In Endeavor, you represent a European empire colonizing and shipping to all parts of the world to increase the empire's glory and status in industry, culture, wealth and politics. Cooperate with other empires to open up shipping lanes to the rest of the world, or attack them to achieve dominance. Control as many cities and trade routes as you can to become the most powerful empire!
It is the Age of Exploration, and the European countries are hungry to expand their influence throughout the world, from the exotic Far East to the legendary golden cities of South America. Unfortunately, when one European power decides to venture across the seas, every other power does the same in order to not get left behind. So it becomes a race to see which power is able to colonize and create trading routes with the most foreign territories.
Endeavor is played on a board that contains a map of Europe as well as foreign territories such as North America, the Caribbean, South America, Africa, India and the Far East. The objective of the game is to control as many cities and trade routes as possible, as well as acquire the most resources. The resources are industry, culture, wealth and politics; and they are crucial to how effective your country is. Industry will allow you to build more useful and powerful buildings, culture will let you hire more workers, wealth is needed to pay those workers, and politics allows you to control more independent parties such as tradesmen, slaves and local experts.
At the start of each game, each city, trade route and shipping lane on the board is randomly filled with a token. These tokens provide either an increase to one of the above-mentioned 4 resources or a free action. (Due to the randomness of the tokens' locations, each game of Endeavor will play differently). As the resources are so important for expanding your empire, it is key to capture the right cities and routes to further your expansion strategy.
There are a number of ways to control a city or shipping lane. Each country starts with just the ability to colonize cities in Europe. Other abilities are available if you construct the appropriate buildings. These abilities include opening the shipping lanes, attacking other players' cities and acquiring external hired help (in the form of drawing cards specific to each territory). You will need to use a combination of these abilities to expand your country's control over the world as well as grow your resources and power.
Shipping is important as opening the lanes will give you access to the cities and cards in each territory. In addition, the country with the most shipping presence in a territory gains control of its governor, which is a card that provides you with huge resources. Attacking other players not only passes the control of a city (and its victory points) to you, but can also be strategic in controlling trade routes. If you control the cities at either end of a trade route, you gain control of the trade route as well.
The cards are an interesting part of Endeavor. Each territory has cards that provide a different combination of resources, and you gain access to better cards the more presence or control you have in that territory. Controlling powerful cards can provide you with huge resource advantages. There are also slavery cards that can provide you with large resources. Be careful though, as the most powerful country in Europe has the ability to abolish slavery, robbing you of those resources and hitting you with negative victory points.
The game mechanics in Endeavor are pretty simple: all you have to worry about is colonizing, shipping, attacking and drawing cards. It isn't a game with lots of rules and complex strategic decisions, though there is a fair amount of strategy involved in deciding what actions to take to give yourself a leg up while hurting your opponents. However, even with the simple rules, Endeavor seems to have captured the right amount of complexity to make it a satisfying game to play for both veterans and new players alike.
Endeavor is a fairly fast-paced game as strategic board games go. A typical game lasts close to an hour and a half. It is also an easy game to teach, since the rules and mechanics are pretty easy to grasp. Even then, it is able to capture the feel of expansion and colonization in the Age of Exploration very well indeed. You know all those stories about opening trade routes to the Far East? About finding the lost Incan gold in South America? You get to live all that in Endeavor!
Complexity: 3.5/5.0
Playing Time: ~ 1.5 hours
Number of Players: 3 to 5 players
You can read more about Endeavor at
http://www.ageofboards.com/endeavor.html