Endeavor Deep Sea, 3 players
I tried this yesterday afternoon for the first time and came away pretty positive. It's a game about ramping as quickly as possible through combinations of limited actions. All that happens by going up tracks, but the presentation is great, and it ends up being more than the sum of its parts. I got absolutely blasted by the experienced player and the other new player, but I've sort of learned to accept I'm going to get completely embarrassed at games with this online tabletop simulator crew of friends. I'm not deliberative enough and don't go through enough potential outcomes quickly enough.
I was pretty hot on the game for the first, say, 4 turns but cooled a touch as we got late game. The first turns are characterized by a lot of limitations, especially spatial limits related to submarine position, which limits your options and makes individual decisions much more consequential. By turns 5-6, though, you have three submarines and almost unlimited movement. That freedom combines with having 6 action spaces on your tableau to create an enormous multidimensional optimization space that is not appealing to me. It shaves any of the weighty feeling to decisionmaking off because you have to make an impossibly dense series of 6-8 decisions that can be chained in an almost infinite combination. Neither is my strong suit as a satisficer by nature nor my taste as someone who likes dramatic, committed plays even in eurogames.
Nevertheless, I would definitely play again. Well put together game with incredible, appealing art.
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