Endeavor: Age of Expansion

Endeavor was already a favourite in our group, both in its original form and after its excellent KS upgrade, so Age of Expansion arrived with plenty of goodwill. We mostly tried the new buildings, leaving the full spread of nations and other extras aside because some players were new to the game. Base Endeavor is still first-rate. This expansion has simply decided that tight should become swollen.

The new buildings do provide more routes to explore, and anyone who has thoroughly worked through the base game will get a genuine shot of replayability from them. But they also create an absurd surplus of disks. Where Endeavor normally makes you account carefully for what you can afford to do, disks now pile up and the economy of scarcity loses its edge.

Player interaction goes with it: with fewer possible attack actions, you can find yourself watching those reserves become a small mountain unless the game is feeding on disk-hungry exploits. The extra options do not make the game tighter or open a sharper conflict; they merely loosen a system that worked because it would not let you have everything.

Had this been my first encounter with Endeavor, I might have called it a good expansion with more material. After so many strong games of the base version, though, Age of Expansion is one of those rare cases where the expansion is unnecessary.