Overview: From BGG
Caught in an enigmatic storm, a modern-day luxury ocean liner crashes ashore on an otherworldly island. As one of the ambitious survivors, you soon learn that the island is home to a multitude of majestic and fiercely territorial dinosaurs. With the cruiser beyond repair, you have no choice but to establish a foothold on the island, withstand the onslaught of the dinosaurs, and sow the seeds of what will one day become a strong and tenacious community capable of discovering the mystery of the island.
Rules & Setup:
As with all of these large games from Mindclash the rules are expertly laid out and easy to follow from start to finish, and the boxes even come with detailed guides to put everything back into the box (which is massive).
The set-up is quite involved as there are a lot of pieces to sort, with resources, minis / standees, dice, tokens and individual player boards along with a LOT of cards.
However, once set-up is complete what you have on the table is another vastly impressive site, especially if you have the miniatures version with the different types of dinosaurs and human figures.
The rules look daunting but everything is very straightforward once you start getting into your turns, and there are plenty of how to play / playthrough videos on sites like YouTube for you to watch and learn from.
Theme:
Perseverance: Castaway Chronicles introduces the first two episodes in a series of euro-style dice-drafting / dice-placement strategy games. The saga will ultimately consist of four episodes, telling the story of a group of survivors becoming a mighty civilization on a hostile island. As each episode features unique characteristics and a different game feel, they are playable as standalone medium/heavy games but also as a continuous campaign. The theme and story unfolds through evolving game mechanisms across the episodes, also making the rules easier to learn. In the campaign mode, the outcome of each episode influences the next, but the game has no legacy elements and no hidden rules; the whole storyline is infinitely replayable.
In Episode 1, players are striving to develop and protect the foothold town of Perseverance, besieged by the dinosaurs of the island. By building walls, traps and settlements, mounting defenses and partaking in the early political power struggles of a forming community, players gain followers to establish themselves as leaders. Episode 1 introduces the signature dice placement / area majority mechanism that evolves and spans through the series, and also features a defense mechanism against waves of attacking dinosaurs, unique to this episode.
In Episode 2, the survivors have successfully defended the city of Perseverance, completing a massive wall to stop the dinosaur onslaught. Under the guidance of the ship’s senior officers, the players now set out to explore the surrounding wilderness, expand the settlement beyond the walls, and chart a path to the mysterious structure on the horizon. This Episode adds new actions to expand the core mechanism and allows for a deep customization of your Leader and faction through dozens of unique skills. The previous episode’s defence mechanism evolves into hex-based adventuring and expansion, allowing you to build outposts beyond the city walls, but beware - the dinosaurs are still not your friends...yet.
Gameplay:
Each round / turn comprises rolling a set number of both white and player coloured dice, which all have the same symbols on, and these match symbols on the board which give you specific actions you can take, but also show how many and what type of dinosaurs are attracted to your section of the board, and filling up all the places of these dinos mean an attack will take place at the end of that players action / turn.
You take an action by selecting either one of your own dice or a white dice, for which there is no penalty, or if you play or have to play a dice of another players colour this will have some negative effect / beneficial effect for the player whose dice it belongs to.
When you place the dice, your actions include getting new resources, going out on adventures, adding influence to members of the leadership team, getting new soldiers, and adding small constructions to the section you are in to help you gain points when they are scored, although dino attacks can destroy these or kill your soldiers, meaning you possibly lose points or the ability to score points later.
These rounds play out until you have triggered the end of game sequence and you then add up your victory points and the player with the most is declared the winner.
Artwork and Components:
Again, as with other Mindclash games, the quality is top notch all round, with the miniatures being really detailed (and you get a LOT of them), and the boards, cards and other components are all made of high quality card with superb and totally thematic artwork.
You even get a storybook telling the tale of the first two chapters in this 4 chapter adventure.
The Good:
I love everything about this game, and it gets played in the excellent solo mode quite often, and when my gaming friends have played it then they have all said how good it is
The Other:
The only small gripe is the set up time, but as I mentioned earlier the look of the game once done more than makes up for this.
Final Thoughts:
If you love dinosaurs and adventure games, then PERSEVERANCE could be exactly what you are looking for to scratch both of these itches.
I’m looking forward to playing all 4 episodes back to back in the full campaign mode, as well as more individual games, as they can also be played in any order.
