ENG GER

OUR JOURNEY

Rapture has already experienced and achieved over many years! Read the full story here!

The development of our tabletop game Rapture began in 2014. What started as a crazy idea and a little collective brainstorming session quickly grew into a clear setting as well as some basic rules. And unlike other start-ups, we didn’t even have a garage at our disposal! We actually started in an apartment hallway, which, admittedly, was pretty spacious. During the first few months, we used glued-together paper stand-ups and ran multiple tests on plain particle boards to find out if the game itself actually worked.

Much to our own surprise, it did – really well, in fact. That’s when it became clear to us that we could create something that could be a great deal of fun for many people and generate a big player base. So, we started with the actual work on the project, and as time went on, the design of the miniatures, the playing cards, and the whole game itself slowly developed to take an increasingly established form.

At the same time, ideas and concepts, the story, the many different characters, and the numerous factions came into being – out of the 11 so far, 6 have already been balanced and tested for gameplay. Based on historical events mixed with fictional elements, the Rapture universe was thus created, refined, and fleshed out with more and more details. All that was just waiting to come into the gaming world!

After three years behind the scenes and extensive testing, we were finally able to make our dream come true in December 2017: We put all our savings together and founded a limited liability company. Putting the capital to use, we began to bring our vision to life with the help of professional artists and modelers.

That was the start of our collaboration with artists from all over the world. To this day, working with people from different culture groups remains an absolute thrill – we have encountered many exciting things, but there were also a number of challenges that had to be overcome and experiences that had to be gathered.

When we created Rapture in 2014, one of the biggest questions was whether our miniatures should be molded digitally or by hand. In 2014, 3D printers were still rare and those that could give us the quality we required were way beyond our price range. However, technology in this area advanced at such a rapid pace that when we were ready to proceed with production, this question had already answered itself. While on a personal visit to Spain, we were able to convince some amazing partners of our dream, and thus, in 2018, the first Rapture miniatures finally went into production!

2018 was also the year in which we bought tickets to the SPIEL convention in Essen and, with the New World Order starter box in hand, were able to make first connections within the scene. Rapture was no longer a mere vision from an unassuming hallway!

Playing the first couple of rounds with the finished miniatures after five years of development, was an incredible, indescribable moment for us! To hold something in our hands that we have created out of nothing and that we have watched grow every step of the way, filled us with a deep sense of pride.

A year later, in October 2019, we were once again at the SPIEL convention, only this time as official exhibitors, presenting Rapture to a wide audience. Our booth turned out to be pretty popular, and many visitors had the opportunity to try out the game. The response was exceedingly positive – a lot of players actually wanted to take Rapture home right then and there.

A few months after that, in the spring of 2020, we represented Rapture at the Tactica Convention in Hamburg. Here, too, the feedback remained positive throughout, which encouraged us to take the next steps. We planned our Kickstarter campaign for the end of 2020, as it was very important for us to personally familiarize Rapture with its potential players. Unfortunately, however, the world changed drastically right after Tactica, so that all following live conventions and scheduled appearances had to be cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Nevertheless, the feedback on our game and the project in general was so much more overwhelmingly positive and heartwarming than we could have ever imagined. For us, it is simply amazing to see that you are having fun with the game, because ultimately, it is precisely for this purpose that we developed it: that you all have fun playing it and may share many unforgettable evenings in the Rapture universe!

This motivated us all the more to prepare Rapture for the Kickstarter campaign. And when we finally reached that point after six years of work, we put our entire focus on it. Before the Kickstarter campaign, we unfortunately did not have the means to call on professional designers to ensure that the rulebook, playing cards, packaging, and the layout of the Kickstarter campaign in general meet the most state-of-the-art graphic design standards. The funds that we used to pre-finance the project were almost exhausted, and thus, for the time being, the final layout had to wait for the outcome of the Kickstarter campaign.

The campaign started in November 2020 and ended in December – with enormous success! It was finished, Rapture was officially accepted by the community, welcomed with open arms, and successfully financed!

The months that followed were naturally quite turbulent. After all, we would have to accomplish nothing short of proving ourselves worthy of our supporters’ trust and deliver Rapture on time in October 2021, as promised! With the fresh cash injection, we promptly set the production of the new miniatures in motion. These would be added to the miniatures of the first three factions: the Angels, Atlantis, and the New World Order, which we already completed over the course of the Kickstarter campaign. At the same time, we also continued writing the story, which we could now have professionally proofread and translated. The first add-ons for Rapture then underwent their final testing and the balancing of the factions and the characters was refined. Additionally, we could at last begin with the work on the final graphic design, with which the rulebook, cards, packaging, and the whole kit and kaboodle were customized in a coherent and visually appealing way. In September 2021, the biggest chunk – the rule and storybook – were finally completed and went to press! Seven years of work and development on the Rapture game are contained within this book. Thousands of hours of fiddling with the rules, the game tests, the phrasing and rephrasing… Many texts were written, tried out in the game, thrown out, changed, and rewritten, the basic framework of the story was developed, countless plot holes discovered and fixed, the novelization of the story developed and written down… We are therefore all the more overjoyed to hold the finished book in our hands and to have gotten so much positive feedback from all of you, saying how great the final version turned out!

In September and October 2021, all the individual components like figurines, accessories, cards, books, dice, bags, and boxes arrived, and we spent every spare minute packaging everything. After all, we now finally had a workshop and a garage at our disposal – gone were the days of sitting in a hallway! It took a lot of effort, but it was worth it. Despite all the setbacks and problems that had to be solved the months prior, we were able to send out the first packages to all our supporters in October 2021 – right on time, as promised in the Kickstarter campaign!

But even this was just a little stopover in our journey, because the official launch of Rapture in spring of 2022 was already in sight and we had to go straight back to work to prepare for it. Lots of details in the production process still had room for improvement, we designed and built new game boards, upgraded our online shop, and above all, revamped our homepage with a new design!

After Rapture’s official launch on the 12th of March, 2022, the game is now finally available for purchase – both at our online shop as well as at the first, select retailers who have decided to add Rapture to their product range!

It is precisely this that gives us the most joy. With Rapture, we want to bring players together, to create a community that you can experience for yourself at the store, to build connections that go beyond impersonal online proceedings. That is why local shops are so important: they are the link between us and our players, they are the ones who create the platform. These are the memories we treasure from our own youth – playing with trading cards or tabletop games at the local comic shop. They were the good old days, and we want nothing more than to do our part so that these experiences don’t just remain memories for us, but instead can be experienced anew by everyone – in the “real” world.

The four of us have been friends for many years. We are fortunate enough to be able to look back on an enormous repertoire of games and to have gained experiences that help us greatly in our new role as game developers.

Together, we have set great goals for ourselves, and we are confident we can achieve great things, too! With Rapture, we wanted to create something truly special: a game by players for players!







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