20091016 - Endeavor, 18AL @ OTK
Ξ October 18th, 2009 | → 1 Comments | ∇ Boardgames |
Thanks to jack208 for a fantastic game of Endeavor last night, my mind is still turning at the possibilities existing in the game mechanics.
Yesterday started pretty slow as jack208 has to attend to his work instead of playing War of the Ring as intended. However, with rhyen, ryan, john, aanemesis and wong’s help, I managed to get in a few (just a few) games of Race for the Galaxy (with john’s set of complete expansions) at damansara to help tide the time.
Thankfully, night arrived and I find myself at OTK with jack208 bringing his Endeavor as promised. blownfreaks and ceternal are also lucky enough to join in what could be the first play of Endeavor in Malaysia (I do so love being first!). Despite ceternal’s reservations about another Puerto Rico derivative, I am happy to report that it is not (not that there’s anything wrong with PR), although references have been made towards it being a Goa derivative instead (which I have totally no idea of since I’d never played that game).
To me, the easiest reference to compare Endeavor to is a streamlined version of Age of Empires III that is faster but just as interesting (and maybe even more so! but it could because I’m a follower of the cult of the new).
Like AoE3, the game is played for victory points, called glory points here, and played for 7 turns (AoE3 has 8 turns). Like AoE3, Endeavor has phases where you build buildings, collect your population, collect income, collect resources, occupy the new world and attack the other player’s colony, so on so forth.
However, the way it is implemented in Endeavor is completely different and more (gasp!) elegant. Instead of players collecting trade goods and then calculating income from them and then spending them buying stuff, Endeavor has resources that are abstracted as Industry, Culture, Finance and Politics. Each turn, players’ Industry, Culture and Finance, will automatically churn out buildings, population and jobs, while Politics governs a player’s maximum hand size, a sort of bureaucratic representation of a government’s effective use of resources. And thus, freed from the complications of which trade goods to get, which population specialization to get, etc, everything a player does is just to determine which resources to take at a particular given time. Should he increase his Industry to get better buildings? Or should he increase Culture to attract more population? Finance to create more jobs? Politics to maximise resources? Throughout the game these four engines of growth will determine a player’s options and combos. Of course, the answer here as in most eurogames is that a balanced approach is probably required.
Obtaining the said resources in Endeavor is also remarkably simple. There is Occupying, Attacking, Shipping and Drawing. All of those actions require the matching building to activate and the population to activate them. Occupying, Attacking and Shipping serve as key actions to increase one’s influence in an area. These actions by themselves generate a small amount of resources, but accumulated over time, they build up one’s influence in Europe (the colonial empire base), as well as the 6 major colonial areas: the Far East, India, North America, Caribbean, South America and Africa. These building up of influences allow a player to draw increasingly better assets. This Drawing action is critically important as they generate the big payout in resources and glory points.
So what do I like about this game? To me, the streamlined mechanics of grabbing 4 resources and then bringing them to bear on your opponents is immensely enjoyable. The differences in which all players decide which resource to concentrate first sets you apart early and lets you have a sense of achievement in which your decisions matter. Combat is luckless, so the concentration is on decision making.
A caveat will have to be mentioned though, we made 3 mistakes in our maiden game. First of which is that we did not follow the rules of influence in Europe where we drew cards to our hearts content irregardless of our influence levels. I think that might have affected the timing of the abolition of slavery. Also, we did not return our discarded cards to the board when we exceeded our Political limit. This would have made getting the higher level cards more difficult. Lastly, we played that slavery cards can be discarded midway to cancel its negative points but in fact it can’t be. But those mistakes in no way affect my enjoyment of the game.
Despite my positive first response, I do acknowledge that I have only played it once and that the game could have optimal moves and progressions once we are more familiar with the game. With the initial resource setup as the game’s only randomiser, the replay value might be limited. Then again, since our playgroup rarely plays a game to death (we still have not explored all of Agricola’s cards!), this is a non-issue for me.
A 9/10 rating from me.
Next we played blownfreaks’ home-made desktop publishing extravaganza 18AL. Actually home-brewed is a misnomer as blownfreaks had help from his professional publisher wife. Thus his set is absolutely professional-looking. Apparently the game 18AL had a new design this year and the graphics is stunning, nothing like the boring plain colors of the usual 18-series but sharp and colorful, reminiscing of Chicago Express.
This game was test-driven between jack208, blownfreaks and myself and the our impression was that the train obsolescence made all the difference. jack208 was at the wrong end of the train obsolescence and I always came out ahead. blownfreaks had a rough time of it too and both him and jack208 had to cough up some cash for the dreaded forced-train-purchase (FTP) towards the end of the game. In fact the privates bidding round in which the priority deal ended up with me probably had a major influence on the rest of the game for us.
The train rush feels much too quick and most of the privates did not have time to be bought by corporations. Perhaps we were much too aggressive or perhaps a train or two was needed to slow the game down a little.
Tracks and city jostling exists but in an adequate amount. The game plays fast too and our three player game took about 3 hours. jack208 had an opinion about it being an introductory 18-series game versus 18TN as he felt 18TN had simpler to understand private companies. I felt that both were quite easy to understand, only that privates folded too fast in our game.
So the test drive completed, I would give 18AL an 8 out of 10 rating for an 18-series game. (but 10 out of 10 for graphics!)
