If you’ve been waiting for ButtScribe to support GW’s best game that nobody plays and also has Titans in it, your prayers have been answered. That’s right, the late twenty-tens’ hottest gaming product has come to Buttscribe exactly on time: Apocalypse.
It’s fair to wonder why I’ve done this at all, let alone now, and the answer is that someone asked. Goonhammer patron normanthesquid hit me up over Discord (join our Patreon Discord, and you too can submit requests that I find much harder to ignore than the ones that come in via email). What appealed to me was less the nature of the request, or the popularity of the game, and more that the thing already 80% worked right out of the box, because the 40k and Apocalypse BattleScribe repositories – and hence sheets – aren’t that different.
Apocalypse is genuinely one of the better modern-GW games, and the almost contemptuous speed with which they released and then walked away from it bums me out. In the early days of 8th, there was a notion of multiple rules systems sharing the 41st millennium, using mostly the same models and targeting different Vibes. 40k would be the “normal” way to play, with Kill Team as a smaller, faster, and crunchier version, and Apocalypse for the messy all-day-long Basement Knockaround game. I get yelled at every time I talk about Kill Team, but Apocalypse was an actual good game, and all the more impressive for how awful the original “just big 40k without org charts” version that it sprang from was. It did what Kill Team has always badly needed to do, which is move away from the pre-existing 40k stat blocks – not being beholden to marines having a 3+ save, or Bolters being S4, opened up a whole new way of handling unit interactions. Apocalypse flattened the strength/toughness table and the entire concept of AP values into a single roll: your gun has a Strength Against Personal, or Against Tanks, and that’s it. It used d12s for God’s sake. Imagine that: a GW game that isn’t hard-coded to d6s at all times. The turn structure, blast markers, stratagems, and the minor deck-building – even if I didn’t love the mechanics, all of them worked together to make this, by far and away, the easiest and most fun way to play large-format Warhammer. It was like 28mm Epic Armageddon.
The game got one update – an FAQ and some new datasheets – a few months after being released, followed by, at the time of this writing, 18 months of absolute radio silence. You aren’t even allowed to buy it anymore. It’s dead as hell.
Anyway, I think the Buttscribe sheets look pretty good. There’s less on them, just because Apocalypse is a lighter game, in the “character sheet” sense, and so they fit 4 to a page. The visible layout, and invisible code, improvements will get back-ported to the 40k cards soon. In the mean time, give Apocalypse a whirl, with the name you can trust: Buttscribe.
We’ve got more Apocalypse content coming soon, check back later this week for a battle report and something pretty cool from normanthesquid.
