You’ve crash-landed on an alien planet, stranded far from your crew. What now?

Vantage is a cooperative open-world exploration game for 1 to 6 players, ages 14 and up, and takes about 2 to 3 hours to play. It retails for $85.00 and is available in stores and directly from Stonemaier Games. The play time can vary significantly depending on player count and the choices everyone makes, so “2 to 3 hours” is just an average. Although the game is recommended for 14 and up, I did play with my 12-year-old, and for the most part there’s not really anything inappropriate as long as your kid has the patience for a long game.

Vantage was designed by Jamey Stegmaier and published by Stonemaier Games, with illustrations by Valentina Filić, Sören Meding, and Emilien Rotival.

Here’s what comes in the box:

The game box itself has three vertical “drawers” along the edge (the green parts seen in the photo above): these are used to store the various dice, cubes, and tokens—I recommend keeping them in baggies inside the drawers, so that they don’t just spill out into the large card wells when you lift the drawers.

While I’ll show you a few of the cards throughout the review, I don’t want to show too much because the game itself is about exploration and discovery, so I don’t want to spoil things. A lot of fun of the game comes from wandering around the planet and learning what happens when you do things. That said, you can see some examples of the small cards above: these are the crew cards, which you’ll start with at the beginning of the game. Cards may have various spaces to place challenge dice (with icons indicating restrictions or bonuses), spaces for “boosts” (small silver wooden cubes), actions (marked with a color and icon), and some instructions about how boosts are gained or spent from this card.

There are other types of small cards—items, skills, animals, and more—that will be placed around your character card, and there are some other cards like missions and destinies that will be placed on the main board.

The large cards are mostly locations, featuring a large illustration, a small text description of what you see, and then (usually) six different actions you can take at that location, along with a compass rose for movement to another location. More on those later.

The game “board” is a thick cardstock mat, similar to some other Stonemaier titles, and is primarily used to track everyone’s health, time, and morale. There are also spaces for a few cards and the dice, mostly so you can distinguish the dice supply from the spent dice.

The dice are custom dice. Skill dice are standard sized with the six different action icons etched into them. Challenge dice are smaller black dice, and they include the health, time, and morale icons, as well as a dash and a return arrow.

You can download a copy of the rulebook here.

The goal of the game is to complete a mission, a destiny, or both, before any player runs out of health, time, or morale.

Place the board in the center of the table, with supplies of skill tokens, coins, boosts, and skill dice nearby. The pool of challenge dice should be 8 dice plus 2 more per player.

Setup continues with some randomization: you start with Location 000 on the Book of Vantages, where your ship is approaching the planet. Everyone gets a character card along with a matching skill token, and then places their trackers on the game board—”daring” is recommended for your first game, so everyone starts with 4 health, morale, and time. Then everyone rolls two skill dice, takes the matching skill tokens, and then consults the chart to get a starting mission, which is drawn and added to the game board.

Location 001, on the back of the Book of Secrets, has some additional randomization: everyone will get a different starting card, and roll two more dice to gain more skills and find their starting location. There are 126 possible starting locations, and 21 possible starting missions.

You’re allowed to describe your card to other players, but you aren’t allowed to show other players your location card. I think the idea is that you’re in communication with each other, but you don’t have a way to share visuals. You can only see the world from your own vantage.

On your turn, you get to choose one action to take. There are actions printed in lots of places: on your character card, on the mission card, on your location card, and on various other cards that you may accumulate over the course of the game.

There are six main categories of actions, represented by the six colors and icons: move, look, engage, help, take, and overpower. On a specific card, the action usually has a more specific word for what you’re doing in that context. For instance, on the card below, the move action is “steer” and the help action is “repair.” One important note is that you can only take one action per location card (unless the card says otherwise), so generally you can’t exhaust all the possibilities on a location in a single play. If you “hijack” this time, you can’t come back and “fish” here later—you’ll have to wait until the next time you play the game.

You must decide on an action, and then you look up the card number in the corresponding action book (or you can also use the online Rulepop site). That will tell you the action cost—in the example above, the “spy” action for location 433 is “Spy on the boat” and the “2” in the hexagon is the cost. You may spend skill tokens matching the action to pay for the cost, and other players may also contribute tokens toward this. (Thematically, it represents them sharing their expertise and knowledge with you.) If you don’t pay for the entire cost using skill tokens, then you roll a number of challenge dice to make up the difference.

Challenge dice that show health, morale, or time will reduce your levels unless they can be placed onto cards. Each die space on a card has some indications about when you can place dice there—some are tied to specific actions, some are tied to particular elements that are in play, and some require a specific symbol to be rolled on the die. If there’s a lightning bolt on the edge of the space, that means you can place dice from any player’s action; otherwise, the space can only be used on your own turn. After rolling the dice, players may distribute dice among their cards as applicable, and then the player loses health, morale, or time for any dice that remain unplaced (and then those dice are placed into the penalty section of the board). A dash means that the die does not cause any penalty, and the return arrow means the die can be placed back into the die pool without a penalty.

At some point the dice pool will run out: if you take an action and there aren’t enough dice left for the action you are taking, then the dice get refreshed. All of the dice—those on cards and those in the penalty section of the board—are returned to the pool, and then you take the dice you need. Refreshing dice opens up all of those spaces on cards again, which lets you take more costly actions without suffering consequences.

Moving to other locations usually costs 1 movement skill point, and you just go to the number shown on the compass rose in the direction you want to travel. However, if there is an asterisk instead of a number, that means travel in that direction may not be as simple as walking; there is a “depart” action book to look up the costs (and the thematic description) of traveling in those directions.

There are three ways the game can end:

There isn’t a scoring mechanism, but you can with with a mission victory, destiny victory, or epic victory (if you completed both).

Your mission is randomly determined during setup, and remains the same for the course of the game. Destinies may be gained throughout the game depending on actions you take (including completing a mission), and you may have any number of destinies in play.

Vantage is GeekDad Approved!

Vantage has the feel of a choose-your-own-adventure book, but with so many more options. There are almost 800 different locations to explore, and most of those have 6 different actions to take, and that’s not even taking into consideration the countless actions on all of the cards in the game, like items and missions and other things you’ll encounter.

The rulebook explains how to play the game, but it doesn’t give you a whole lot of direction otherwise. There are some tips to get started like try to fill out your grid of cards, and just try things out to see what works and what doesn’t. It doesn’t even really explain a whole lot about the missions and destinies, or even how you get destinies. Every player has “Master,” “Buy,” and “Equip” actions on their character card—what do those do? When should you try them? The rulebook doesn’t say. It really feels like being dropped into a room full of weird gadgets and being told: “Okay, have fun!”

Back in 2021, I spent about 6 months playing through The 7th Continent with my son and a couple of friends. It’s one that I backed on Kickstarter after reading Will James’ write-up and getting to try the demo for myself. The game involves exploring a brutal environment, and you build out an enormous map of small square cards while trying to stay alive and figure out the various “curses” that each introduce specific tasks that need to be completed. (We played an epic game where we just mixed in all of the curses at once.) We really loved the element of discovery, of mapping out the space and gaining expertise, of figuring out puzzles and locating important landmarks.

Vantage gives me a lot of similar feelings to The 7th Continent, and in fact Jamey Stegmaier does cite it as one of many inspirations, though there are some significant differences. For one, you’re a little less focused on mere survival: you don’t have to constantly figure out how you’re going to feed yourselves so you don’t starve to death in the wilderness. It’s more sci-fi than pulp adventure novel. Although the locations do make up a giant grid map, it’s a little harder to visualize. Where The 7th Continent‘s cards literally fit together to make a top-down view of the mysterious continent, Vantage‘s cards are illustrations of the scene from your viewpoint and don’t piece together to form one large image. Plus, the fact that you are separated from your crew right from the start means that you’re all seeing different bits and pieces of the world, and it may take a while before you find out how the pieces connect. (In some games, your paths may never overlap because it’s such a big world!)

In the first two weeks after receiving Vantage, I think I played about 17 hours of it (with 13 different players), and I’ve played several more times since then. I loved falling onto a random spot on the planet and just diving into the exploration, and the wide variety of paths we could take. Minor spoilers here, but we had a player who went on long, meandering quests to track down a bandit hideout, another who spent most of the game studying magic and learning some ridiculously powerful spells, and yet another who was underwater for almost the entire session. We’ve dug deep into the planet, flown high into the skies, and encountered enormous elemental beasts. Some games went longer than they really needed to because players had just one more thing they wanted to do so we didn’t finish off a mission or destiny for a while.

The only thing that carries over from one game to the next is your own knowledge of what you remember. In that sense, there are boundaries to the unknown. It will take a long time before we hit those limits, but at some point it is possible to have visited everything and done everything—though there are places where the dice are used to introduce randomness, even in the directions you might be able to travel. The planet is the same each time you play; it’s just not likely that you’ll land in the same spot very often. I’ve seen the complaint that the static nature of the planet makes it less interesting, but given the sheer number of options, I personally don’t see that being much of a problem for a long time.

One issue we ran into, though, is the downtime when you have a lot of players. Since you’re each in your own location, it can feel a little bit like you’re each playing your own little game in your own little world. Certainly there’s a lot of interaction in terms of taking challenge dice from other players or spending skill tokens to help somebody, but your story is usually isolated from the other players unless your paths happen to cross. Each turn can vary wildly in length: if you’re simply moving east, then your turn is as short as paying 1 movement and drawing a new card, while somebody else might have an entire mini-game to play on their turn because they encountered some sort of challenge.

Vantage is definitely a game for those who are invested in all of those stories: if I care as much about what you’re experiencing out there in the desert as I do about the snow-covered peaks I’m navigating myself, then I’m having a good time even when my turns are short and yours are long. But if I only care about what’s happening right in front of me, then this may be the sort of game I’m better off playing solo instead. (And it does work solo, too! I just prefer playing with other folks in general.)

One other minor complaint I have is that the actions listed on the cards are not always detailed enough. You’re supposed to decide on an action before you get to look it up in a book and find out its cost, but there were definitely times where the single-word description was not enough to convey what the action was. I accidentally stole a boat once; another player shoved a person off a cliff. We’ve made our own house rule that you can ask for clarification to get the full-sentence description of an action if you’re not sure what it’s referring to. I can see that the cards look cleaner and more uniform with just the single-word actions, but it might have been nice to have a little more clarity in some cases.

I don’t know how long it will take to fully explore the world of Vantage, but it’s quickly become a favorite with several folks in my gaming groups. (If I weren’t always trying to play other games for review I would definitely be playing it even more!) I’m really looking forward to finding out what else the planet has in store. We’ve already discovered at least some secrets about the planet’s origins—no spoilers here!—but I know there’s a lot more yet to explore.

For more info about Vantage, visit the Stonemaier Games website!

Disclosure: GeekDad received a copy of this game for review purposes.

Source: geekdad.com