🗺️ I Can See For Miles and Miles...
A message from an entity known as "The Traveler" has lured you to an uncharted planet. While orbiting, your spaceship suddenly malfunctions. The crew jump into their individual escape pods and are sent scattering down to the corners of the planet's surface. While you're unlikely to find each other, you have radio contact and can share information and skills in order to help each other out. Gather items, vehicles, quests, and what-have-you in order to complete your mission and/or fulfill your destiny.
Vantage is a cooperative exploration game for 1-6 players from Stonemeier, creators of Wingspan and Scythe. It just released and I happened to get a copy very quickly after orders went live, so while many people are waiting on theirs, I've managed to get a few plays in, and I wanted to share my thoughts. I want to be clear that this is not a review. I've played it twice at two players and only feel like I've scratched the surface of the game world. I'm also going to avoid spoilers, because this game is quite spoilable. Instead, this is just a collection of my thoughts after a couple of playthroughs.
The game has been in development for eight years and was inspired by The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. The designers wanted to craft an experience that prioritizes exploration over everything else. As such, we have a game here that's very light on mechanics. The main gameplay mechanism involves managing a pool of challenge dice that you roll whenever you try to accomplish a task. The number you roll depends on how difficult the task is—although that information is hidden from the player until they commit to an action. You can reduce that cost using skill tokens, and the result of the roll tells you how much of a drain the action is on your health, your time, and your morale. These stats are tracked separately, and if any of them go to zero, then that triggers an event that could eventually end the game.
Fortunately, you can absorb some of the damage using yours and other players' cards. If you can place a die on a card, you don't have to take the hit. But once you've filled a slot, it remains filled until the dice pool gets too small to perform another action, at which point everything refreshes. And that's about it for game mechanics.
But I mentioned actions, so what are those? There are six action types: Move, Look, Engage, Help, Take, and Overpower, each with a corresponding reference book. You might encounter a treasure chest, for example, and you can try to pick the lock (an "engage" action) or force it (an "overpower" action). Which you choose will depend on your acquired skills and what kind of dice rolls you can absorb more easily. The actions available to you will depend on what cards you have in play: your items or character as well as your location. All the cards are numbered, so you determine what action you're going to take, look up the card number in the associated reference book, and do what it says, which will typically involve gaining cards, moving between locations, or gaining skills or other bonuses. But mostly it's cards.
And there are a lot of cards. There are ~400 dual-sided location cards and another ~900 non-location cards. And any time you do something, you look it up in one of the 10 included reference books: one for each action type, another for departures, which are instances where moving between locations isn't straightforward, as well as a Book of Vantages, a Book of Secrets, and the book of rules. That's a lot of thumbing through cards and pages, passing around books, and so forth. (The game box is a freaking brick.) The only board is a small one to track character stats and your dice pool. And your locations are secret from each other—you have radio contact, so you can describe anything on your card to the rest of the crew, but no one else is allowed to look at it but you. Ultimately, it makes for a game that's nominally about exploration, but is almost entirely a theater-of-the-mind experience with a very underwhelming table presence.
So, to that end, it helps to not think of Vantage as a "table top game" so much as an RPG with no GM. It's not really about gameplay, it's about emersion in the world. The rulebook leans into this. There's a mechanism that kicks in once you've got enough items in play that allows the players to end the game at any time. You can rush through to complete your objective or you can faff about and try stuff. The overriding rule of the game is "when in doubt, do whatever seems like the most fun without breaking the theme." It's a very different take on what it even means to be a game.
I'm reminded a bit of Pendulum, which is an older Stonemeier game that ended up being not very popular. It's a worker placement game that uses sand timers to open up different parts of the board. A big gameplay element is that you're supposed to feel rushed, you're supposed to make mistakes. That's part of the game. It was an attempt at crafting a unique experience, but it ended up being frustrating to a lot of players. I think Vantage manages this better, but it has the same problem. Your first game is going be a lot of "wait, what?" as it fights against your expectations. There's no clearly defined path towards your objective. There's no map—you're supposed to feel constantly lost and disoriented. And it can just unceremoniously end whenever you feel like it's time to bail. It's a bit jarring.
Once you've got the hang of it, though, it's a pretty engaging experience. After my first playthrough I couldn't be sure if I'd really liked it or not, but I also couldn't stop thinking about it. The second time was much more natural, and I'm looking forward to trying it again at higher player counts. And I don't feel like I'll be repeating myself because this game is dense. There's all kinds of stuff for you to find, no small amount of lore to uncover, and honestly I don't even know what else.
So overall, I liked it quite a bit. It's weird and cool and constantly surprising. I'm looking forward to playing it again.
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