Apocalypse!

[gavindowning]

So my copy of Apocalypse arrived last night. I obviously haven't had a chance to play through yet, but I've looked through the box and have a few thoughts.

First of all, there are now board setups for 5 or 6 players, with additional board segments to allow for this, and additional playing pieces in orange and purple.

There is a new deck: Coastal Resistance. Some of the new locations require you to draw Coastal Resistance instead of basic Resistance cards, and some locations can require you to draw from either one. Some Coastal Resistance cards (and corresponding tokens) are only damaged when defeated; they must be defeated a second time before they are destroyed. And yes, Captain Hero is indeed in the Coastal Resistance, too. (And there's a second copy of him in the main Resistance deck now, with special rules if you're unlucky enough to draw him multiple times in the same fight.)

The aliens have a new ability: they can land their saucer (effectively destroying it and returning it to your pool) in a 0-population, 0-resistance area, creating a terror factory. This can only happen once per board segment. This factory can be destroyed or conquered by other aliens if it is left unguarded, however.

The four new alien races are a great deal of fun. I am particularly happy with the Martians from IFOS, but all four appear very playable, with a fun and creative backstory in the rulebook.

The new allies in the Space Stuff deck are quite fun. There's a seductive spacequeen, a beast-riding taskdriver, a warlord in a tank, and the terrifying Apocalypse Cube, which moves very slowly, but definitely lives up to its name. The other Space Stuff is worthwhile, too, but the allies, as before, are the best part of the deck.

For those playing cooperatively (as we tend to do in our household), there's new Human tech, as well.

As an added unexpected joy, my copy came with an additional small supplement which I had not heard anything about. This supplement featured a new playable race (a weak-bodied, weak-minded race with a surprisingly fast reproductive rate and the ability to swarm unexpectedly -- they seem like they'd be a lot of fun to play), new event cards relating to the new race, one new location (a National Park, which can become a landing zone when conquered), new Resistance cards (the National Guard and a Well-Armed Redneck hero), and one new Space Stuff card (brain leeches!).

Overall, I am extremely pleased by this expansion. While not my favorite of the Flying Frog games, I enjoy COPE a great deal because it can play so much more quickly than the other Flying Frog games (with the average game lasting about an hour, max), but I was occasionally frustrated when we had 5 or 6 people interested in playing a game. The new choices for alien races -- particularly with the unexpected supplement -- bring a lot of fun options to the game, and the expansions to the existing decks add some new variety and spice, without bogging down the game at all. While I haven't played with the new expansion yet, I'm definitely looking forward to painting up the figures and cracking into the game again.