A cooperative campaign experience for 1-4 adventurers set in a fantasy world on the brink of being consumed by nature. Setup in only 5 minutes, and complete a scenario in 30 minutes per player. Pre-Orders & Late Pledges are open now for a limited time!
Latest Updates from Our Project:
It's a trap! No, really.
10 months ago
– Wed, Jun 18, 2025 at 03:12:42 PM
Hello everybody! Raul here.
It's June here on good, old Terra and things are getting exciting! Mike is joining us on this update once again with some news on the manufacturing front. Just make your way down the post, and be careful not to land on any.... ... ... ... TRAPS!
Oh no! Who could have seen this coming?
That might sting a bit, but it does give us a chance to talk about traps. As any good Rover knows, you must stay on the look out for the many different dangers in the wilds of Chorus to survive. Traps are one such danger. They come in a variety of different perilous types, each with their own effects, and are represented in game by special trap tiles.
A fine selection of the jeopardies, lying in wait for an unsuspecting passerby.
There's the Bursting Bell, which is a bulbous, orange puffball bomb that can be found in many different locations around the world of Rove. Any creatures that have the misfortune of triggering them will find themselves missing a good chunk of health! Or the Hatchery, a pulsating organic egg sac that is often full to the brim with buzzing bundles of unpleasantness.
The Nektari sure are pretty, but none too pleased to be disturbed.
There are loads of different trap types in the game, some are created by the players' or adversaries' actions. Some are present on the map at the beginning of an encounter or are created through narrative elements. Their effects are often determined by the Codex book, or the action that created them. The most unique of these is the Magic Trap, which when triggered forces the players to roll the ether die to determine its effects. Wild!
Mysterious!
Traps are one time effects that are cleared off the board once they are triggered. They are usually activated by Dashing into or ending your turn on their space, but there are ways a Rover can avoid falling into them. It is possible to Jump or Fly over them, without setting them off, as long as you don't finish your turn on them. And Teleport... you would have to actively be trying to activate a trap to trigger one with Teleporting.
Also, an especially clever Rover can force their adversaries into triggering traps with forced movement, pushing or pulling their prey to do double-duty: clearing the board of traps and damaging their enemies.
So you've made it passed all the traps, congratulations! You are on your way to making a great Rover!
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Manufacturing & Fulfillment Update
Howdy, Mike here with an update on the manufacturing and fulfillment of Rove.
First, let's cut right to the important part: Our manufacturer has notified us that Rove will be completed and leaving the factory on Thursday, July 17th.
Great! ...so what happens next?
Between our five SKUs, we're looking at over 12,000 boxes waiting for us, and these items need to be divided up correctly and shipped around the globe. To do so, we need our Backerkit surveys filled out, and we're fortunate to have an awesome pool of backers as over 80% of you have completed this step. If you have not yet filled out your survey, you must fill out the survey here if you want to receive your pledge on-time. To be clear, if you don't fill it out, we won't have your address, and we can't ship your copy of Rove. Please, click the link above and confirm that your survey has been completed.
If you have any questions or concerns regarding this step, please email our team at [email protected] and we will be more than happy to assist.
With our completed surveys in hand, we're able to split up our items up and ship them to our fulfillment centers in Asia, Europe, and North America. Once they arrive, the pallets are broken down, and the individual orders are packed and fulfilled based upon our completed survey information. Some regions will likely see fulfillment faster than others, but we will notify everyone as to the status of the containers as they move across the globe.
Did you charge for shipping yet?
No, we did not. We've put this off for as long as possible due to the situation with tariffs in the United States and the general unpredictability of global shipping in a tumultuous world. We're now at the point where we must roll the dice and begin charging for shipping, as your games will soon be on their way. These emails should start rolling out in the next two to three weeks, after our final push to get our backer surveys filled in.
Fortunately, we have not seen any major changes in shipping prices or import duties other than in the United States. We will be consulting our logistics partners to calculate the final fees, but non-US customers should expect no major difference between the final cost and our original estimates. For customers in the US, we're calculating our costs now, and will let you know shortly what the final cost will be. If there is indeed the need to slightly adjust US shipping prices due to the new 55% tariff rate, we will let you know. We will do our best to minimize the impact of these new costs.
So originally the game was supposed to ship in May/June. Why did it ship in July?
While tariffs caused headaches, the main reason was quality control. Several of our prototype items did not meet the level of quality and precision that we expected, and revisions and adjustments had to be made. Image quality, color correction, the precision of the die cuts, the thickness of the paper, the application of non-slip oil onto the playing surfaces to prevent your chits from sliding, the organization of player materials inside of the tuckboxes- every minor detail matters to us. These details matter because your playing experience is based not only upon Rove's awesome gameplay, but by the design and quality of the components you are using to play our game.
I mean, look how awesome this art from Alexandr Elichev is. It was of the utmost importance that this big stinky Briarbull was printed in the crisp, stunning resolution that it deserves.
Can we get an idea of what the team was working on?
Sure! For example, let's look at the boring plastic insert that holds all the pieces before you open it up. That's simple, right? How complicated could that be? It's a piece of plastic with some indentations. It holds stuff. With twenty-two packed tuckboxes, six thick, heavy books, hundreds of cards, dozens of unique dice, and a wide range of accessory parts, fitting everything into the box was a challenge already- but we wanted to take it a step further.
Our goal is for you to enjoy playing Rove- not to sit there organizing components, ziplock bags, and punchboard all evening. Could we come up with an internal layout that could eliminate the need to buy a third-party organizer and speed up setup and teardown? Let's take a look...
Every piece of the game required careful thought to be sure that it would suit your needs and lead to a great play experience. For instance, we designed our internal packaging so that it would also serve as a two-tier organizer for your components so that you wouldn't need to go out and buy a third-party organizer.
After our original digital mockup, a series of rough napkin drawings were sent back and forth between our team in New Jersey, USA and the packaging designer in Henan, China. Ultimately this turned into a 3D model from which an initial test tray could be made. Note the indentation that was made for a removable tray with a lid.
A sneak peak inside of an initial test-fit box at the factory. We took great care in organizing Rove's Playable Characters and Questlines into neat little tuckboxes, making setup and packing a breeze. Unlike some campaign games, there's no need to spend 6 hours punching out cardboard on your first session with Rove. At the top, you'll also see a removable tray with lid, designed to hold your punched components and sit on the table.
A process like this takes weeks of back and forth, prototyping, and adjustments to get right. Even with the picture above, that's not even the final configuration- additional cutouts were added to make it easier to remove the tuckboxes from the tray after this picture was taken. Every step of the way, we needed to ask ourselves, will our players enjoy this? Is this the best product we could possibly offer them?
Proofing, Proofing, and more Proofing.
Between Rove: Core Game, Rove: Xulc Expansion, and Rove: The Art Book, we had ten full books to design and proof. Together, they contained over 100,000 words, thousands of graphic assets, and hundreds of pages. Proofing these books was a serious challenge, but we're happy with our final results. While errors will inevitably sneak through, we are proud of the work we did to make Rove as error-free as we possibly could.
The Art Book was the first hardcover that our team produced, leading to some interesting challenges regarding page setup.
Proofing involved many, many hours of staring at manufacturing sheets like this, searching for hidden errors.
Cards were another tricky piece to get right. No pressure there, we just needed to print over three million playing cards without any errors.
To make it faster to get into your first game, our punchboard was divided up into smaller sheets that rest within your tuckboxes. That way, you only need to punch what you immediately need to play your first game. In total, over 85 unique punchboard layouts needed to be designed and tested.
Even seemingly simple products such as the dice bag for our "Premium Dice Kit" required adjustments to the logo design and to the bag's color to match our vision for what Rove should look and feel like.
I hope my sneak peak behind the curtain into the world of proofing and manufacturing wasn't too boring!
To come back to my original point: On July 17th, Rove is scheduled to leave the factory and begin heading towards you. If you haven't already, please fill out your Backerkit survey. We will make one final push to collect survey information, and then will be sending out our shipping invoices. If you have any questions or concerns, [email protected] is the best way to reach us.
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Thank you for reading through our update!
If you're looking to talk about Rove, be sure to check out our Discord. If you're specifically looking for help with your pledge, please use our new Customer Service email.
Want to receive more frequent updates? You can find us here: Facebook Instagram Discord<- The fastest way to contact us.
Maps and Map things
10 months ago
– Wed, May 28, 2025 at 08:59:05 AM
Hello everybody. Raul here!
We are mostly through May now, and that much closer to the end of the Production Phase. We are inching closer the point where we can start shipping boxes out to the distribution centers. Exciting! We are still keeping an eye on the tariff situation here in the US, and will have more information about what steps we are taking soon. For everyone outside of the US, things should proceed as they normally would, with your boxes being shipped out once we start with the Fulfillment Phase.
Speaking of moving things around, let's talk about flying!
This indicates a unit has the flying trait.
We are not talking airplanes and jets here, but instead are referring to one of the movement types in Rove. Flying, in our game, is a trait that some units have that affects the way they can move around the map. One of these "flyers" players may see during their adventures in Chorus is the Kifa, a bat-like creature that can kill with its screech, and has the nasty habit of impaling and dragging around its prey with is barbed tails.
Its kind of cute, except for all the fangs and scythe-tails.
Normally a unit cannot enter a space that is occupied by another unit, but our little Kifa, with its flying trait, can sail over both friend and foe without an issue! This makes the Kifa, and flyers like them, much harder to pin down than their more terrestrially bound peers. On top of this, they are also much better at avoiding various perilous zones and spaces that may occur on a map.
Some aforementioned "perilous zones and spaces," which we call Terrain. Here are the Dangerous terrain (red), difficult terrain (blue), and object (yellow) icons.
Units entering into dangerous terrain will trigger its effect, which is often damage, but the Kifa can ignore this and safely travels over it without issue. As long as their fuzzy selves do not end their movement on dangerous terrain, they will not trigger it. They can also completely ignore the effects of difficult terrain, which costs extra movement points to enter, and can sail over objects, which act as obstacles for some other types of movement. The space an object occupies can be jumped over, but cannot be occupied without flying.
Open air (white) icon.
Similarly to objects, open air spaces can be jumped over, but cannot be occupied without the flying trait. Additionally, units that are at low enough health, and don't have flying, can be forced into open air spaces and slain. I mean, if you shoved someone down into a pit, it makes sense that they wouldn't be too healthy afterwards.
Now, let's see how some of these spaces would look like on an actual map from the game. Spoiler warning for those that keep everything fresh for when they open the box.
A narrow land bridge with some nasty pitfalls on either side seems like a great place for an ambush. Especially for the Kifa!
Along the center are difficult terrain spaces and objects (including an ether node, which counts as an object while its associated dice is on the map), and there are large open air spaces on either side. The Kifa can get around all of these without a problem, but the Rovers will really have to watch their steps!
There are other ways of getting around a map (including teleporting!), and other types of terrain that you can find in our rulebook, that we have posted to our Discord.
Until next time!
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A quick note from Mike, Rove's Project Manager:
We're moving along with manufacturing, and solved a few final hurdles in terms of troubleshooting. This week we were able to review the an early copy and are very happy with how things have turned out. The issues we found were minor, such as an incorrect material color for one of the dice, a missing icon on one of our Apex Rover's punchboard, and a page numbering error in our hardcover art book.
Rove is a massive game, with hundreds and hundreds of individual components and nearly 100,000 words of text. For the manufacturer, there's tremendous range of different punchboards, layered player materials that require assembly, and complex materials that must be packed with precision and care. On our side, reviewing such a large game to be sure that it's as close to error-free has been a serious challenge, but one that we feel confident that we have completed to the best of our ability.
Manufacturing continues, and we're nearly at the finish line to get these games palletized, loaded, and shipped across the ocean to the final destinations. We will keep you posted regarding these final stages, especially considering the uncertainty of tariffs and international shipping.
Our team has been truly enjoying having the opportunity to engage with you all on Discord, and we welcome you all to join us there! For those eager to dive into Rove before their game arrives, we also plan to update our Tabletop Simulator mod with the latest assets in the coming weeks so that you can start your adventures early!
-Mike
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Thank you for reading through our update!
If you're looking to talk about Rove, be sure to check out our Discord. If you're specifically looking for help with your pledge, please use our new Customer Service email.
Want to receive more frequent updates? You can find us here: Facebook Instagram Discord<- The fastest way to contact us.
🧙 The Addax Team
Mothers and Matriarchs
11 months ago
– Fri, May 09, 2025 at 10:45:31 AM
Hello, everyone. Raul here.
It’s already May! Time is flying by, and production is moving along at a steady clip. Things are looking good, and we have not run into any other obstacles to completing the manufacturing phase. *Knocks on wood*
Now here in the US, May means it’s time for us to celebrate Mother's Day and show mommas all across the land our appreciation. In honor of the holiday, let’s get acquainted with one of the moms from the land of Chorus. Fair warning here for some slight spoilers for the Prologue, and a trigger warning for those who are bug averse.
Without further ado, let’s meet the Galeaper Queen!
She is more matriarch than motherly, but she still gets the job done. Even if that job is brood mother…
This immense insect is one of the first major enemies that Players may come across and fight, as they set off to begin their adventures in Rove. She is a considerable threat due not only to her size, but also her capacity to hatch hordes of hungering galeapers. These ravenous, winged, bug monsters tend to wreak absolute havoc in the areas they swarm and will eat anything they can get their mandibles on, including the Rovers!
Cute kid?
The galeapers tend to be numerous, but each of them only takes up a single space on the map. The galeaper queen, however, falls under the category of enemies we call “Large Adversaries,” that have special standees that allow them to take up more space. These types of adversaries are meant to represent some of the biggest threats to Chorus, and we wanted to make sure to get that feeling across when you spot their imposing figures on the map book, looming over your characters.
Here you can see the large adversary spawn icon as shown in the map book, as well as the adapter in action, and whole assembly placed on the map.
When moving large adversaries, it can sometimes be tricky to plan out the movement, as they do take up so much space (four hexes worth, to be exact!). We have found it is often easiest to visualize the whole move based off of the relative movement of a single one of the creatures hexes. They otherwise follow many of the same rules that would apply to regular adversaries, including movement restrictions This means that none of their four spaces can occupy a hex they would not normally be able to inhabit (i.e. an obstacle or barrier hex).
Large adversary being moved one space, while keeping track of the same hex.
You can find out more about large adversaries, along with the regular kind, in our Rulebook that we have posted up on our Discord.
Until next time!
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Thank you for reading through our update, and thank you to all the mom's out there!
If you're looking to talk about Rove, be sure to check out our Discord. If you're specifically looking for help with your pledge, please use our new Customer Service email.
Let's talk about dice
11 months ago
– Wed, Apr 30, 2025 at 12:50:55 PM
Hello everyone! Raul here again.
We’ve got some exciting news to share - a video of our dice from the factory! Our production partners have done an amazing job, and the custom dice turned out looking even better than we imagined. Take a look at the ether dice:
These aren’t just any dice, though…
In our game, the dice are more than just randomizers. The ether dice serve as the power the Rovers can draw from, infusing themselves with it to perform powerful Raves, our game's flashiest skills.
The cost to play this card is two Ether.
You can also drain the elemental color from the ether die, turning it dim, to boost certain skills and abilities without having to spend the dice. This opens up more choices, and more strategies, in how players can use their ether to approach different challenges.
Draining Ether can give powerful boosts to your actions.
Once ether dice are infused, players can use them to power their items, gaining their effects.
Ether and Dim die can be used to power your items.
The dice can also change the encounters themselves, forming clusters of gathered magical energies called “ether nodes” that act as obstacles for characters to navigate, and affect the surrounding areas on the map with elemental auras.
The effect of the aura depends on the type of ether the node is composed of, and there are many different kinds you may encounter in the lands of Chorus.
Some encounters also use the dice in other interesting ways, adding a twist to how they play and affecting how you approach them… but that is a story for another day.
We designed the dice to be versatile and integral to the game’s core mechanics. They bring just the right mix of planning and unpredictability—every roll tells a story. And we cannot wait for you to tell yours.
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Thank you for reading through our update, and for your continued support—we're getting closer every day!
If you're looking to talk about Rove, be sure to check out our Discord. If you're specifically looking for help with your pledge, please use our new Customer Service email.
Back to the fun stuff
12 months ago
– Mon, Apr 14, 2025 at 01:47:40 PM
Hello, everyone. Raul here.
We thought it would be a great time to get reacquainted with the five base characters that you could be playing in Rove. While these classes have been previously presented, excitingly, these pictures are from the profile pages included in the completed rulebook! They include Class Ratings in different categories for each Rover, so you can get a better grasp as to which might be more your playstyle. We are also going to be sharing the entire rulebook on our Discord, so read on to see how to get a hold of it.
The True Scale is a dynamic duo that is business in the front, and also business in the back.
The Flash is an explosive powerhouse of ether energies. Plus, they can teleport!
The wild and wondrous Shadow Piercer is gifted with deadly aim, healing powers, and a tail!
Diminutive, deadly, and devious, the Sophist makes his presence known, and in style to boot.
The Dune Dancer excels at making friends, especially of the fuzzy, feathered, or furry variety.
Download the Rulebook
More to come in a couple of weeks, but in the meantime, you can check out Rove's Rulebook in its entirety on our Discord.
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Quick Update from Mike on Manufacturing & Tariffs:
We're continuing to monitor the situation, and are hopeful that the recent talk of 90-day pauses, and specific goods being added to exemption lists could be a positive sign that there could be an end in sight to this mess.
While we wait to see what news tomorrow brings, here's the newest images from the factory floor- this time, showing off the completed miniatures in their vacuum-formed tray.
Manufacturing is chugging along, with only a few more weeks remaining until we're all printed, palletized, and ready to ship! We've just received images of the miniatures in their final form, which I'm very happy to share with you now:
Behold! The Rovers: Base, Prime, and Apex in all of their plastic glory.
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Thank you for reading through our update! We wanted to be sure we let everyone know that we're still
If you're looking to talk about Rove, be sure to check out our Discord. If you're specifically looking for help with your pledge, please use our new Customer Service email.
The Addax Team