Description

Description from the publisher:

Apochalyptica is an advanced board game for 4-8 players based around a group of people that find themselves facing nuclear war in the late 1940s. WWII has just ended, but any celebration to be had is cut short by news of bombs falling worldwide, with more headed their way. This ragtag group must gather as many supplies as they can before locking themselves away in a bunker for twelve months. During this time, they will have to deal with a number of trials from petty arguments among themselves, to food, water, and oxygen running out; all with the threat of fallout exposure looming around every corner.

The game is board-and-card based, but plays like your average tabletop rpg. Players have the opportunity to roleplay as their characters, dealing with interpersonal relationships within the bunker as you wait for the timer to tick down and free you. Each character has their own unique set of skills and traits to bring to the table, and players must decide how to best use them to ensure the survival of the group.

The first section is the gathering section. Based on the chosen level of gameplay difficulty (easy or normal. Hard doesn't have a gather section and instead starts directly in the bunker with a set amount of supplies) players will travel around the board to "locations" to search for supplies. To search, they roll 1d10 and compare it to a table of outcomes.
At the end of three rounds, they enter a "voting" phase to choose which characters enter the bunker with their supplies, and which must be left outside.

Section two, the "main game", is twelve rounds in the Bunker where the surviving characters must monitor the levels of food, water, and oxygen. All while trying to keep their sanity levels intact so they don't end up killing each other, or themselves. They have ways of slowing the drop of each of these supply levels, including farming, building a water purification system, monitoring a radio for information about the outside, and interacting with one another in positive ways. Each round, however, players must roll to determine events that occur on their turns that could either help or hinder their progress. It could be something as little as having a bad day and losing a few extra sanity points, to something as disastrous as a radiation leak that permanently seals off a section of the bunker from use.