ComradeQ

Flying Frog Productions’ “Conquest of Planet Earth: Apocalypse” does everything a good game expansion should do: include additional content and introduce a few new mechanics.

Content-wise players gain: 4 additional playable alien races (bringing the total number of races to 14), a bevvy of new cards for the “Event,” “Location,” “Space Stuff,” and “Resistance” decks along with a new “Naval Resistance” deck. The real stars of the show are the new ally miniatures, all which are beautifully designed, bringing unique abilities to the battlefield. The standout miniature is arguably the Borg-inspired Apocalypse Cube, which towers above all others and has a whopping 10 points of strength. Additionally, the expansion adds 2 sets of board spaces and player pieces, raising the maximum number of players to 6.

The original game was largely centered around dealing with the Humans’ ground-based forces, but as suggested in the box art, human naval power joins the fray this time around. This is represented in the new “Naval Resistance” deck, which scales in difficulty from Marine infantry to aircraft carriers and even includes a variant of the infamous Captain Fantastic superhero card. The naval deck even includes its own heroes, which aid the human resistance and generally make life worse for the player aliens. A few of the beefier naval resistance are further represented by tokens which force players to battle them twice but count as trophies once they are defeated.

It remains to be seen how the additional content affects game balance in a relatively unbalanced game. All the additions in “Apocalypse” serve to make an already great game even better; a definite must-buy for fans of the base game.