Light on rules, heavy on combos
⚓Endeavor: Deep Sea has gotten a lot of buzz since #SPIEL so we were very curious to give it a go ourselves. We haven’t played its predecessor (Endeavor: Age of Sail) so the game took us by surprise - now I understand the hype! 🙂 Endeavor is a pretty light game, but it is heavy on combos. Every turn you get something which is inherently satisfying, and rounds get more complex as you go. But let’s start from the beginning. 🤿
The game has 10 specific scenarios to play, but this is not a campaign. 👉It’s basically variable setups for the starting conditions and the objectives you are competing for.
From there, games play out mostly the same. Each round players hire a new specialist, get some new discs and get to remove discs from their used specialists.
Specialists are the action selection mechanism of the game. 🧐 On your turn you can put a disc on one of them to perform their action. In the 1st turn you only have 2 specialists, so you won’t get much done, but in the final 6th round you’ll have 7 of them, so rounds get longer and a lot more involved. ☝️ For many actions you will need a disc to mark the action on the modular map too.
You can move around which is essential to do actions, dive for tokens, use the sonar spots to discover new sea tiles, spend your research points to use conserve spots or get journal cards. Everything gives you something, and everything is useful - and important. This is the source of the fun: often that last track advancement you receive, or that additional disc you get will allow you to do something else later. 😊
📈Tracks are a central point of the game. One of them determines what level specialists you can hire, two of them determine each turn how many new discs you get and how many discs you can take off of specialists, and one shows you the travel speed and maximum depth for your submarines. You need all of them.
Endeavor constantly faces you with simple decisions, lightning quick turns, and showers you with many little rewards - but these all add up to create a very rewarding and fun experience. I especially love putting out new tiles as we explore! 🥰
