Clownpocalypse

Clownpocalypse is a card game for 2-4 players, set in a world ravaged by evil clowns. One player plays the Clowns: their goal is to abduct the remaining humans and force them into the Circus. All the other players play Survivors, who roam the blasted wastes in a pitiful search for food, salvageable material, and safety... and who try to take out as many Clowns as possible along the way.

In Clownpocalypse, each player playing a human Survivor leads a Team. At the start of the game your Team is just a single Survivor, but a big part of the game is rescuing other Survivors and attempting to lead them to safety. Each Survivor you shepherd to safety at game's end is worth a victory point, but having a large Team during the course of gameplay can create problems: the larger your Team, the more attention they attract from the Clowns.

It also gets tougher to feed them. In classic survival horror fashion, you start the game with only a limited number of Rations, and you'll need to use your quickly dwindling supply to feed each member of your Team every turn. If your Team gets too large too fast, you're going to have trouble, and then you're going to need to do a hard moral calculus: do you let someone starve? Do you cannibalize your own Team? (Each of these choices has their own pros and cons.)

After you've fed your Team, you get the option to Travel. Traveling is the main way you move through the game deck, uncovering resources and, eventually, the Way Out. There will always be three cards in the gameplay area displaying three possible resources to Travel to. Those resources could be Locations, Rations, Salvage, Weapons, or other Survivors, and part of your strategic thinking in the game will involve assessing which resources your Team really needs--you can only attempt to get one per turn, leaving the rest on the table for your rivals.

And of course, there's danger. The Clowns want to stop you from reaching those resources. So, each turn, the player playing the Clowns places one Clown card, face down, in front of each resource on the table. This is where the game becomes a battle of wits. The Clowns have some cards that are stronger than others, and so they need to carefully choose where they place their best cards. Which resource on the table is the most valuable to the player whose turn it is? Is that the one that the Clowns should defend the strongest? Or should they bluff, placing a weaker Clown there in the event that the player decides to grab up a lesser resource, in the hope of avoiding confrontation? Being able to predict your opponent's strategic choices is an important part of this game.

Once you've declared what resource you're travelling to (or opted to stay put, which has its own risks), the Clowns flip the card they uses to defend that resource, and a confrontation ensues.

Clownpocalypse contains 64 cards (Clowns, Survivors, Weapons, Salvage, and Locations), a set of counters to represent Rations, plus some other goodies in an attractive, sturdy box. Clownpocalypse is hilarious, disturbing, challenging, and rewarding: you're going to love it.