Exploding Goat Games Forums

Bleatings and salutations Goat fans,

First, I'd like to thank everyone for their patience in waiting for an update from The Goat. We appreciate that you understand the obvious implications of running a small, part time gaming company while still working our full time jobs, being family members, and dealing with life in general.

There's big news on the Goat Front!

First, we recently held a manager meeting at Exploding Goat Games in which we made some fairly large decisions. While some of them would bore you to death, we wanted to make sure our fans were kept in the loop on the big to-do's! We, as avid gamers ourselves, find that there's nothing more frustrating than living in gamer's limbo when our favorite companies leave us wondering on new releases...

The Apocalypse Series
The largest decision we made was to move away from Mongoose Publishing's Battlefield Evolution as a core mechanic for many of our miniature gaming rules. Don't get us wrong, we do very much like Evo and its mechanic. I personally have found it to be one of the best convention gaming systems available, due to its relative quick play, easy to learn rules, and dynamic "all hands on" style of play. After two turns of running a convention game, even the younger more inexperienced players have a working grasp of the Evo rule and can focus on the finer details of play. We like Evo and will continue to play it around the local hobby store (in addition to the dozens of other games to which we're addicted).

"Why", you ask. Well I'll tell you... After working several conventions as vendors and receiving feedback in person, on the forums, and on email, we consistently find that people looking for a new game are dissuaded from getting into a new game when they find that they must purchase two separate rule books for it, in this case the two books being the core Evo rules and Apocalypse-Z. Once people hear about this, they tend to put the book down and walk away. Now, we certainly don't expect everyone that picks up a book to hand us cash and run away eagerly planning a zombie horde or Enclave force, we've found enough concern that we feel its worth re-tasking.

In keeping with this new outlook, we've decided to stop (as Evo supplements) further work on Apocalypse-D and several other titles we've been kicking around (notably a mech combat game and a game based upon the Mars series of books by E.R. Burroughs). This doesn't mean that those products won't be released... indeed, they will, but in what we think is a more consumer-friendly format. We're starting development on our own Exploding Goat rule set for battle-sized miniature games. This is still in the early stages of development, but we tend to get riled up on a project and run amok, making rapid progress in a short time. Our plan for the future is to ensure that this new rule set is included in EVERY title released under that series so that you can have the core mechanic AND the title-specific rules in one book.

For those of you who've been awaiting Apocalypse-D as a Battlefield Evolution supplement, we have no plans of leaving you high-and-dry for another year with dino figs collecting dust on shelves. We decided to give away to anyone that desires them, FREE digital copies of everything we have currently for "D". That's right, you'll still be able to play D, Evo-style and not have to spend a penny. The files won't be fully formatted for professional level printing and production (as this process is even more demanding, time-consuming, and tedious than development and playtesting), but they'll contain everything you need to get the ball rolling and even make your own modifications for personal play. The files will contain the new traits and advanced rules for dinosaurs and the humans fighting against them, some background fluff, army lists and stats for the units, and some pointers on obtaining models and terrain. They will also, in accordance with the open license requirements from Mongoose Publishing, contain the legal documents necessary for us to distribute the rules, even in a not-for-profit manner such as this one.

The time frame on this should be a little over two weeks, depending upon customer interest. I simply need to take the time to compile what we've already formatted and insert the remaining files (albeit without the fancy-pants formatting). The files will be in Adobe PDF format so anyone can simply download them and get playing. To receive your free copies, simply send an email to custserv@explodinggoatgames.com with "Dino Evo" in the title. It might take us a few days to get back to you, but we'll include information on how we'll be handling the file transfer. The transfer will likely not be something we can do via email, since most email providers don't allow attachments of the size that "D" is likely to be. We're considering other options such as uploading the files to our MS SkyDrive account and giving people who request it access to those specific file areas for a set amount of time (starting from a confirmation email that we will send out as part of your request process). During that time, you'll be free to download the files and get to cracking heads.

Apocalypse-Z
We're extremely happy to say that Apocalypse-Z has been very well received and had sold upwards of 500 hard and digital copies worldwide since its release in November of 2008. As of this posting, Josh Barrett (ChickenGoat) has just finished running several demo games at GenCon, Indy 2009. Once other work on the new Goat mechanic is complete and other titles are released, Kermit and I will likely revisit the "Z" rules and tweak then to the new mechanic for a "Z-reboot" of sorts.

Department 666
As a completely new, Goat rule mechanic, 666 has playtested very thusfar. Kermit the rules-master has been plugging away dilligently on these new rules. He will, however be a bit out-of-the-loop for afew months, but with good reason. He and his better half are expecting a new bouncing, baby any day now!! We decided to give him some slack on cranking out more work for a feeeew months while he and his lovely wife adjust to their new baby. Rest assured though... after a few months of down time, we'll shackle him to his desk and put him back to work!!

Well, we hope that this satisfies some of your hunger for answers from us... feel free to email custserv@explodinggoatgames with more questions or just post em right here! We'll do our best to answer you in a timely fashion!

Thanks for your continued support.

Jay