- Publisher : Matagot
- Designer : Stan Kordonskiy
- Artist(s) : Mihajlo Dimitrievski, Yoma
- Players : 1-4
- Playing time : 60–120 Min
- Weight BGG : 3.28
What's this?
Endless Winter: Paleoamericans takes place in North America, around 10,000 BC. Players guide the development of their tribes through several generations, growing from nomadic hunter-gatherers to thriving tribal societies. Over the course of the game, tribes migrate, colonize new territories, establish cultural traditions, hunt Paleolithic megafauna, and build durable megalithic structures.
Endless Winter is a Euro-style game that combines worker placement and deck building in innovative ways. Each turn, players send their tribe members to different action spaces and pay for actions by playing cards and spending resources. Tribe cards grant additional work, while culture cards offer a variety of unique effects. Alternatively, cards can be held for an eclipse phase at the end of the turn, where they are revealed simultaneously to determine the new player order and trigger various bonus actions.
How do you play?
A game takes place over four rounds, each divided into an action phase, an eclipse phase and a preparation phase.
During the actions phase, at the start of your turn, you play Culture cards which trigger various actions or provide resource gains. Then you place one of your member pawns and perform the associated actions. There are four action slots on the main board and one on your personal board. If you are the first to perform a type of action, you receive a bonus.
Actions include:
Acquire new tribe/culture cards to build your deck.
Purify your deck by placing your cards in your graveyard and obtain victory points at the end of the game.
Buy sacred stone tiles and earn victory points at the end of each round depending on certain conditions.
Place and move camps and villages on terrain hexes. You will be looking to get the majority on these tiles with your camps/villages to gain resources/actions during the eclipse phase.
Collect animal cards by species to accumulate victory points at the end of the game.
Place your megaliths on different boards to obtain resources, actions and victory points.
Build your idols on two tracks.
To carry out these actions, you will often have to play tribe cards, which will provide you with labor force, and spend resources from your player board.
An interesting mechanic is that the cards in Endless have dual use: either for the action phase or the eclipse phase, so you will have to choose when to play them. The eclipse phase will determine the turn order and grant you different bonuses, resources and actions, etc.
Additionally, there are two tracks to climb to obtain victory points.
Is it good?
Endless Winter is a solid game, although not revolutionary, but extremely enjoyable. It integrates various mechanics such as deckbuilding, card collection, territory control, and even a draw & write mechanic with the Paintings expansion.
Personally, I consider expansions essential to introduce new strategies, new cards, increase replayability, and offer very interesting new scoring modes. Additionally, all expansions and mods don’t add significant time to the length of a game, so there’s no reason to skip them!
Furthermore, the material is of high quality, with magnificent illustrations. Endless Winter is a game that I highly recommend trying.
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Review Endless Winter
Positives
- The DA, the material, the illustrations
- Different known mechanics but quite pleasant
Negatives
- Having to play with the extensions and modules to have a more complete and strategic game.
- A lot of things but nothing really revolutionary
Breakdown
- Components and illustrations 9.5
- Mechanics 7.5
- Thematic 7.5
- Replayability 7.5
- Handling 9.0
- Interaction 8.0
- Originality 7.0
