Somebody said dinos?

In Perseverance you and the passengers of an ocean liner got shipwrecked on an unknown island full of dinosaurs 🦖 who aren’t happy about your presence. You play as a fledgling leader trying to lead this newly forming community.

The huge box of Perseverance: Castaway Chronicles actually holds two whole games. 🙃 We played Episode 1 today. In this one you are trying to get a foothold on the island, building up your settlement and trying to defend against waves of dinosaurs who are trying to trample and eat you. Your rivals are other leaders who are trying to do the same. Whoever has the most followers at the end wins.

The main mechanics of the game are dice drafting and dice worker placement. 🎲 Each turn you pick a die from a common pool and place it somewhere to do the associated action – there is a lot of thinking involved here. First of all the icons might have to match with the dice space. Secondly your die placement spawns dinos in the related area. Whenever the defense area is full with dinos they attack - this could be good or bad for you depending on several conditions.

Another thing to look out for is the colored dice of the players in the common pool. Placing these help players get majority in the certain areas of the board, which will be important in the assembly phases of the game (which occurs whenever the dice pool is empty).

There are a lot of actions to do, and a lot strategies are viable – so every decision you make will be crucial, which also makes the game incredibly fun and replayable. 😁

We really enjoyed our playthrough (we actually tried the game during SPIEL21 too). The power struggles with 3-4 players are probably awesome, but thankfully the game works really well with 2 players too. There are some dummy dice and tokens in the game but they don’t slow the game down at all – they just help make all the majority scorings less binary.

I can’t wait to play Episode 2 too after this – I’ll jump right into reading the rulebook. 😋
Also did I mention you can play Episode 1 and 2 after each other in a chronicle mode? 🤯
Oh and also: later down the line there is an Episode 3 and 4 coming to Kickstarter. 🙀