Escape the Apocalypse - design diary 4
By Alex White
- 6 minutes read - 1204 wordsI ran two playtests of Escape the Apocalypse at Metatopia 2025. I wanted to test the Robot Uprising and Alien Invasion scenarios. Both were a lot of fun, and had quite a lot of drama by the end! If I'm able, I'd hope to be able to write up the results of those games at some point.
There are a number of changes that I'm introducing as a result of those playtests. These are the changes and the reason for them.
Finale should come after Arrival
During both playtests the players felt that having 'Arrival' after the 'Finale' didn't make sense thematically. They preferred to find out what was happening in their personal quests (Arrival) before understand what was happening in the wider world (Finale). Happily this is a simple change to implement!
Less Maths for Threats
Strictly speaking this is a change which I made before Metatopia and which I was testing out there - the test was really positive, and so I'm baking it in.
Originally, the way that the game scaled was that you take the threat card and then multiply it by the number of player characters in the game. If you have a face card you have to mentally turn it into a number before multiplying. So if you have a four player game and drew a Jack, then the threat total would be 4x11 for 44. Then the players have to add their cards to attempt to beat that total. If a total was exceeded, then bonus resources were gained depending upon how well it was beaten. This was almost impossible to smoothly scale for different numbers of players, and wasn't balanced in terms of extra resources at all.
My solution was this. A threat card is drawn, and then everyone has to play a card to beat that threat. Those that beat the threat will gain one extra resource each. If more than half of the group beat the threat, then the threat is overcome safely. If you don't meet that threshold then either one of the supporting characters must die or one of the player characters will become a dead man walking. No multiplication, simple comparison and a little bit of counting. Much better!
This scales perfectly whether playing a solo game or with up to four players (the recommended maximum).
Remove 'Approaches' from character sheet
At the start of each Act, each player gets a new set of three playing cards which are their approaches for that Act. There was a place on the character sheet to record that, so a character might be 'compassionate, skillful, and cunning' in Act 1; 'very skillful and aggressive' in Act 2, and 'extremely compassionate' in Act 3. The 'very' prefix indicates two cards of that type, 'extremely' represents all three cards are the same type.
However, the players felt that recording on their character sheets felt like busy-work. It didn't add anything to their understanding of their character. Moreover, the change in approaches which the character has in the second and third Acts comes over just fine in the nature of the cards which they play.
So I've removed the lines on the character sheet where someone would record their approaches.
Change the keepsake mechanic
At the start of these adventures, having your keepsake at the end of the game gave you a better 'Arrival' result. However, there was no real impetus to lose that keepsake, and it just meant that everyone had a better than expected result!
So the mechanical change that I made is this - if you are given someone elses keepsake to look after, then you get a bonus to your arrival score. If you have given away your keepsake you get a detriment. So why might someone give away their keepsake? The main reason is that if you are a Dead Man Walking and you sacrifice yourself to overcome a threat, you can have a flashback to giving your keepsake away to someone, so that there is a chance of closure for the loved ones, even though the character has sacrificed themselves. It also gives the potential for someone to lean into a worse outcome for themselves for story reasons, and to boost someone else whom they think has had a rough ride of things.
Review tropes
It became clear that some of the tropes were very easy to incorporate into the game while others were not clearly enough defined. In the Alien Invasion horror game, someone had 'Body Horror' and was able to narrate the continual growth of alien fungus over their body throughout the game. Someone else had Eroding Friendships, and their relationship with a supporting character got steadily worse until in the end he pushed them in front of the alien war machines in order to get away! On the other hand, the players with 'Survival Horror' and 'Psychological Horror' didn't have anything they could clearly mark to show they had hit their trope.
As a result, I'm going through all 52 tropes to make sure that all of them have actionable impacts in the game. This bit isn't finished yet, as I've got to re-think some of the tropes. Essentially each of the tropes is going to have something which can affect a supporting character relationship, the finding of resources, the use of resources, or the playing of a particular card suit when facing threats.
When to play cards
I'm recording this as a bit of inconclusive feedback! In the first game, when a threat is revealed, everyone plays their card and then the result is narrated from highest to lowest (if you don't overcome the threat) or lowest to highest (if you do). By the time it got to the third Act, the players said that they would prefer to narrate their actions as they played their card, which they did and liked much better.
So in the second game, I had the players narrate their actions as they played their cards. By the time it got to the third Act, these players said that they would prefer to all lay their cards down and then narrate in order once they saw what had been played, and they liked that much better!
The end result is that I don't think we have a clear outcome here, so I'm going to stick with one approach in the main body of the rules, and highlight the other approach in my variant rules section.
When to have character vignettes
By default we would have character vignettes - short roleplaying scenes or narratives - at the conclusion of each scene. Because of the short run-time of a metatopia playtest (only 2 hours) we only did these at the end of each Act.
In the future, my recommendation is that we have the vignettes in the middle of each Scene - after revealing the location, but before the threat is revealed. This gives more opportunities to bring depth to the location as well as the character stories.
Other news?
This is going to be coming to Kickstarter early next year - probably March. I'd love it if you would sign up for a notification of the launch on the preview page here:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/plane-sailing-games/escape-to-utopia