BOARD GAME REVIEW: ENDURE THE STARS (2017)

Endure the Stars is the first game out by Grimlord Games. It is a game that has a bit of an identity crisis. By the same token, it is also a game that encompasses the worst aspects of Kickstarter. 

Endure the Stars is a space-themed dungeon-crawl type game. In the game, you and your team are on board a spaces station where something has gone wrong. The corridors are teeming with alien monsters, deadly machines and crazed cultists (depending on which scenario you play). Each scenario gives you some objectives to complete to get through, with multiple scenarios capable of being stringed together as a campaign.

The identity crisis comes because the game doesn't know what it is trying to be. Originally, it looks like it may be a survival horror. It even has some mechanics to support that (resolve checks, noise generation, diceless damage from the monsters). However, it then plays out more like a light dungeon crawler where you get your items and chuck some dice to kill stuff. And it is where these two mechanics merge where the problem lies. There isn't enough mechanics to make searching and then moving out with the best weapons a negative, but so many enemies spawn and move that without doing this or exploiting certain rules, you quickly get overwhelmed.

The worst part of the Kickstarter come with the rules. There is already a 3 page FAQ and 1.1 rulebook out that adds a couple of rules and changed. However, the added rules do not appear to be well tested. Similarly, a lack of playtesting (particularly blind testing) is apparent in how some rules and mechanics did not work. And for a game that was this expensive on kickstarter, it just isn't worthwhile.

You definitely get plenty of component bang for your buck inside the box, with nice tiles and miniatures and a variety of heroes to choose from. With maybe another 3 months of solid development and proper testing, this could've been a real gem. They should also have doubled down on a certain theme and modified the game to suit (i.e. survival horror with stronger but fewer monsters, limited searching and weak items but diceless; or dungeon crawl with no noise mechanic, constant minion spawning and unique starting items for each character and no searching). At the moment, it just feels like a bit mess. Which is a shame because it feels like it is about 80% of the way there, but so many other games in both genres are 100% (Mansions of Madness 2nd Edition; Dungeons and Dragons series of games).

2 out of 5 Enduring Waffles.