SDBG Play Endeavour and Cyclades

jopm

South Dublin BoardGamers are a multinational group who have come together over the years through our interest in boardgaming.

We originated in the Dundrum /Blackrock area hence the name but we now have members from all over Dublin and wider afield.We meet regularly usually at least one night a week. The age range is mid twenties to pick a no!

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Endeavour is a euro style area control game where you represent a (non specific) European power colonizing the World and increasing your influence within Europe itself. Your objective is to increase your Empire’s prestige under a no of headings Industry Culture Finance and Politics. There are 7 turns which comprise a building phase followed by an action phase where you allocate your population to various tasks. As you explore outside Europe the shipping lanes open up which give you more resources and ultimately the ability to colonize other regions. The main board is split up into 6 different areas to be ‘explored’ Europe is already discovered and can therefore be occupied immediately. At the start the board is covered with tokens that when occupied by one of your population will increase one of your skills. You need population and certain kinds of facilities (buildings) to take actions. For example you need a harbor to allow you take a shipping action which allows you place one of your population on a sea lane track which gives you the resource on the track. Culture increases your population but then you need gold to pay for them. Also there is a war action which allows you to replace an opponent’s influence with your own. There is also a slavery action but beware it can backfire seriously on you! It is a light complexity Euro game with a direct conflict mechanic that’s plays in about 90 minutes. It is played regularly within the Group and continues to hold its appeal partly as the set up of skills tokens is randomized each game

Brief Session Comments
After the usual process of trying to decide what to play, I set out Endeavor and Cyclades, and we managed to get both in by about midnight. It's actually been a little while since we saw Endeavor. It hasn't changed much. Four players (Filipe hadn't arrived yet), with Jimmy the slave driver ultimately thwarted by Trevor the liberator, whose magnanimity didn't extend to peaceful co-existence with Kieron's expedition to the Far East. My own adventures in the Caribbean, with a side trip to the Far East after a little while, ultimately paid off quite well. I found myself with a lot of people after a few rounds due to my building selection (not many actions), but actually this allowed me to make a big move around the third last round and find myself grabbing just the right resources from just the right places to set me up for a high scoring endgame and hold Kieron back as the same time. It wasn't pretty, but it was a win.





This is a 3-5 player Civ building game set in the ancient Greek Island Group known as Cyclades. Your task is to build two metropolises and this is done by bidding for the favour of the gods each turn. To build a metropolis you must first build the 4 components Harbour, Barracks University, and a Temple. An alternative is to acquire four philosophers which also give you a metropolis. You start with control of a no of islands which gives you income and spaces to build. You need the income to bid for the favour of the Gods and to maximise the Gods powers. For example Ares the God of war gives you one additional soldier for free - using his powers you can then also pay to buy more troops and move them. You can also buy a barracks using his power. Poseidon allows you to build and move navies which opens the way to invade other islands including those owned by your opponents. There are also mythological monsters and heroes you can acquire either to help you or hinder your opponents. As you might expect resources are tight and the bidding for the favours of the Gods is crucial as one only one person can use a god’s power each turn. It can be a very enjoyable game if you are happy with lots of direct conflict. There are two possible downsides one is the possibility of leader bashing (see session below as a case in point). The second is that the cards are icon driven which can be a little frustrating and time consuming as there are so many of them with different abilities. That being said this game is also well favoured by the Group

Brief Session Comments
We included the Hades expansion for the first time, which was a little confusing at first, but gradually started to make sense. Hades pops up every couple of rounds by virtue of a sort of 'doom track', and when he does, you get the powers of both Poseidon and Ares along with an army of undead soldiers that disappear at the end of the round. This is kind of interesting, reducing the focus on Ares a little. There are also new monsters and a whole new class of creature - heroes (that are mixed in with the monsters). You also get a little help from some of the lesser gods, who come out every round Hades doesn't and add to the incentive to take second-to-last on the god track. There's a lot less reason to go to Apollo (I actually didn't go there at all this game), making the bidding on the other gods pretty fierce (hence the lack of money). You also get a new class of priest - the priestess, which, rather amusingly, you can basically feed to monsters or heroes to hold onto them between rounds. You also no longer have a scripted map, but go through a preliminary round of god bidding to determine placement order and a 'reward' (a unit of some kind based on your god). All of this actually doesn't change the game that much, although we did notice that there was less money around and the endgame wasn't quite as tight as usual. Jimmy was the only person with one metropolis as he worked towards his winning second ahead of the usual leader-bashing chasing pack. The difference was that because no one else had a metropolis, it was a more straightforward 'can we stop him' with no clear secondary agenda 'yeah, WE could, but then you'd win...' It still ended as several games have ended, with a desperate search through the monster/hero pile for something to take away the winner's victory. That rarely works (though I've seen it once), and it didn't. In the end Jimmy's win as entirely fair and square, because he had managed to squirrel away a pretty vast fortune in spite of the huge demands for cash, and this got him Ares in the last round, stopping attack and concluding this second metropolis with the building of a fortress. Well played. Worth trying again soon so I don't forget all the new rules!