Started in 2009, Kickstarter has become an invaluable platform for creators and inventors looking to fund their ideas through crowdfunding. Several years ago, toward the end of the pandemic, I became active on Kickstarter and started supporting various board games and comics. It’s a great place to discover games you might normally find only in specialty comic and gaming stores, although retailers like Target and Barnes & Noble have also made an effort to carry games beyond those produced by major companies like Hasbro and Mattel.
This year, the folks at Board Collie Games successfully funded a new game, Survive Nuclear Apocalypse! It’s the first game I’ve purchased that openly acknowledges the use of artificial intelligence in its development, and I appreciate the creator being upfront about that.
Surviving the Apocalypse
Survive Nuclear Apocalypse! isn’t a particularly complex game, and setup is easy. It’s designed for two to four players, and one of its biggest advantages is that a game can be completed in around 30 minutes.
There are three six-sided dice. One is a standard die numbered one through six. Another has five sides showing a one and one side showing a six, while the third reverses those odds with five sixes and one one. There’s also a coin that can either improve your luck or make an already bad situation even worse.
Event cards drive the gameplay, while item cards can help you survive. Food and water keep you going, while rad cards represent your exposure to radiation and can take you out if you’re not careful. Each player begins with five water cards, five food cards, and three item cards. If you end your turn with five rad cards, you’re out of the game.
The mechanics create enough randomness that each playthrough can unfold differently. Naturally, the last survivor standing wins.
Given the premise of surviving a nuclear catastrophe, I’ll leave the question of age appropriateness to parents. Mechanically, however, the game is simple enough that it could serve as a nice bridge between introductory children’s games like Chutes and Ladders and more complicated tabletop games for kids who are already comfortable reading chapter books.
My Very Unlucky Apocalypse
Now, the odds of rolling six ones in a row on a standard six-sided die are 1 in 46,656, or about 0.002 percent. Somehow, this incredibly unlikely scenario happened while my partner and I were playing. And it led me into quite a story.
A nuclear catastrophe has occurred, and I’m simply trying to survive by collecting food and water while avoiding as much radiation exposure as possible. The radio suddenly crackles with a chilling announcement: another nuclear strike is incoming, and everyone is advised to seek shelter.
Panic sets in as survivors scramble for safety, but shelter is scarce. Things initially look bleak, but my trusty pocket knife helps me find refuge. Along the way, a stranger asks to stay in my shelter for the night, promising to repay my kindness with good fortune in the future.
Unfortunately, good fortune isn’t exactly what follows.
Raiders capture me and throw me into an arena against a mutated gladiator. I lose, costing me food and water while exposing me to even more radiation. My streak of bad luck continues when I’m surrounded by a pack of mutants, caught in the open during the eruption of a dormant volcano, and briefly trapped beneath the rubble of a supermarket while searching for food.
By this point, I’ve absorbed close to a lethal dose of radiation, but some potassium iodide pills help protect my thyroid for a little while longer. I eventually gather with other nearby survivors so we can pool our resources, but apparently the apocalypse still isn’t finished with me. The water I drink turns out to be contaminated.
I manage to disarm a rogue scavenger, only for his friends to find me and steal my stuff. While searching a car, I cut my hand on radioactive glass. Then, just when things seemingly can’t get any worse, a swarm of vicious mutants bursts from a tunnel and attacks everything in sight.
Including my opponent.
And just like that, after everything I endured, I’m the last survivor standing.
I win!
A Great Entry Point for Game Night
There are plenty of nuclear disaster and post-apocalyptic survival games out there, including recognizable franchises like Fallout. Many tabletop games in this genre feature much more complicated systems and are better suited for those Friday or Saturday nights when you invite your dedicated gaming crew over for a longer session.
But if you’re looking for something for family game night, want a shorter experience, or are introducing someone new to tabletop gaming, Survive Nuclear Apocalypse! is an accessible place to start. It offers enough randomness to keep things unpredictable without requiring players to spend half the evening learning complicated rules.
And if my experience is any indication, sometimes surviving the apocalypse comes down to being just lucky enough to watch everyone else have even worse luck.
Survive Nuclear Apocalypse! can still be found on Kickstarter.
