Upstart indie game company Psychotronic Studios released their first game on kickstarter earlier this week. Apochalyptica: A Game About Humanity, Survival, and the Atomic Bomb is a 4-8 player union of board game and tabletop rpg that developer Emile Boisvert believes will help bridge the divide between the two traditional gaming communities.

“You have friends that play games like Risk or Catan; and friends that only play tabletops like Dungeons & Dragons,” he explains. “It’s hard to get them to sit down and agree on a game to play as a whole group because the play styles are so different. Apochalyptica takes the best parts of both game-types to make an experience that’s accessible to everyone. Players can decide if they want to role play their characters, or if they want to play it like a traditional board game. The game only gets richer the more you put into it.”

Apochalyptica is set in post-war America on the eve of a nuclear apocalypse. A group of survivors must gather as many supplies as possible before locking themselves away in a bunker for 12 months while the war rages overhead. The game is cooperative, and players must work together to survive.

The game increases in difficulty as rounds progress.  “It’s not a game for the faint of heart,” Emile explains. “You might have to make some hard choices. Once food becomes scarce, killing a fellow survivor might be your only option to ensure the survival of the rest of the group. You need your team to survive; but you don’t want to be dinner when food runs out. The game focuses on group mentality and how it can break down, or strengthen, when the stakes are raised. Who do we become when the survival drive takes over?”

Psychotronic Studios is a small independent game studio in Brunswick Maine founded by Emile Boisvert in 2015 while he was attending Hartwick College as a senior BA student. Apochalyptica is the first game produced by the studio, and has been in production for more than three years.

The kickstarter campaign for Apochalyptica will be running from May 12th to July 11th, and can be found here: http://bitly.com/2qabXbi.