2022
Historical
2022
Historical
60 - 120 Minutes
1 - 4 Players
Designed by Stan Kordonskiy (Dice Hospital, Rurik, Lock Up), developed by Jonny Pac (Coloma, Sierra West, Lions of Lydia), solo mode by Drake Villareal (Solani, Spook Manor), and illustrated by The Mico (Raiders of the North Sea, Paladins of the West Kingdom, Valeria), Endless Winter: Paleoamericans takes place in North America, around 10,000 BCE. Players guide the development of their tribes across several generations—from nomadic hunter-gatherers to prosperous tribal societies. Over the course of the game, tribes migrate and settle new lands, establish cultural traditions, hunt paleolithic megafauna, and build everlasting megalithic structures. Endless Winter is a euro-style game that combines worker placement and deck building in an innovative way. Each round, players send their tribe members to various action spaces, and pay for the actions by playing cards and spending resources. Tribe cards grant additional labor, while Culture cards provide a variety of unique effects. As an alternative, cards can be saved for an end-of-round Eclipse phase, where they are simultaneously revealed to determine the new player order, and trigger various bonus actions. The game features a novel blend of interwoven systems and mechanisms, such as multi-use cards, area influence, tile placement, and set collection. Plus, there are many viable paths to victory. After four brisk rounds, scores are tallied, and the tribe with the most points wins!
A cool theme but just a few too many ideas merged into one game for me. Felt like playing 4 different Euro mini games at the same time, none of which were all that interesting.