Endurance is a solitaire game of Antarctic survival, based on Ernest Shackleton’s famous 1914 expedition. The expedition saw their fair share of struggles as they were stranded for eighteen months in the ice and snow and faced nearly impossible odds to ultimately survive the ordeal without the loss of even a single crew member. So right off the bat the game is decidedly difficult but tells the story of this somewhat of a miracle as these brave souls fought to stay alive by finding enough food, mostly eating canned goods from their ship’s hold but also hunting the local animals which consisted only of penguins, staving off boredom, sickness and injuries and frigid temperatures and attempting to keep their hopes alive by pulling together.

The game is based around cards that are drawn and force the player to make a series of checks to see if the tasks are successful or not. These checks are divided into Actions and Tests. They all require the player to either roll dice to see if they are successful or simply have the appropriate resources available to meet the demands on the card. When dice are rolled, you have to take into account both your successes, or rolls that were over the appropriate skill level of your chosen crew, and your failures in the form of 1’s rolled, and must come up with more successes than failures. These dice rolls were absolutely traumatic because as you fail your crew will become demoralized and exhausted and will be flipped over to reveal that they either have a worse skill check value or their will to help has evaporated and they can’t even assist any longer. Once they fail again, they are them removed to the hospital area where they then can die with further failures of the crew or bad events that come up. The game is absolutely brutal and very difficult to do well and make it to the historical result. But you become attached to each crew member as they fight for their lives. You feel their pain as you fail Actions and Tests and lose supplies as they are used up. You also get hit right in the heart when their animals, their sled dogs and beloved cat, have to be eaten in order to survive. The game is not a game of fun and entertainment but a bleak and slogging experience where you go from failure to failure, losing hope that you can make it any longer, until you do and then have a few fleeting moments of joy when you pass Tests, gain new resources or progress on your journey.

This game is also very unique because there are no victory or loss conditions. The game will simply come to an end when either the men are rescued or when rescue becomes an impossibility due to the loss of crew and morale. The beauty in the game is that it creates a great narrative, albeit a very sorrowful and tough one, that tells either a tragic or successful story. I have played the game 5 times and have never really done that well but that doesn’t matter here as it is about the story you create and the connections you make with the members of the expedition. I have never quite played a game that gave me the feelings that this one did and ultimately that is the focus and goal of the design.

In this video, I do a full playthrough of the game to give you a feel for how the game flows and the steps and mechanics being used. I didn’t fell all that comfortable once we hit the boats because I had not previously made it that far and didn’t expect to in this playthrough either. Please consult the rules to learn about my mistakes.

-Grant