Endangered

Good evening everyone, in the first of several backlog reviews, I will go over a co-op game that Amanda, Hector, Eddie and myself sat down to play some time ago; Endangered. Endangered is a very uniquely themed game about saving endangered species, which makes it a great choice for a co-op game, but is it fun to play? Read on to see my opinion.

The components for Endangered are something of a mixed bag for me. They all seem to be of a fine quality, but many of them are somewhat lackluster. The stars of the show are the excellent meeples used to represent the animals, and these are great. They look simple yet elegant on the board and clearly depict the animals represent and even though the review will be of the base game, I own the expansions and have to say, they look even better. The rest of the game is passable but boring by comparison. The main board is bland yet understandable and the artwork on the cards is solid, but not particularly outstanding. It may just be me but I found the overall graphic design of the game to be very bland in comparison to the meeples, but it is serviceable to play on and that is the most important thing.

A game of Endangered begins with choosing an animal species to save, and a character for each player, who has their own deck. Each player then chooses a specialty for the specific character they have chosen and the board is prepared, with each species having it’s own unique board setup and event deck. Players roll dice for their actions each turn and place them similarly to a worker placement game, with an escalating mechanic that requires a player to have a higher rolled dice to place on an already occupied action. Events cards, which are usually bad things happening to the species and its habitat are drawn, and then players can attempt to breed mating pairs of animals via a dice roll. The game continues for a set number of rounds, represented by years, and if by the end the players can convince enough countries to make a treaty to protect the species they win, if they fail, or any of the various loss conditions occur along the way, the players lose.

I have various feelings about the way Endangered is played, and will begin by saying that while overall I enjoy the both the theming and mechanics of the game, there are certainly some flaws as well. Players generally need to coordinate and plan their actions strategically, but there is a very large random factor involved with the game, which definitely causes some consternation with players who spent several actions planning out a big move, only to find out that it was a total waste of time. Amanda and I lost our first game largely because the tigers, despite all odds, kept breeding like rabbits, which one would think is a good thing, but was not. The country ambassador cards, which are essentially your victory conditions, are also pretty random and you will generally not have enough actions throughout the game to satisfy them all meaning players much pick and choose which ones to work for throughout the game. This sucks when several of them may be decided by a single dice roll. I understand this is by design but it does ruin some of the fun when you spend a whole game “year” attempting to satisfy a somewhat easy target ambassador only to have it ruined entirely because your tigers decided to defy the odds and mate excessively. The fact that the cards remain hidden until you begin to influence them makes it almost mandatory for at least 1 player to choose a specialty that allows them to influence from the start, I really don’t understand why this vital action is not a part of the default options in the game.

With that being said, there is a lot of good here as well. With a fairly tight action economy, there is a lot of strategy to be planned and employed. Apart from a few default options on the board, the players largely build the action spaces that they intend to use from the cards in their deck. This allows a wonderful amount of freedom in deciding how you want to play the game. I do not have enough playthroughs to know whether all paths to victory are viable, but it at the very least, slows a massive amount of player choice. The theme is also a good one, and well represented by the actions the players take as the game goes on, both in terms of how the actions work and the special actions in each character’s deck. I also suspect Endangered has some serious legs in terms of longevity, as there are a good deal of different combinations of player characters possible for any given animal, and the expansion adds a staggering number of animals to save.

The two player game honestly has some problems with it, that I don’t really understand the need for. the biggest issue being that endangered balances player count by limiting the number of years based on the number of players, in effect allowing the same number of actions per game regardless of the number of players. But for some reason for the two player game also increases the dice escalation mechanic, making players place a die two numbers higher than another player to place on the same space as them. This is really punishing with 6 sided dice, and I suspect there is a pretty solid difficulty spike when dropping from three to two players.

Overall I will give endangered a cautious recommendation. It’s certainly not a bad game, and it does offer a few things not often found in the co-op genre, certainly a lot more player freedom then your average co-op, but it is not without its issues. If you are a big fan of co-ops and want something different, or just really enjoy the theme, go for it, you will probably enjoy it. It is definitely not a way to introduce people to either the genre or gaming in general though, and if you’re just looking for a co-op to play, there are better choices out there.

Note: I quite enjoyed the game, however, there came a point when we realized we had really messed up. If you don’t start finding out what the requirements are for the countries to give you their ambassador’s support early, you’re essentially just building up and hoping for the best. Since you always get different countries, you really have no idea or way to know what you should be saving for and working on. With that in mind, I would like to play it again, however, I’m not sure we will play this with others.

The Teal Deer

Designer: Joe Hopkins
Price: 50
Players: 1-5
2 player Scaling: It causes a punishing and in my opinion, unnecessary, difficulty spike
Playtime: 60-120 minutes
Estimated Lifespan: 10+ games
Estimated Average Play Frequency: Quarterly
Complexity: 4
Components: 3.5
Bang for Buck: 5
Value for Time: 3.5
Fun Factor: 3
Overall: 3.5