Award-winning Endeavor Deep Sea, published by Burnt Island Games, has been a favourite for a while now, and a new expansion, Endeavor Deep Sea: Uncharted Waters is coming soon. Designed by Carl de Visser and Jarratt Gray, this is the latest instalment in the Endeavor series of games.
Endeavor Deep Sea has already been reviewed on the Zatu blog, and a detailed how-to-play article can be found here, so I’ll limit myself to a very brief summary of gameplay.
The shared modular board is a random-ish grid of tiles representing different ocean depths, built out as gameplay progresses, and each tile contains spaces you can occupy to gain various benefits—typically, incrementing your levels on Reputation, Inspiration, Coordination and Ingenuity tracks, all of which contribute to abilities and score; there’s also a Research track, which is kind of used as currency in the game rather than for scoring at the end. The initial layout defined by 1 of 10 Scenario sheets selected at the start of the game, which also provides additional scoring objectives and reward possibilities.
Your turn consists of a preparation phase followed by activation. During preparation, you recruit Specialists (how many depending on your Reputation level), gain Action discs (the number dependent on your Inspiration level), and reclaim Action discs from Specialists used in previous turns. The action phase is where you decide how to deploy your Specialists, performing whatever actions match their abilities—e.g., the Reef Diver, unsurprisingly, lets you take a Dive action, and the Ecologist lets you take either a Travel or a Conservation action. The available actions, which must take place where you have one of your submarine vessels, conditional on what options that tile offers, are:
- Travel—move a vessel to another tile, depending on your Technology level (which is determined by where you are on the Ingenuity track), receiving an arrival bonus on the destination space;
- Sonar—gain a bonus and/or discover a new area of the map by selecting and placing a new Ocean tile;
- Dive—gain a range of bonuses, the most critical here being increments on the Research scale;
- Conserve—pay Research values to gain further bonuses; and
- Journal—pay Research points to gain a Journal card, which (you’ve guessed it) provides a range of bonuses, including the possibility of promoting one of your Specialists, granting them more abilities.
Pretty much everything you do gains you something, making each move feel pleasantly satisfying.
At the end of the game, your score depends mainly on how far you’ve managed to progress on the 4 attribute tracks, but also includes points from occupied positions on the Impact board (which I’ve not mentioned here—see the how-to-play article or relevant section of the Kickstarter page for details) and Journal and Specialist bonuses, as well as Scenario-specific scoring.
Endeavor Deep Sea also offers cooperative and solo modes, where scoring matters less, instead focussing players on additional goals, such as everyone accumulating a minimum amount of Research or gaining a certain number of Specialists at specific levels. As well as this, the solo/co-op mode makes use of Setback cards which stymie players’ plans in interesting ways.
The range of Scenario sheets and random nature of the map provides a high degree of replayability.
The New Expansion
That was the base game, so the question here is: what’s new in Uncharted Waters?
Burnt Island Games says: ‘The Endeavor: Deep Sea Uncharted Waters expansion will push players to the edge with challenging new missions, undiscovered depths to explore, and a whole new team of specialists looking to join your crew and make an impact on the world.’
The Kickstarter page sums it up more succinctly as ‘More Stuff!’—6 new Specialists to add to the 51 existing ones, 4 more Scenarios (10 in the base set), 8+ Journal cards (adding to the existing 32), 12+ Dive reward tokens (on top of 36 in the base game), and 20+ Ocean tiles (37 in the base game), some of which are designated ‘mini-expansions.’ However, all that ‘mini-expansion’ appears to mean is actions involving the use of tokens not used with other tiles, which does feel a bit like stretching the definition of expansion, mini or otherwise. Nonetheless, Uncharted Waters is quite a substantial addition to the game, though I’m not sure why the pluses are present at this post-campaign stage—laziness in updating the web pages, I guess. (I’ve asked about final numbers, but have yet to receive an answer.)
What there isn’t in the expansion is a new rulebook. Or rather, as they phrase it, no major new rulebooks—presumably there’s going to be a description of the mini-expansions, and it is a bit of a shame that that’s not available in the campaign page. Regardless, ‘more stuff’ is a good enough reason to be excited about Uncharted Waters.
One other expansion addition, which I especially like, is enhancement of the solo/co-op modes: a heap of new Bonus and Setback cards, including a difficulty grading to make it easier to choose how hard a game you want to play. (It’s interesting that increasing numbers of game designers are putting more effort into solo and cooperative play, something I also noted when taking a look at the recent DinoGenics crowdfunding campaign.)
Verdict
Endeavor Deep Sea is already a great game, and the new expansion, Uncharted Waters only adds to it. Unlike with DinoGenics, mentioned earlier, the creators aren’t taking the opportunity to modify the base game, merely to reprint it (or shift existing stock, given that the game is still available to purchase—perhaps a bit of both), but maybe there’s little to improve on the original game. Certainly, the production quality is great and play is smooth.
This Kickstarter campaign focuses on the deluxe version of the base game, which—besides the usual token upgrades, if you think such things are worthwhile—includes the existing 3 mini-expansions and a fifth player option. The campaign proper ended in the middle of last year, but at time of writing, is still open for late pledges, with deliveries expected in October. Given that, as I mentioned, the base game is currently available in retail, should you invest in the campaign? It boils down to how patient you are: if you want Endeavor Deep Sea right now, just go buy it, and worry about upgrades separately! As far as I can tell, everything will be coming to retail eventually (and almost certainly cheaper than crowdfunding prices, when you take delivery fees and potential taxes into account), so if you’re as risk-averse as I am, just wait for that. Here’s hoping everyone’s favourite retailer will have a few copies in stock…
About the author
When not playing boardgames or blogging about them, L.N. Hunter keeps himself occupied writing fiction: a comic fantasy novel, The Feather and the Lamp, sits alongside close to 100 short stories in various magazines and anthologies, and on websites and podcasts (see https://linktr.ee/L.N.Hunter for a full list). L.N. occasionally masquerades as a software developer or can be found unwinding in a disorganised home in Carlisle, UK, along with two cats and a soulmate.
