At its heart, Aftermath is a story of duty. You will take on the role of a young critter attempting to become a provider, a sort of hero, to their colony. Your job is to leave the relative safety of the colony, and venture out in search of food and scraps of technology that were abandoned by the humans when they vanished. Along the way you will face enemies, forge alliances, uncover intrigue, rescue the weak, and fight the predatory forces that would either steal from you or eat you.

At the beginning of the story, your colony is small and struggling. You are just youngfurs, going out on your first mission to prove that you have what it takes to do the job. Your mission: To bring back as much food and scrap as you can find, plus steal a special treat from a half-buried vending machine. Along the way, you will meet friends and foes, generating new missions and story threads.

Scavenging

While on a mission, you will need to forage for food and supplies. Each map location will have a number of scavenge location icons. Place scavenge tokens on these facedown on these icons, with the token’s difficulty number showing. 

To reveal a scavenge token, a character must pass a scavenge skill test equal to or higher than the token’s difficulty number. If you succeed, reveal the token, claim its prize, and then discard the scavenge token. Tokens with higher difficulty numbers will bestow better prizes.

Campaign Dashboard

There are a variety of objects your party may come across in this world. Everything you scavenge is recorded on the handy campaign dashboard. In Aftermath, keeping track of your colony is a breeze. The campaign dashboard has a series of dials that allow you to always know your colony’s status. 

Stats your dashboard manages:

This represents odds and ends of useful tech left behind by the humans. Use scrap to build new colony improvements, fix broken items, build vehicles, etc. Scrap is the nuts and bolts of survival.

Use food to feed your population or heal your characters while on a mission. The bigger your population, the more difficult it is to feed them all, making the decision to use food as a healing mechanism even more difficult.

Use batteries to power vehicles so you can venture further out from your colony, or use them to increase the power of battery-operated weapons and armor.

    The main plot of your adventure can be advanced through finding clues. Each mission has 1 possible clue. If you find that clue, you will read the coordinating story at the end of your mission. This will advance the main plot, and has the potential to spawn more missions for your party.

You can find useful junk that is better than scrap. Some of these items are broken and require scrap to fix. Others are found unbroken and can be equipped and used immediately. Found item cards are stored in your colony supply deck box. As your deck box grows, you will have more options for equipping your providers before heading out on the next mission. 

Tracking Time

In addition to scavenged resources, the campaign dashboard allows you to keep track of a few other important pieces of information:

  While you are out on a mission, the colony will be vulnerable. The longer you are gone, the more danger the colony is in. That is why you must record the passage of time when directed. Each mission has a time number listed. If you go beyond this allotted time by the end of the mission, your colony will suffer an event for all excess time used. These events are usually bad.

You can mitigate the negative events through colony upgrades and improvements. These improvements often offer other benefits as well. 

  Bad things that happen to your colony will lower its morale, and good things can raise it. If your morale ever reaches zero, your colony disbands. To win the campaign, you need to accomplish each character’s personal goals, while also managing the colony, which is no easy task.

  If you’re successful at managing your colony, you will get to watch it grow and thrive. Before you know it, your abandoned house will start to look like a thriving critter city as your list of accomplishments grows. Perhaps you and your team will become the most famous providers of all?

Aftermath is available for pre-order now and will be released in September. Pre-orders in the 48 contiguous states are eligible for free shipping! Stay tuned for more previews in the upcoming weeks.

Written by Jerry Hawthorne Jerry Hawthorne is the designer of Stuffed Fables, Mice and Mystics, and other great games. Follow @mice_guy