The sad story of Aftermath

Final thoughts

2023-12-22

• The how to organize leaflet is downright terrible and should be much more thorough and user-friendly.
• The rulebook itself is not bad, but the sentences could be restructured in a more logical order. A lot of things the rulebook doesn’t mention you encounter automatically. It serves the purpose of getting you started, but some points may have been better explained such that the Discovery box is filled with {compass} cards before you even start.
• The rulebook not mentioning later terms on Pages further out, well it’s subjective, it’s not needed to explain fully but personally I would have liked a mention at the very least of every term, in a companion guide. Because the game is dead (and publishing rights are in limbo) I wrote this guide myself.
• However, there are a lot of design points that I find either flawed or just bad, see problems with the gear..

Problems with the gear

• Unconventional rulebook that defers rules to cards and Page sections. It could work if a getting started and a reference approach were used. Designer seems to either stubbornly stick to his views, or isn’t aware of other products.
• But even when taking things literally, there are a lot of unexplained parts. A lot of mechanics are implied.
• A fan produced an attempt at a better rulebook, but it has mistakes and isn’t great either, it is equally hard to reference.

• “Threat card are never discarded when you defeat an enemy. It doesn't say so in the rulebook so do not discard any Threat card when you defeat enemy.” – RB is lax in attention to what players might do wrong, it just doesn’t mention it and assumes players will do the expected thing. If anything, it displays laziness from the designer’s POV and it shows there has not been proper play testing. There is no reminder of anything except for obvious cases.
• Calamity once per page, revisiting a page, it’s all implied you take notes or have a good memory.
• Text overall is too implicit. Consider RB text “when rolling the white die, also roll the black resolution die”. It is usually interpreted as roll them together, but that is not what the text actually says, all it says is that you have to roll the black die, but not when, before or after committing cards, and the RB is full of such vagaries.
• Weird names. Brilliance, Swiftness, Resistance but Strength. Why not use conventional names Intelligence, Agility, Defense/Shield. No reason at all to use those terms. Conventions players are used to, are thrown to the wind.
• Scavenge tokens – I understand the game needs them to respawn, but thematically, why would they between missions, it’s a postapocalyptic world after all, end game.
• Completely absent from RB if you may or may not attack lower life forms while situation is safe. Why aren’t enemies categorized as such.
• The Hunt box is in practice never used. You almost never need to put in enemies you had no time to defeat. Game has obviously been toned down but nobody checked for the tuckbox. On the other hand, a tuck box with “CURRENT GAME STATE” would have been very welcome.
• Consequences to Colony have been nerfed to the point they just don’t matter, making the whole overtime thing irrelevant.
• Above points seem to describe an originally more harsh game, with more complexity, more interesting, a kind of “grim aftermath”.
• Mouse faces on a Page vs enemy figures to place is poorly designed. You don’t want to leave Enemy placing up to the players, “as evenly as possible across spaces with rat face icons” should be instead numbered rat faces as they are drawn – now the enemies are painstakingly randomized on the Threat Track for initiative, but you can simply move the most scary one as far away as you want? That’s unfortunate.
• {eye} icons on Spaces: you may not choose not to read the entry, you may not keep moving. Regardless if you read it before or not. It makes no thematic sense.
• Skill tests are a mess, rules-wise, and should be streamlined. Sneak test <> opposed defense test <> opposed attack test <> scavenge test. Some, like the designer, might think it adds variation. Others find it impossible to remember.
• The rules on the white suit are a mess. If you initiate with white, you can only follow up with white or cards with same value; but if you initiate with a non-white card, then you can follow up with white cards – suddenly they represent any attribute color – oh and in opposing tests it’s different.
• The notion “When you acquire an item from the Colony supply tuck box, it is always Broken (unless it is Indestructible).” Makes no thematic sense. selling Indestructible items yields 0 Scrap, less than breakable items. It makes no sense that the colony breaks items. The natural notion of Indestructible is entirely missing.
• The Black Resolution die is said to represent thematically opposing forces, but because it is added to the difficulty of the test, and the difficulty is known beforehand, then the Black resolution die should be rolled before committing any cards to the test. The RB starts with a Regular Skill test, and tries to describe what is different in an Opposed Skill test, but it’s incomplete and incohesive. The white die should be rolled after card commits (as per RB) but if interpreted as benevolent forces, you can rule that to roll before card play.
•  When generating enemies, first drawing random enemy card of a type, then having to shuffle them, is not optimal. The order you drew them was already random.
• When generating enemies, it’s not clear whether or not to include bosses. Or veterans. And if not, when do they come into play.
• Page topology as written is not well-defined (but easily fixed).
• Player turn order and Bookkeeper is clumsy. Aftermath standard player turn order is strictly clockwise, so you may have to wait 3 turns while your action does not impact anything. Modern board games allow more flexibility, let players decide who goes when.
• Consider a Page with both normal enemies (with enemy cards and Threat cards) and lower life forms without enemy card. RB doesn’s say anything about who acts first in the Enemy resolution phase, nor does it say if lower life forms even observe the Enemy resolution phase.
• There is a weird disconnect between enemies placed in The Hunt space on the Threat Track and enemies in The Hunt tuck box. When calamity happens, you simply take both together and shuffle, but the RB is very unclear about the flow between the space and the tuck box.
• The text “up to 1 space away and” makes the Ranged attack description contradictory and muddy. First range is capped at 1 then the printed range is applied. WTF did proofreading here?
• Hiding fails when it is the only character. This is un-thematic and unnecessary. The absence of other characters does not make the hiding character unhidden. RB quotes “it will target the closest character within range and clear sight.”, “An enemy will not move toward a character that is hiding unless there are no other characters to move toward.” And “clear sight”, clear sight is implied under Line Of Sight to be draw an imaginary line from any portion of that attacker’s base to any portion of the defender’s base” so enemies will target a character in hiding but prefer not to.
• Hiding and benefit from a hiding spot is slightly different but not explained well. “Hiding Spot: A character on a space cannot be targeted by an enemy in a different space. An enemy will not move toward a character that is hiding unless there are no other characters to move toward. Characters that are BIG or are equipped with an item that has the NOISY keyword cannot hide. " now consider Dustfeather: “If a character isn't finishing it's turn on a hiding spot, …” so literally this means DF ignores a big, noisy, Marked character in the same spot as DF just because it’s hiding.

It’s just all so poorly thought through, clearly not a mind with any training in the exact sciences. It’s just so typical of the designer, and to me a clear case of muddled thinking and poor testing. Not only that, all critiques on his previous products have fallen on deaf ears. I laud the creativity in painting this awesome world but lament who wrote the final rules.

The Errata/FAQ

Contrary to promises Jerry has not updated the erratum, in fact, Plaid Hat Games has even removed the link to the Errata/faq from their website (another sign the game has been written off). None of the bugs in the rulebook mentioned later and acknowledged by Jerry have been worked in into the Errata/FAQ.

While you can still find the file, the Errata/FAQ make no distinction between first and next edition, and likely you would own the second edition - so the Scrapper leader attack value may already be 7.

The 1.4 Rulebook and other attempts at streamlining.

• The 1.4 “enhanced” RB is even more vague on p.8 but leaves the order open (when to roll the black die) correctly. In this interpretation you can even play cards after rolling the white die. Something I made explicit in the game modes, because it’s (by accident) actually enhancing agency.
• The 1.4 handles batteries incorrectly.
• Paying white cards for activating abilities is explained wrong.
• It further confuses strength tests as color test, which is blatanly confusing.

Do not use Karar’s 1.4 rulebook as a single source of truth.

Other attempt at Rulebook clarification: worth noting but only refers to Actions so that one is far from complete. https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/2365526/attempt-rulebook-clarification - but I used phrases from the source where they clarified the rules.

Sources

This document is a compilation of the online questions on bgg, youtube and others.

Source preamble

Aftermath is a “dead" game (dead meaning no expansions will ever be made nor any support from the current publisher), which is actually a good thing for rule editors. Initially I set out to simply write a Companion / FAQ but that wouldn’t suffice; also any rulebook overhaul would need re-learning the game instructions as well.

In short, because PHG lost the license to Asmodee for AM including future expansions, and Jerry siding with PHG means Asmodee can’t make the expansions because they have no such creator, and Jerry has written the expansion but can’t release it.

Other sources

A very good source: https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/2365526/attempt-rulebook-clarification

Some others:

https://www.reddit.com/r/boardgames/comments/s6hxvv/aftermath_line_of_sight_issues/

https://www.reddit.com/r/boardgames/comments/p9c27x/aftermath_expansionsenemiescharacters/

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5P9jnyi9yDE

https://www.reddit.com/r/boardgames/comments/10r3bqw/wht_is_your_opinion_of_aftermath_is_it_worth/

https://www.reddit.com/r/boardgames/comments/xa6kbi/aftermath_or_familiar_tales/

https://www.reddit.com/r/boardgames/comments/pokra9/wasted_potential/