ENDERAIN - first impressions game review

[tabletopwargamer]

Just received my copy, which was unexpected as it was a pre-order, but a nice surprise after work!

OK, first impressions are, wow this is a very good level of production.  Book is really nice with no stupid fluff filling it up.  Cards are good quality, dice are....dice.

The team tracker is a real clever thing.  You dont need it to play, but it clears up counter use and tracks xp.  Really neat idea for me.

Gameplay is familiar (2 actions, all the usual stuff), but with some interesting differences such as 8" moves which seems to me will get things moving alongside free action cards. 

Shooting is neat and different.  firepower and hitting power using D12s which opens up a HUGE number of weapons stats to choose from.  No boring generic hand  weapons and carbine choices!! Also the use of a different color effects dice to manage exceptional results.  All pretty simple but neat.

Campaign play is also very simple but you can see there is nice progression choices for your gang.  powers and roles can be upgraded as can stat line totals on gaining xp. Proper choices rather than just gaining a point more for firing or something.

the card deck is the real changer for me.  Totally removes boring initative rolls or fixed turn sequences and also could introduce some real agony into playing a good initiative card that you wanted to keep for the effect you could also play from it.

NPCs - these are cool.  The pair of dice that you roll for them do everything, and make them unpredictable.  Rolling them I could see how you simply cant game the Npcs as you would usually,ignore them ore get bored of them.  Never seen this in a wargame and I'm really looking forward to seeing them in action. Also rules for building in non-violent NPCs as story points and objectives.

On the downside there is a learning curve because its overall got some complexity.  But the tactics you can inject from the choices you have with roles, powers, weapons etc, and "super teams" for stuff like Star Wars, means I don't see me getting bored with it any time soon.

It is generic, which is great as i can see people adopting it for pretty much any scifi setting.  But if you want, there is a hint of lore in it to build games on.

Overall, this could, might, be the set of rules I've been hoping to get for some time and worth a look.

[PeteW]

OK, first impressions are, wow this is a very good level of production.  Book is really nice with no stupid fluff filling it up.  Cards are good quality, dice are....dice...........

Just to chip in here and say I agree with the comments made here. TTWG has said it far better than I would manage, and while early days I do think there is a lot of potential here.

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[Bloggard]

hmm, was going to be po-faced about this, because of the FB-thing, but the NPC aspect sounds really interesting.

would like to hear more about that if anyone gets a chance to elaborate.

[zemjw]

I change my mind on this one every time I read another post

There's a playthrough by the authors, but I'm not sure if it made me more of less inclined to buy it. There are definitely some bits that look interesting, but at other times it seems very fiddly.

[Spinal Tap]

It does look interesting and, perhaps, a successor for Stargrave for me in solo mode.

However, I've just started the Hope Eternal campaign, am ready to start Rangers of Shadow Deep, want to revisit Zona Alfa and am working on  a slow burn dungeon crawler project.

I'm pretty busy all told and think I'll wait for a while before opening another project up.

If it had been released before Hope Eternal I reckon I would have jumped all in.

[ithoriel]

The acrylic tokens and templates I ordered from counterattackbases.co.uk arrived today and very good they looked.

Well, one solo game under my belt so treat this with appropriate caution!

I used the character creation rules to recreate my "Freetrader: Destiny's Child" crew, as best I could. By chance, there are currently 8 of them and a bot so they fitted requirements nicely.

As designed, Solo play is basically a scavenger hunt, unless I'm missing something (quite possible!) though there are options for Story Points to add a bit more depth.

So, Mila "Call me captain!" Voronezh lead the rest of the crew into the wastelands on the planet of Imperial Mercy, one of the Throne worlds of the Imperium of the Sentient mind, to an area where several derelict space raft were abandoned. They were on the hunt for any Loot or Data that could be used or just sold to pay the bills. To quote Mila,"Running a spaceship ain't cheap, people!"

With an idea in mind already of what the crew were it was simple enough to match roles and powers to their backstories but I do feel that starting with a blank canvas might induce analysis paralysis! Definitely worth creating a team in advance of any game if doing it properly. Destiny's Children are, I suspect, stupidly overpowered for a starting crew in Enderain.

That said, they got more of a mauling in Enderain than they do in 5 Parsecs!

As well as the 3 loot tokens there was a data token, held by an NPC (optional rule) who could be sweet talked or threatened into handing it over. I decided that only the captain could sweet talk the guy but any character could threaten him. Threats were less likely to work. Once any character had threatened him, sweet talking was not an option! Loot tokens were within the three derelict starships, which would have to be broken into.

A die roll saw the crew starting within 6" of one corner.

Half a dozen NPC's were spawned using the dice supplied and off we went.

NPC's are hard to take out of the game completely and more spawn fairly regularly and the random triggering of NPC's using the special dice means you never know which are immediate threats.

Some people have described combat as fiddly but if you can add, subtract and count to twelve I don't see that it should pose a problem, tbh.

It is equally tempting to play initiative cards you will wish you had later and to hoard cards for a future your team doesn't have!

Apart from the captain, all the crew were wounded, three seriously, and one was dragged off table "Out." They had retrieved all three loot tokens and successfully bullied the NPC into handing over the data. Having a big, burly, blue skinned guy teleport in front of you and snarl,"Spill the beans or I'll wring your scrawny neck!" will do that, I guess. 
 As a one-off I didn't bother with experience.

Overall I liked the system. It is clearly closer to Stargrave or Kill Team than to 5 Parsecs so it depends what you are looking for. In Stargrave I feel like it's one character and some cannon fodder, here it felt like all the characters were important, even the two Recruits. Maybe that's just me.

I do find myself wondering if I could graft Enderain's combat system and 5 Parsecs campaign generation together.
Anyone else played and have a view?

[zemjw]

In Stargrave I feel like it's one character and some cannon fodder, here it felt like all the characters were important, even the two Recruits. Maybe that's just me.

That is good to hear. I've never been happy with the various Graves' approach to crews, so having everyone be useful is nice. It is one of the things I like about 5 Parsecs as well.

I do find myself wondering if I could graft Enderain's combat system and 5 Parsecs campaign generation together.

That sounds interesting, as I wasn't crazy on the 5 Parsecs combat rules - although, to be fair, that was after a single game.

Overall I liked the system. It is clearly closer to Stargrave or Kill Team than to 5 Parsecs so it depends what you are looking for

And I'm back to being conflicted, as I prefer the harder SF approach of 5 Parsecs over the space fantasy approach of Stargrave. However, it's not a deal breaker by any stretch of the imagination

[Psychopomp]

I'm growing more and more leery of wargames that require cards and/or widgets cluttering up the table.

How necessary are the cards, and how likely are they to get out of hand?  Will you ever need more of them?

[ithoriel]

@zemjw - Like Stargrave/ Kill Team in having a focus on Team vs Team (IMHO) with solo play being perfectly possible but I suspect not as much fun long term as PvP or even multiplayer co-op rather than being Space Opera.
@Psychopomp - the cards are used to determine initiative but can also be used perform certain actions. It's a small deck and I don't expect there to be any expansion of it unless there's a substantial evolution in the rules. You start with a hand of four per team plus 1 for the NPC's. Teams and NPC's play one per turn to determine initiative. Teams and NPC's draw one at the start of each turn. Some cards, when played by Teams, trigger the draw of a replacement. Playing one to trigger an action/ power/ etc. will probably reduce your hand for the rest of the game.
I got tokens for loot/ data and to mark figures when activated because I usually post game reports with photos and the tokens can help  readers follow the action. It would have been perfectly possible to create terrain items instead .... and I may well do that .... eventually!!
Happy to answer questions, to the best of my ability, if people have them.
 

[Bloggard]

can you expand on the NPC aspect? Understand if not.

it's the only thing which would get me to go for a copy, and at a 'reduced' price of £35, it's still steep for me.

[PeteW]

can you expand on the NPC aspect? Understand if not.
it's the only thing which would get me to go for a copy, and at a 'reduced' price of £35, it's still steep for me.

Ok, I’ll give this a go. Caveat being I’ve not yet played a game. To date I’ve been diving into the team creation side of things (building an excel spreadsheet to act as the calculator for the team creation process) but am impressed with the options and subtly the rules provide for.
Anyways the NPC side of things.
There are 16 different types of NPC (all generic and figure agnostic) ranging from various human types, via mech and bots to pack animals.
Two custom dice are included – a D6 known as the Action die, and D12 known as the NPC Class die and these pretty much control the NPCs and these seem to be what sets this system apart.
NPC’s spawn as one of three classes, (game language) determined by colour (red, green and blue) on the NPC class die, but can be of all types, so you might end up with the green class consisting of, for instance, 3 human types, a bot and two animals. Red and blue classes will also have their members.
Each turn the AI checks for NPC activity using the action die in conjunction with the class die. In simple terms there are 6 different actions possible, and these can be stacked. The clever part is that the two dice control which colour class is activated to carry out the actions required. (This can be just one colour class or all three).
The Class die also controls distance and direction of movement, so the system is very random and it must be almost impossible to second guess which NPC figure is the next biggest threat. For me as a sole gamer this is really cool to see. The same method is also used for determining each NPCs spawn location meaning that members of the same class can be scattered across the entire map. Very random, and very variable.

ithoriel can put me right if I've got anything wrong.

and a teaser for the character calculator, which will make little sense unless you have the rules 



P

[PeteW]

Just to add to my previous I've just run a couple of spawn rolls to get a feel for what the at start NPC mix looks like

First run ended up with the blue class consisting of 1x light trooper, 2x elite trooper, 1x light mech
                                      green class 2x elite trooper 1x terminator bot
                                         red class 2x light trooper
9 at start NPC

Second run using the wilderness chart
                               blue class 1x human/animal hybrid (so lets call it an alien race) 3x stealthy but timid gatherers
                               red class  1x stealthy but timid gatherers, 8x pirates (this number matching the player team size)
                               no green class spawn
13 at start NPC

Liking what I see here

P

[ithoriel]

If you are doing anything wrong PeteW .... then so am I! 
And, yes, the randomness makes second guessing NPC targets "interesting." The thing you are currently worried about may be about to savage a team member or it may be about to head off in entirely the opposite direction.
For Firefly fans - They may “Either blow us all up or rub soup in our hair. It’s a toss up.” 

[Bloggard]

Thanks very much PeteW and ithoriel.

hmm, looks like I may to relax my principles ( ) and invest in a copy ...

[PeteW]

If this works I have just attached the first draft of my crew calculator for the game - uses excel.

Please give it a go if you have the game and let me know if you find any errors or issues and I'll update.

What the output page looks like



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