Grand Gamers Guild Faces Challenges in a Changing Gaming Landscape

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1. Unboxing Endangered from Grand Gamers Guild Verified Buyer – 23 February 2025

   Endangered is a cooperative game where you must work together as conservationists trying to save a species from extinction. Will you be the philanthropist donating large amounts of money, the zoologist studying this rare species, or the TV wildlife host bringing the needs of the animals into everyone’s living room. While facing immediate hazards, you must also convince influential ambassadors to pass a resolution to protect the animals. Designer: Joe Hopkins Number of Players: 1-5 Play Time: 60 Minutes -Setup- First, place the gameboard on the table with the year marker on year 1 of the calendar track. Make a supply of the animal meeples, influence cubes, money tokens, and dice at the side of the board. You will shuffle the ambassadors and deal out the 6 (out of 12) that will be used in this game. Depending on the animal module you are playing with, you then will set up the board according to the module setup. Place the animal meeples in their starting spaces, make a stockpile of destruction tiles and shuffle the impact deck for your specific animal. Finally each player chooses a character, a starting ability, shuffles their character cards and draws two cards from it. When all players are ready, the game begins! -Gameplay- Endangered is a modular game system. There are base rules that remain the same but depending on which animal module you are using, how you reach your end goal will be completely different. All modules have an easy, normal, and hard difficulty. Each module brings its own small set of rules, like tigers have different breeding patterns, but the pandas need to have a 3×3 grid of squares that don’t have any destruction tiles on them before the game can be won. On your turn you will roll your three dice and choose actions on the board or on played action cards to take. They can be simple like moving an animal one space or putting one influence cube on an ambassador, to something like pay $1 million dollars (represented by a single money token) to clear a destruction tile not adjacent to an animal. This game is cooperative so it is imperative to strategize with other players. Part of that strategy is what die you use on each action. The action cards can initially have any die on them but every dice placed after the first must be a higher value. So do you place a 6 on a much needed action knowing that no one else will be able to also use that action? Your dice will remain wherever you place them until the beginning of your next turn, so the actions you take can be limited for other players based on the dice value you used. The goal of the game is to keep your animals alive by mating them. After you have taken your actions, there is an offspring phase. You count the number of mating pairs on the board and add 1 to get a target value. Then you roll the offspring die. If you rolled a value that is less than or equal to your target then an offspring has been produced and is placed on the board adjacent to a mating pair. After the Offspring phase is the destruction phase, this phase works much like the offspring phase, where depending on the module rules you will roll the destruction die and add a destruction tile to the board. If the tile is placed on a space with animal meeples, those animals are removed from the board. You can lose the game if the animal species ever gets to 1 or fewer meeples or if you run out of destruction tiles and need to put another on the board. The fourth phase is the impact phase. Each species has a deck of impact cards that are events relating to your species. For example, the sea otters have an oil spill event which adds more destruction to the board. Finally, there is an upkeep phase where you will draw one card from your deck and then the next player goes. After all players have gone, the year (round) is over. Depending on the player count, at the end of some rounds you will have a voting year. This is where the ambassadors come into play. This whole time you are trying your hardest to get the tigers on the board to mate, you also are needing to add influence to the ambassador cards. The only way to win the game is to have 4 or more Yes votes at the end of a voting year. The ambassadors are from different countries and are all looking for different criteria. Maybe you need to add all animals on the board to the amount of influence cubes on the ambassador to be over 12. Maybe you need to roll two dice and have the total plus any influence cubes on the card be 16 or higher. The ambassadors will vary from game to game which adds to the variability. -Components- In the box there are: 15 tiger tokens, 15 otter tokens, 1 year marker, 25 influence cubes, 25 money tokens, 24 destruction tiles, 2 dice, 12 ambassador cards, 15 action dice, 5 role cards, 10 specialty cards, 70 player cards, 36 impact cards, and 2 scenario sheets. The board is very pretty to look at, especially the ocean side with its vibrant blues. The animal meeples have been made with plenty of detail. You can tell right away what species they are supposed to represent. The box cover is also one of my favorites in my collection. -Final Thoughts- Endangered’s biggest selling point for a lot of people is going to be its theme. It is a theme that I’m not sure many other games have covered so it is nice to play something new and interesting. This game can easily be played with your family though I wouldn’t say it was a gateway game necessarily. The modular system works really well here and I wish it was something more games did. I don’t need an expansion that completely flips the game on its head, just one that adds a few more wrinkles here and there. If it had to say anything negative, it would be that each role plays the same. There are 14 cards per role and only 4 of those are unique to you. That results in a lot of cards becoming useless as they are already played. This isn’t always true because each card only has 3 slots so in a 4 or 5 player game some cards may be completely blocked off and it helps to have duplicates. Also in the base game there are only 2 species and the third is a separate expansion. This could lead to limited variability. I would give Endangered 4 nature reserves out of 5. Board or Bust Scale: 1 – I would never play this again. I would not give this away as a gift. 2 – I would play this game if someone else had a copy, and asked to play, but I would not buy it for myself nor suggest it. 3 – I would ask to play this game on occasion. Would be happy to receive as a gift or in a trade. 4 – I would purchase this game for myself. I can see this getting to the table a few times a year. Always enjoy myself when playing. 5 – This is exactly what I want out of a board game. Would never turn down a game and would ask to play regularly. Hard to imagine ever getting rid of this game.

   

2. Anonymous Verified Buyer – 4 March 2025

   I bought this game for my son’s 34th birthday. He loves strategy games and is a fervent environmentalist, and as I had hoped, he loved this game. The whole family loved the fact that it is a collaborative game.
   

3. Ashley A Hopkins Verified Buyer – 13 March 2025

   Great for competitive gamers, mixing up to cooperative is a nice change of pace. Great for all ages, my nephew is 6 and was able to play since we were able to help.
   

4. Nathan B Verified Buyer – 19 March 2025

   Excellent game – my girlfriend loved the art, mechanics, and theme in particular.