Unboxing Thursdays: Endless Winter & Explorers

Unboxing Thursdays we open, learn and play two games as we add them to our library.

This Thursday we are playing and learning together, Endless Winter & Explorers.

Endless Winter: 8.0

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!

Explorers: 7.3

At the beginning of Explorers, you and each other explorer place four landscape tiles — grasslands, bodies of water, desert, or mountains — and three different scoring tiles in your game frame. Then from your starting village, you go on an exploratory tour.

The exploration cards, each of which shows two landscapes, indicate which landscapes you are allowed to cross (off). On your turn, you reveal an exploration card, choose one of the two types of terrain, then cross off three spaces ahead of your current location. Your fellow players must then decide whether to place only two crosses on the same landscape, or choose the other landscape and tick off three crosses. All of your crosses must be orthogonally adjacent, so you need to plan well to avoid being stuck due to "bad" landscape choices.

Over four rounds, you expand your territory, receiving a special action for each checked box with an object in it. You receive points for provisions and gems, with a map you can place crosses on any type of terrain, and lost temples can be explored with keys — but whoever reaches the temple first receives the most points for it...

Join us Thursday, December 8th at 6:00 pm for our Unboxing Thursday Event. 

See ya soon!

*This event requires a 1 - Day Membership, credit will be applied back for qualifying purchases. Current Members are always free for this event.*