'll be sure to include this on the backside of each card so that players can try this variant.
• We're including new reference materials and cards for the new players or for ones like me that need them
• We will be including all the new characters and promo variants with Ally cards and as optional bosses for the "Others"

That's It!

Hopefully that's enough excitement to carry you through the end of the campaign.  Thanks so much for your support. I hope you enjoy the comic strip and I would be incredibly grateful if you could jump back to the sharing section and spread the word or just let people know what you're most excited about with the game. 

- Mike

Final Week! Apepocalypse is here and a spotlight on the Few and Cursed Expansion
almost 3 years ago – Tue, Jun 08, 2021 at 03:59:23 AM

Good morning everyone and welcome to all the new backers, it's great to have you here! Over the weekend, Wasted Wilds has officially become our BIGGEST Kickstarter EVER! Not only that, but we've unlocked the "Apepocalypse" and will have a brand new set of intelligent simians entering our post-apocalyptic world.

I spent much of the weekend on adapting all the missions from the original game.  I've done my best to narratively tie together all 13 missions together into a 3rd campaign for the game (the 14th could be a showdown with a Kaiju to top it all off).  We're currently working on unlocking a "4th campaign" as I would go through all the Gothic Horrors missions and do my best to adapt and tie them together as well:

We're in the final push, so tell your friends. Visit us on Kicktraq and do whatever else it is that backers do to draw attention to their favorite games.

The Few and Cursed Expansion

The Few and Cursed Expansion for Maximum Apocalypse brings not only the Redhead's "Curse Chaser" deck, but also adds a new tribe of people and monsters from the lore of the comic book.  The expansion will have a series of missions that highlight the Crows of Mana'Olana storyline (Issues 1-6). For those of you that don't know, the Few and Cursed takes place in an alternate timeline where the water evaporated back in the height of the Wild West.  In this world, the supernatural is real and humans have started delving into magic and the dark arts to survive.  

This setting is obviously perfect for the "Scorched" Exposure cards and has inspired a new Status Effect for Maximum Apocalypse called "Cursed." The expansion comes with 6 curse tokens that each player has and can flip to indicate they are cursed or not.  If you are cursed, things get a lot more difficult for you as you explore the unique locations from the comics:

The expansion also includes a new Tribe of Familiar faces from the comic that you can negotiate with:

You can't do the Crows of Mana'Olana without the crows, so there's also a deck of supernatural monsters creeping around every corner:

It has been really fun to dabble in Felipe Cagno and Fabiano Neves world and I am so thankful that they agreed to take a partnership that started with a promo card during the first Maximum Apocalypse Kickstarter campaign and make it officially part of the series.  Don't miss out on this Kickstarter exclusive expansion!

The Art of the Apocalypse - Artbook update
almost 3 years ago – Tue, Jun 08, 2021 at 03:58:45 AM

Hello everyone! Gustav here with an update on the artbook. I wanted to share some details about my plans for the book, what it will contain, show you some works in progress and hopefully hear some of your thoughts on it in the comments. So let’s get to it!

I would have loved to include every last illustration I’ve done for the Maximum Apocalypse games, but that would have resulted in a pretty thick and unwieldy book. So in the interest of keeping it reasonably priced, long and liftable by a human, I’m making a selection that includes art from the first game, all of the previous expansions and now Wasted Wilds. 

At the moment it is divided into roughly these chapters:

•  The Process - A chapter about the creative process, stylistic goals and workflow I’ve used when making the art these past 4 years, including some step by step images from sketches, line art and colouring.
   
•  The Characters - Every character gets a spread with their main character art together with a couple of my favourites from their deck, their male/female counterpart and a short text about them.
   
•  The Monsters - The characters are fun to design and draw, but I confess the monsters are my favourite, so I want to include a double spread for each apocalypse containing most of the monsters and bosses together with a notation.
   
•  The World - the focus of this chapter will be the illustrations for the different map tiles and scavenge cards.

As stated in the campaign it will be a softcover 8.5 x 10 inches book with an estimated 120 pages. It will include (among others) the art from the game in bigger size, my illustrations for the Maximum Apocalypse RPG, black and white lineart versions and other previously unseen stuff with notations throughout by me and a foreword by Mike. All in all I aim to give you a lot of bang for your 20 bucks!

The book spreads in this update are works in progress, but hopefully they’ll give you an idea of what to expect. All the art is presented for the first time without the usual card icons and descriptions from the game. I’m also working on a new cover illustration made uniquely for this book, which I’m looking forward to sharing with you in future updates.

If you find all this interesting, don’t miss out on this kickstarter exclusive chance to add it to your pledge! It will look great on your coffee table, promise :) I’d also love to hear your thoughts below on the artbook and any wishes/ideas you might have for it.

Thanks for reading and hope you have a wonderful weekend!

- Gustav

16 Stretch Goals Unlocked! Beekeeper Spotlight
almost 3 years ago – Tue, Jun 01, 2021 at 10:10:41 PM

Good morning everyone and welcome to all the new backers, it's great to have you here! We've just unlocked the 16th Stretch Goal and are just $7k away from making this the most funded Rock Manor Games project EVER! 

Even though we're in the middle of the campaign, we have a lot of stuff to look forward to this week.  We have another comic strip by Semicoop coming up and Gustav is working on an update where he will talk about the artbook and highlight some of his works in progress. It's also a great time to post your ideas for stretch goals over on this thread. It's been great to read what's important to you guys and also get some ideas for some things we can maybe add in the final week.

Beekeeper Spotlight

I know we unlocked the Beekeeper stretch goal awhile ago, but I wanted to take a moment to delve into here skill set a bit more.  The Beekeeper's innate ability is to deal 2 damage and Poison a target in short range. She has a lot of things that allow her to poison things and as you build up poison tokens, you can build up a lot of damage that you're dealing to monsters every activation.  This makes her quite good at crowd control, but not the best at targeting precisely.

One of the other unique things the Beekeeper has is a new card type in her deck: animal cards.  These cards act sort of like gear cards except they don't take up any storage and they have health instead of ammunition.  When an animal's health is depleted, it is discarded. 

Of course one of the animals she has are bees (as you can see above), but what might be more interesting is how she can combo and destroy a stunned monster in range by tossing it into her wood chipper.  Not a pretty way to go, but quite effective at destroying high health monsters like the Wooly Mammoth.  She used to be a vet so she has a menagerie of other odd pets like a Lynx, Fennec Fox, Iguana, and a Falcon.  

We've also unlocked her male counterpart promo card.  You can vote on his ability over here.  I wanted to make him a bit more on the Zoologist side of things so think a more animal focused power makes more sense.

I hope you enjoyed your weekend. I got a chance to play Gorinto with my wife.  We didn't like it as much as Azul, but had fun.  Have a wonderful rest of your day and thank you for making this project so successful!

- Mike