Got a chance to play this exciting game at GenCon. I admit I only played a couple times, but I thought an early review was better than none given the lack of information. My short bit: just an awesome game.
0. Description
In Endeavor, the players are European powers that set out to explore and colonize the world. Each turn is very phase driven, you:
A. Take 1 new building.
B. Take some new dudes from the supply.
C. Remove some dudes from your buildings to make them available again. (Buildings are not like in Puerto Rico. They trigger an action when occupied, but then need to be freed up to be used again.)
D. Take turns making actions with your dudes. Most actions require you to put a dude on an open building and then place a second dude on the map. The exception is one action lets you draw a card.
E. When you pass, you apply your hand limit on cards and once everyone has passed you do it all over again.
The player board has 4 important tech tracks. They more or less correspond to every phase above except D. (One track lets you get better buildings, the other lets you grab more dudes from the supply, the other lets you unload more buildings and the last lets you hold more cards.) All the map locations are seeded with tokens that correspond to a tech track. When you occupy a space on the map you get the corresponding token and update your progress on the corresponding tech track. The cards also show multiple tech icons.
It is a VP game and most of your score comes from 2 places:
A. You get points for how far you progress on each tech track.
B. You get points for your board presence in cities and the connections between them.
1. Analysis Paralysis / Downtime
This game just SHINES on the AP front. Turns fly by so dang fast. All the accounting can be done simultaneously, so the only part of the game that even takes a moment is playing out the player actions. And even that flies by in such a hurry. You are only presented a few options each time, but they sort of compound to make sure they feel different. 629
You only have a handful of buildings to choose from each time, but what buildings you choose determine what handful of actions you are going to have available. So viewed one at a time you never have huge choices, but the consequences get bushy.
You also can't plan out your entire game from the beginning, so it does stop that whole "waaaay forward" thinking. The space on the map is limited and the other players are competing with you for it.
Even in a crowded loud convention hall with 4 newbies and one teacher the game did not last over 2 hours. That's a small miracle of sorts.
2. Frequency of Meaningful Decisions
There are no stupid decisions in this game. They just don't ask you to make them. I love that in a game. Grabbing a building is a damn hard choice. It can dictate a lot of your strategy.
Deciding what actions to take and in what order can be excruciating. You want to do everything, and you want to do it now. And you will just not be able to do so.
The only stupid decision in the game is discarding down your hand in the final turn. It just turns into some silly min/max exercise that has way too many permutations to complete easily. Luckily you can do that while other players finish up their turn.
3. Multiplayer Solitaire / Player Interaction / (Competitive / Casual)
Well, this is not solitaire. There is a map with a limited number of locations. You all want to be everywhere and it's just not going to happen. As if that wasn't enough, here's a couple more great glitches:
You *can* outright take over another person's city. To do so you need a cannon action. You must trigger the cannon action, then sacrifice one guy to your supply and then place a second guy onto the occupied city you want. The original owner places their dude back into the supply. War is expensive and both parties involved feel the attrition, but it is very much a part of the game. Why would you do it? Well you need a lot of dudes in one area of the map to be able to draw the good cards from there. Also, there are a lot of "connections" between towns that earn you additional tokens and then VP at the end of the game.
I'll now introduce another important part of the game. You start with only the European cities open and available at the beginning of the game. All the other continents only have "shipping lanes" open. When a shipping lane is full, then the cities become available (but only to those who partook in the shipping lanes. 629