Endeavor: Deep Sea is an action-selection game for 1-4 players. Each player is the leader of a team of marine biologists, technicians, engineers, etc. exploring the sea. Anything the player does—gets another submersible, discovers a new place, explores a new location, conserves a species, collects journals, fills a board with tokens (ahem)—will get them victory points. The player with the most victory points after six rounds, wins.
Like many school classrooms, Endeavor: Deep Sea is wonderfully colorful. The art on the sea tiles, player boards, role tokens, etc. captures the concept of exploring the sea for science—science!!! The game is also incredibly rewarding. There is a certificate for everybody for everything. Anything the players do will award them victory points. There are no slaps on the wrist for making mistakes, nor are there major blockers preventing players from doing whatever they want. They are free to move, think, decide what they want, their dopamine centers hit with certificates every step of the way. The fact there is no player interaction reinforces this point. It's a free world and everything is free, baby!!
So what happens to a child when they are in this environment? Some quickly pick up what the game is putting down, maximizing points every turn. Their refrigerators bulge with certificates . But without rigid expectation, most students float along. They drift here and there. They make choices that feel good in the moment, and feel even better when the game gives them a certificate for doing just that. (And there are of course the students who have no clue what's going on, but because they got a certificate for joining, they're feeling like a success, too. We'll leave them for another day.)
Thus, the average player is going to feel good playing Endeavor, but maybe a little confused or disappointed when end-game scoring happens and all those certificates they've accrued come for naught. Wait, what? I did all this stuff, got all these points—just look! And I lose?** Endeavor promotes this type of situation by not having direct player interaction, or punishment or penalties for bad decisions.
Another challenge with Endeavor is that art only gets the game so far. Once it reaches a certain (unidentifiable) point, the game's mechanisms should take over, evoking the other half of theme. This barely, kinda, maybe, maybe-not happens. There are actions with names like: Dive, Navigate, Sonar, Conserve, etc. They have official looking symbols, and therefore would seem official. But in reality, if you just called them A, B, and C and matched your actions on the board to A, B, or C, not much about the game would change. It's thematically dry.
The other aspect of Endeavor which does not feel thematic is the roles players acquire and the submersibles. Players start with one submersible, and through gameplay, can add one or two more. The roles acquired, however, remain singular. You have a sonar operator, for example, who sits on your player board, apparently sonaring for each of the submersibles in your fleet. Your engineer engineers for everything. The other option is that they've cloned themselves. This disconnect gives the feeling: designers didn't like the limited experience of having only one submersible (too few certificates) and so built in a mechanism to increase the number—the more certificates the better—but at the expense of believable theme. Macro level it makes sense, micro/theme, less so.
My last complaint: Endeavor is a game that ends itself in the process of going off the rails. Every round, players get to add a role to their team, bump up their stats, get bonuses, get more action discs, etc. This ramps up so fast that by the time players get to the sixth round they are swimming in stuff. They went from one or two action discs in round #1 to hillocks of discs after round #6. It's then the game says, Ok, let's count points. If there had been a round #7, the game would have needed a forest's worth of wooden discs. And the narrative of the game suffers for this abrupt end. It leaves players (at least in our group) feeling like they hadn't fulfilled their potential—there was more to do and the game randomly held up a stop sign. That's enough fun for one day, kids.
To say something positive, the production is amazing. The box inserts are great; the tiles and tokens nicely nestle into their resting places. The player boards are dual-layered, keeping those pesky little wooden tokens in place when jostled or bumped. And the materials are solid, thick cardboard or wood, easy to pick up and move around. I wish many of my other games had such production values. (Looking at you, Seasons.)
In the end, Endeavor: Deep Sea is an average game. It's colorful, gives players a points pool to swim in, has an excellent modular board, offers a variety of choices, and is superficially thematic. If you want to sit down with a group of people, have indirect interactions, and do anything to get points, your needs will be met. If, however, you want player interaction, stronger connection between the actions you perform and concepts of the game, and a challenge acquiring victory points, the game will not be for you. To be clear, I like dry Euros. They can force players into tactical and strategic decisions that make you look at your opponents out of the corner of your eye. Endeavor is not that. It's a cozy Euro where everybody goes their own way and meets at the end to compare points. And to return to the metaphor of this review, this means that, despite the best of intentions, some kids—ahem, people—get left behind.
**You can imagine the person graduating from uni with a dual-major in underwater basket-weaving and Assyrian village poetry 1659-1663 saying the same thing...
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