Z-Man Games Endeavor Board Game - Strategic Empire Building Game for Adults & Teens | Perfect for Game Nights & Family Gatherings

After reading the five page instruction pamphlet, my adult family members set up all the pieces of the game. That took about 20 minutes. Then, when we tried to figure out how to begin, and what to do, and where to go, it was all a mystery. We read aloud the directions, but to no avail. We finally decided that in order to play this very complicated game, you must have someone who has played it before, at least at the first time playing. I wrote online to the author of the game, asking for more specific directions, and all he replied was that he would need more specific questions. Perhaps this game is for analytical geniuses, but it certainly is not entertaining for those of us who like to play challenging games. I bought this because it was written up in the SFChronicle as one of the outstanding games of the year. Well, perhaps I should ask that journalist to come over and help us.Remember how long it takes to play a game of Monopoly? Well, Endeavor is a game which takes awhile, too. After all, building empires and cities in the eighteenth century takes time, but what an adventure! It's a lot of fun and the combinations of ways to earn points for the final tallies make it interesting and challenging.Build buildings to allow you to take actions.actions allow you to take control of shipping lanes and coloniesregional control allows you to grab cards that improve abilitiesAll of the above let you improve your "technologies" to do items above better.Love this gameEndeavor is the new colonial-era offering from Z-Man games. Endeavor was designed by Carl de Visser and Jarrat Gray, relative newcomers to the game design world.Endeavor pits 3 to 5 players against one another in the age of colonization and exploration. The game ends after 7 turns and each turn is composed of 4 phases. During the build phase, players grab a building, adjusting their stats accordingly. Players acquire people (read: workers) during the population phase. During the salary phase, players pay their workers in order to reuse said workers. And the action phase is where players vie for control of the board. The action phase is the real meat of the game; the other 3 phases are rather mechanical.There are 4 actions a player can take: ship, occupy, draw and attack. In order to perform an action, players must have a building that allows that action. For example: the shipyard allows a player to perform a ship action. By using these actions, players place their workers on the board.The board is divided into several regions. By having your pieces in a region, you can draw a card that boosts your stats. Each space on the board is also worth a glory (read: victory point). At game start, random tokens are placed on each space. The first player to control a space claims the token. Thus, where you will place your workers depends on your long term goals (which cards you can draw and where you will score victory points) and your short term goals (actions your buildings give you and which tokens you want to claim).Players may perform any number of actions so long as they have the workers or tokens to spend but players may only play one action before the next player has the opportunity to play an action. Thus, you need to manage the timing of when to move as well as where to move.Each player has a small game board upon which their individual stats are kept. Your score is based in large part on these stats. Thus, the winning player will be the one who balances his position on the map with his individual needs.A game of Endeavor takes around 60 minutes to set up and play with experienced players. This makes the game really quick by comparison of some games. Also, there is a lot of strategy in Endeavor. Every action is important but there is no real fear of analysis paralysis.Endeavor is a solid 4**** game that I may bump to a 5th star in the coming months as I play it more.I can't say enough good things about this wonderful game. I've loved it every time I've played it. And everyone I've played it with has thoroughly enjoyed it. Even coming in last is more fun than most games! BUT, it is quite nice to have at least one experienced player teach the rules to new players.While this was designed to be a 3-5 player game, do yourself a huge favor and go to Board Game Geek and get the "official" rules for the 2-player variant (with its own sub-variants). These were designed by the original game designers, who chose not to publish them with the game. In the 2-player game one of the unused colors is treated as a "neutral" and every time a player ships, colonizes, or crate items home, that player has to do the same (where they can) using the neutral country. The neutral never has its own player board and thus doesn't worry about leveling up or getting victory points. The two players try to use the neutral to shut out their opponent, which can be difficult but challengingly so.The "pay your workers" seems to be the hang-up for new players. And that is the nifty mechanic of the game. You can put a building into play that lets you put a worker into the building to take an action (e.g., ship or colonize) but you can't remove the worker and re-use the building until you "pay" him. So you have to balance getting new buildings that give you spaces for workers, adding new workers that can be placed in buildings, and paying off workers to get them out of buildings. New players tend to have trouble paying off workers and thus have too many filled buildings that can't be used the next round. If you do the mechanic right by the 7th and always final round you should have a lot of workers and a lot of buildings or action pieces that allow you to use these workers (to fight, to send your ship out to sea, to colonize, to crate goods back home, etc.).The other interesting mechanic regards "slavery". If a player chooses s/he can activate slavery and take slavery cards that allow them to increase their technology or get more money to pay workers. But if another player gets the final normal card in Europe/Med area, that player automatically abolishes slavery and the slavers lose all the items on their cards and have to flip them over, losing 1 VP (glory) for each slavery card. So in a 4-5 player game, usually 2 players may slave and the others don't. Then the slavers have to be careful not to let the other players abolish slavery. And it is quite interesting to watch as the two groups take steps either to protect or abolish slavery. (This is often where many of the fighting actions can occur, though fighting uses up a lot of men.)Every time I've played this game all the players, new and experienced, have thoroughly enjoyed it. As I say, to play this game is to love this game. Both the mechanic and the theme work well together! I always feel like I'm sailing the Seven Seas in the 16th/17th century.