Board Game Review - Endogenesis

Okay, so I recently got my Kickstarter copy of Endogenesis in the mail. In Endogenesis each player plays as a formless Spirit in a new universe. You are competing with the other players to become the king/queen of the pantheon of the gods when the universe kicks off. It runs from 1 to 5 players, with 1-2 players having a different game mode. The run time is anywhere from 30 to 120 minutes. As a personal aside, the Kickstarter went off about as perfectly as a Kickstarter can. The designer David Goh has earned a look from me on all of his future projects.

So, if the above description doesn't perk your interest...
It plays as basically Keyforge EDH/Commander.

The parts from the game are very well done. The art is gorgeous, and they got some specific cards to be foiled like the box. The cardboard pieces are thick card stock and have a nice finish on them. The shard had some small issues being punched out, but I am going to blame that on user error. They play fine, and there is only minor removal damage.

The most klunky part of the game is in the set up. You have to take the 40 card chaos deck and seperate out all the non-legendary monsters, shuffle those, remove 5 face down, shuffle all the chaos cards together then place the 5 on top.  You then have to deal 2 knowledge cards to each player, and deal more until each player has 2 normal skills, take all the discarded cars and shuffle the knowledge deck together, then deal 2 more to each player for a total of 4 cards.

It all makes sense for balance reasons, but it is still a bit klunky. Sometimes, I like to armchair game design how the mechanics of the game could be done better. In this case, I have no better option for maintaining a balanced start point for the game. And having played the game, I would agree that balance needs to trump ease of play in this instance.

So for the TLDR of it all. If you like Keyforge, EDH, Brawlers with table politics, then you will like this game. Call it a 9 of 10 upgrade shards.