A Designer from Doom and Quake gets CoOperative with Planet Apocolypse
After raising $500,000 on Kickstarter (five times the original goal!) Planet Apocalypse is due finish production soon.
This Petersen Games Exclusive, designed by Sandy Petersen, is an exciting co-op board game where up to five post-apocalypse heroes confront the hordes of Hell. The man who authored Call of Cthulhu for Chaosium’s 1981 release (and created so many levels for id’s Doom and Quake) has made Planet Apocalypse, where players cooperate to kill demons, and defend humanity from the hordes of Hell itself.
The basic game has a deck of 65 “Gift” cards, which form a sort of tech tree for players to progress through. In these grim End Times, can your band of defenders destroy the Hellgate? The
Professor Maxwell, an intellectual heavyweight with a specialty in ballistics, is great at training troopers for the trials ahead (or giving other players troopers to work with). He is so imposing and so memorable that sometimes other players recall his past advice — even in his absence!
Hannah Hazard, the sniper, can eventually total up the results of a humungous amount of damage dice in a way that is can give even the deadliest denizens of hell a very bad time. Naomi, another combatant, also has many non-combat abilities that make her quite versatile.
The forces of evil also have their own strengths and specialties. The “Limbo” demons (basically damned souls) are distorted, creepy things with rings on their back so they can be hung up on hooks to be cured like ham. The player heroes can crush them (or even harvest Courage from them), but they’re basically Hell’s cannon fodder. Among demons, the real threats are those with special advantages based on what “Legion” they’re from: demons from the Leith Legion stun the mortals they injure; while demons from the Acheron Legion cause “Extra Doom” when they leave the map.
Planet Apocalypse comes with a suitably grisly Invasion Map, 6 Heroes, all the basic demons, 2 unique Force Circle demons, a Demon Lord (which scales up in power along with the number of player heroes), and more.