Perseverance: Castaway Chronicles – Episodes 1 & 2

The individual Perseverance episodes work perfectly well on their own, but the campaign demonstrates how deceptive a small addition can be. A few achievement tiles and a modest reward deck sound like a footnote; in practice, they alter the scale of the decisions and bring the game much closer to the density of Trickerion.

At heart it is still a dice-drafting and placement game, but producing the best result in the current session is no longer enough. You pursue achievements because they unlock reward cards, which provide benefits both now and in the setup for the next game. The interesting decision is when to surrender immediate points in order to assemble a stronger finishing position across the whole campaign.

Competition centres on those objectives and on the rewards the other players can claim first, while the system also provides a respectable catch-up mechanism: even when winning the current game has become implausible, there is still a reason to play carefully. Campaign marks and the more powerful cards in the second episode raise the pressure further, although the extra-action tokens can make the administration rather heavy in places.

Crucially, the entire continuity lives on the score sheets, so several campaigns can coexist without turning the game into a permanent table-bound project. It is a simple idea, executed with considerable force, and it raised my opinion of Perseverance substantially.

Updated session

A later complete run confirmed that first impression, while making the cost much clearer. The two Episode 1 games were demanding already; in Episode 2, with 3.5 and 4.1 hours of play respectively, fatigue became part of the experience. The campaign is excellent, but it feels more like a marathon worth running properly once than something one casually repeats.