Endeavor: Age of Expansion

The original Endeavor was already one of my group’s favourites, both in its first form and in its impressive Kickstarter upgrade. Age of Expansion had been left sitting on the shelf, so we tried it mainly with the new buildings and without all the extra “bling” — nations and the rest — because there were people at the table who did not know the game.

At its core, Endeavor is still the strong game I remembered: you build up your position and use your discs to take actions, with the economy of available discs keeping your choices in a pleasantly tight noose. Decisions matter precisely because you cannot do everything; every disc spent somewhere is a disc missing from somewhere else.

The expansion’s new buildings disrupt that balance by offering so many extra discs that the game develops full-on disc inflation. With fewer possible attacks, the discs pile up, and sometimes you simply watch them turn into a mountain unless some very disc-hungry exploits show up at the table. Brilliant: we took the game’s tightest feature and decided to loosen it until it barely resembles itself.

Yes, the game remains top-tier, and if you have exhausted the base game, the expansion can give it a shot of replayability. But having played so many excellent games without it, I consider this one of those rare cases where an expansion is genuinely unnecessary. If this had been my first contact with Endeavor, I might have been more forgiving; now, though, I know exactly what it broke.