LogFAQs > #986028932

Vantage
My Score: 7.0
BGG Link: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/420033/vantage

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Vantage is a recently released game with a lot of hype around it by Jamey Stegmaier, the guy behind many popular games, Scythe, Tapestry and Viticulture probably being the most noteworthy. This game is pretty different from the other games of his that I played of his.

Vantage is what I would call an experience more than an actual game. It's a co-op game adventure game where you and the other players crash land on a planet with a mission to accomplish. The main gimmick is that you all are in different locations and can not actually see the locations the others are at, but you have radio communication and can communicate with each other about what you see. So you can describe everything on your card but cant show them the actual artwork.

The game is pretty simple to play. After the setup (determine characters, your mission, your starting locations and resources) you all take turns doing one action at a time until you complete a destiny and win the scenario or one player dies. You have three separate meters: health, morale and time and if any of these drop to 0 you then read a passage which i think gives you a last chance but it didn't happen to us so I'm not positive.

On your turn you can do three types of actions: a location action (one of the six actions on the location you are on), a card action (an action on one of your cards or in the middle) or a departure action (move to another location in one of the four cardinal directions). Every action has a cost associated to it as well as a type (one of six colors basically), you will know the type beforehand but not necessarily the cost.

How paying a cost is a pretty cool concept. You basically roll that number of dice (you can discount it if you have the appropriate resources, but they aren't that easy to get). 2 results are good and take the die out of circulation, 1 does nothing but puts the die back into the pool and the other 3 are each a type of damage (one for each type). The thing is that you can assign die to your grid (basically a 3x3 square where you have your character in the middle and can get other equipment and stuff around it). Cards in your grid will have squares in them that hold dice, and usually those squares have restrictions/effects on them. For instance a starting character has one square that is color coded to their characters "type" and they can put any die there if they were rolling that color of action and it gives you a boost. The other square they have has a lightning bolt on it, which means any player can put a die there, but its for one specific face on the die (one of the damage types).

If you ever go to roll dice and there's not enough in the pool they all refresh (go back from the cards and the ones out of circulation and back to the pool) freeing the cards up to be used again.

As you get more and more equipment you will have more and more places you can put die, and they usually have other affects too. Sometime cards will have other actions that you can do, such as upgrading them for a stronger item but I wont go into too much detail because by nature this is a spoilerly game. Cards also can hold cubes on them (when I said boost what that means is putting a cube on it) which can be used for different things depending on the card. For example on your character you can spend a cube to reroll a dice, but theres a variety of things that can be done on different cards.

In locations you can usually only do one action per card, so the general gameplay is do action -> move -> do action -> move although you will mix in card actions here and there. By default when you do an action where it isn't explicit on the card (for example when moving sometimes it will just say what location you go to if you go west, that has a cost of 1) another player will look up the card the action is on in the colored book of that action and tell you the cost and then read it once you pay the cost (There is like 9 books as an fyi). There might be choices that they read for you as well. I will say that there is a site you can use (https://vantage.rulepop.com/#) that makes this a lot easier to manage.

I don't want to too much into details but the game really is pretty simple to play. You just take turns doing actions until the game ends. You have a mission from the get-go, you will get various destinies throughout the game, and players can get individual goals as well. If you complete any destiny the game ends and you win. If you complete your mission and then a destiny you super-win.

This game is not meant to be super-strict, if you don't know a rule they say to use the rule of thematic fun, make the most fun ruling that thematically makes sense. It's more of an experience than anything else.

Now onto my thoughts, we played this with 5 people at my club, which was frankly too many people. Bgg recommends 1-3 and I see why. Honestly this is likely a pretty good solo game. The problem with too many players is twofold: it actually makes the game easier and it doesn't really add enough for the increase in length between turns.

The dice pool is dynamic, being 8 + 2 per player, so we had 18. By the middle of the game I never felt like we were in any real danger even if players did dumb stuff (and they were doing dumb stuff). It's not a huge deal since this is more of an experience, and there are difficulty settings (which just effect your starting health, time and morale) but its the kind of game that feels like it gets easier as you go on as you have more places to put dice, and with 5 players getting cards to put dice on instead of just 2 or 3, it felt too easy. I don't neccessarily want it to feel hard, but I definitely wish it scaled better with more players (I do believe there are optional rules to add more dice in as the game progresses, but its meant for the 3-4 player count as there's not enough dice in general to add enough in for 5 or 6 players).