Why Endeavor?
I love complex, heavy games. I love diplomacy, scheming and plot intricacies. But, at times, I love to take a breath from all of that. I purposefully want to relax and think about my own stuff… my own strategy, without too much warmongering, without too much caring to attack and to defend… to muster armies. You know… bribing and negotiations, and war, may stress you. And sometimes you don’t want to stress; you just want to enjoy a nice thematic game with your friends, exploring some cool relaxed mechanics, and with just a bit of conflict, direct or indirect might it be.
I’ve been looking for that game for quite some time; I’ve approached <PERSON>, <PERSON>, Viceroy, Orleans and more, but they’ve all left me longing for something else.
Endeavor: Age of Sail falls right onto that sweet spot of theme, elegant mechanics, relaxed gameplay yet with a bit of conflict, and interesting player interaction/competition to get the best things from the board for yourself and deny your opponents.
Also, Endeavor is a bit German. But - again - just a bit, so that if you don’t really like pure German board games, you might find that Endeavor is totally fine for you. While if you like German-style games you’ll be comfortable with pushing your 4 main stats upwards (called attributes, and namely: Industry, Culture, Wealth, and Influence) to improve your engine and score you VPs at the end of the game . Yet it’s not only a matter of player attributes….
Here’s you player board, beautiful and functional. See the 4 main attributes on top: each influences your Empire’s capabilities.
How does it work?
So ready to set sail? Let’s start from the beginning: Endeavor is set during the Age of Sail (1571-1862). 761
The players take the role of 2-to-5 major Empires trying to expand their influence all across the globe by shipping fleets to distant regions looking for trades, occupying those regions after the appointment of a Governor, attacking other player’s fleets and camps, drawing market cards from those same regions, or paying your hard-laboring workers just to profit from their labour time and time again.
The first step to take each turn is to always pick a building from the stack of available buildings and lay it on your docks: the building is free to build, but you can pick stronger buildings only if your Build level matches or exceeds the level of the building you want to pick. Buildings are what allow you to perform actions; if a building has an action spot, you’ll be able to send workers there to perform that action (more on actions later).
After that, you’ll gain new available workers that want to join your cause and work for you, depending on your “Growth Level”. These workers come from outside your player mat and sit silently on your Harbour… ehrm I meant… Harbor
Then everyone’s going to “Pay” the workers they’ve used during the previous turn by clearing as many Action spaces from workers as their level of Salary.
These three steps may be performed by everyone simultaneously, whilst the following Actions are to be taken in turn order.
But before delving into the few, nice, easy to remember actions, let’s take a break from the technicalities and have a look at this lovely map. Just look at it. Isn’t it soothing? Maybe it’s the clever choice of colors - I dunno: the prevailing colors are a combination of desaturated Greens and Oranges and these inspire a sense of peace (greens) and warmth (oranges).
A beautiful and functional map. The wooden tokens represent player's pieces. The brown\light blue tokens are what you gather.
Ok… feel better now? Now take a look at those nice little tokens scattered all around the globe. These represent your commercial and influential opportunities, and - as you gather those tokens - you’ll be able to increase the 4 main attributes of your Empire - some of which we talked earlier. For each symbol you gather (either from a space on the board, or shown on the cards you pick), you increase the corresponding attribute by 1 step.
At the beginning of the game the players have presence only in Europe, as their empire starts from there, while the other 6 regions are closed. A Ship action allows the player to place a disk on any sea or ground space onto any open region; whilst a closed region may only be approached by sending a disk on its shipping track. 629