Endeavor: Deep Sea

Plunge into the modern era, where our planet's vast interconnected ocean scape is one of the last frontiers to discover and explore. Experience a deep new ever-changing adventure in this followup to the smash hit Endeavor: Age of Sail! In Endeavor: Deep Sea, you head an independent research institute with the goal of developing sustainable projects and preserving the fragile balance of marine life. Throughout the game, you’ll recruit field experts and use their abilities to explore new locations, research dive sites, publish critical ecological papers, and launch conservation efforts. Expand your expertise, develop your team, and learn as much as possible about the sea. The action your institute takes now, could mean a healthy ocean and a sustainable future for the planet. Endeavor: Deep Sea is designed by the same creative team behind Endeavor: Age of Sail and Endeavor. This edition is set in a new era of nautical discovery, but uses streamlined rules which will be familiar to fans of the original game. —description from the publisher

{
  "game_id": 367966,
  "name": "Endeavor: Deep Sea",
  "core_verb": "activate building, take action",
  "decision_shape": "combinatorial",
  "reward_schedule": "engine_compounding",
  "aesthetics": [
    "Challenge",
    "Discovery"
  ],
  "core_loop_pitch": "Activate one of your buildings to take its action — recruit, sail, dive, publish — then refresh and repeat.",
  "mobile_translation_difficulty": "Easy",
  "translation_difficulty_reason": "Clean action-retrieval engine with bounded state; light interaction means solo AI works. No port yet but it would slot in trivially.",
  "direct_digital_port": null,
  "closest_loop_translation": "none yet",
  "primitive_tags": [
    "building_activation_engine",
    "track_advancement_unlock",
    "action_retrieval_refresh",
    "map_reveal_exploration"
  ],
  "confidence": 0.6
}

{
  "game_id": 367966,
  "name": "Endeavor: Deep Sea",
  "mechanics": {
    "core_verb_long": "Each turn you take one cylindrical 'action disc' from your staging area and slap it onto a specialist tile in your tableau, which lights up that specialist's icon and lets you trigger a board action — Sonar to reveal a new dive site, Dive to take research tokens, Travel to move a submarine across the modular ocean map, Conserve to plant tokens in protected zones, Publish to spend research for points and tech. The cadence is short, snappy turns: pick disc, place on specialist, do action, pass. Between rounds you pull discs back via a 'Recover' action that itself costs a disc, creating a constant tension between spending now and refreshing.",
    "core_loop_long": "A round has four phases: Build (recruit a new specialist from the market), Growth (take action tokens equal to your recruit/staging tracks), Action (alternate placing discs on specialists to trigger map actions until everyone passes), Cleanup (reset for next round). Across roughly seven rounds you push four player-board tracks (recruiting, staging, recover, submersibles) upward — every track upgrade unlocks more discs per round and deeper-water access. Map actions chain: Sonar reveals a new tile (which gives an immediate discovery bonus), then Travel into it, then Dive on its tokens, then Publish those tokens for victory points and abilities. End-game scoring totals points from published research, conserved zones, specialist abilities, and end-game bonus cards — winner is the institute with the most points.",
    "decision_space": "Per turn the option space is wide: typically 6-10 viable disc placements across your specialist tableau, each enabling a different map action. The hard tradeoff is tempo vs. engine — do you Recover (spend a disc to get all discs back) early to flood actions, or push for a juicy Publish chain? The map is shared and modular, so location selection has soft area-control consequences (other players will Travel into your revealed tiles unless you lock them down with conservation). The published-research market is open-drafted, so timing on which paper to claim before another player snipes it is a recurring squeeze. Mid-game, planning a 3-action chain (Sonar → Travel → Dive) within a single round is the signature puzzle.",
    "skill_expression": "Strongest skills: action efficiency and chain planning — visualizing a 4-disc combo where one tile reveal triggers a discovery bonus that pays for the next dive that publishes for the bonus that recruits the next specialist. Secondary: market reading on the specialist row and published-research row, since both are open-draft and contested. Tertiary: light spatial planning on the modular map (where to point your submarines, which depths to unlock). Almost no opponent-direct conflict and minimal arithmetic. Strong players see two rounds ahead and identify the keystone specialist that turns their tableau into an engine.",
    "tactile_dependency": "low",
    "tactile_dependency_reason": "Modular map and disc-placement are tactile-feeling but every state is fully legible: tiles, tracks, tokens, cards. Translates cleanly to a board-state UI; the satisfying physicality of slapping a disc onto a tile is a sensory bonus, not load-bearing."
  },
  "theme": {
    "promise": "Run a modern marine research institute — recruit scientists, send subs into the deep, publish papers, protect coral, feel like a David-Attenborough-adjacent ocean steward.",
    "setting": "Modern, nautical, exploration, environmental/ecological",
    "narrative": "none — pasted-on theme but unusually well-integrated; the conservation track and published-paper flavor land harder than typical Eurogame veneer because actions and theme align (Dive does feel like diving, Publish does feel like publishing).",
    "audience": "hobbyist Eurogamer, family",
    "art_direction": "Painterly marine illustration in a cool blue-teal palette with warm coral and species accents; clean modern infographic-style iconography on player boards. Burnt Island Games production with the Endeavor visual lineage — readable from across the table, deluxe edition lavishly upgraded. Theme reframes the original Endeavor: Age of Sail's piratical/colonial aesthetic into a modern conservationist one, and reviewers note that thematic re-skin is a deliberate ethical choice."
  },
  "translation": {
    "digital_meta_layer_ideas": [
      "Multi-week solo campaign: 8 chained scenarios, each unlocks new ocean regions (Atlantic, Pacific, Antarctic), persistent research library and specialist roster carry forward — campaign resets with prestige modifiers",
      "Async 4-player league with weekly seeded maps: same modular setup for all leagues, leaderboard scored on point totals, weekly meta rotates which conservation bonuses are doubled",
      "Daily 'expedition' challenge: fixed map, fixed starting specialists, 30-minute time-attack on points; leaderboard by efficiency",
      "Live-event seasons themed around real-world marine conservation campaigns (e.g. 'Coral Triangle' month with bespoke specialist cards)"
    ],
    "closest_mobile_genre": "tactics RPG",
    "live_service_potential": "medium"
  },
  "confidence": 0.75,
  "extraction_version": "v3"
}