Vantage
- Board's Eye View
- Aug 1
- 4 min read
Your space ship has suffered a catastrophic malfunction and the crew have to abandon ship. You're close to a habitable planet so everyone gets into their individual escape pod and launches. That's the set up for Jamey Stegmaier's Vantage (Stonemaier Games). It's an open sandbox exploration game where players are each exploring, interacting with the environment and with the flora, fauna and sentient beings they meet on the planet, and collecting resources and equipment.
The game takes 1-6 players but players' escape pods will land them at different locations (randomised every time you play) so regardless of the number of players every player will be exploring their own location: that is, they are seeing the world they are on from their own individual vantage point. We often hear of games described, sometimes disparagingly, as 'multi-player solitaire'. Vantage is unashamedly 'multi-player solitaire': it's possible that players' paths might cross as they explore the planet, but it's a big planet and the likelihood is that their explorations will not converge. That means that players are each doing their own thing. Notionally they are in communication with each other and so players can make use of each other's 'skills' (ie: they can contribute skill tokens to a task on another player's turn) and, in this fully cooperative game, they may be able to accommodate dice that would otherwise adversely affect a player's health, morale or time but otherwise everyone is on their own.
Players will have a location card that will offer them six options: one relating to each of the core skills in the game. In addition, there may be actions you can take on cards you pick up on your explorations or, like missions, may be available to all players on the central board. The board otherwise just tracks all the players' health, morale and time: if ever any one of any player's three trackers hits zero, the players collectively lose the game.
When you choose an activity, you're referred to a numbered paragraph in the book relating to that skill. That will first tell you how many dice you have to roll. You can expect to pretty much always succeed in any task so the dice don't affect your success but rather the potential negative consequences. They are custom six-sided dice with three sides that show a health, morale or time icon. When you roll one of these you have to move your corresponding marker down towards the dreaded zero point unless you have space on one of your cards that can accommodate that die, or if another player is permitted and willing to take and accommodate the die. Before rolling, you can spend corresponding skill tokens to reduce the number of dice you would otherwise have to roll.
From this you might assume that Vantage is a game about balancing and coping with attrition. That would have taken the game where Unsettled (Orange Nebula) has gone before. However, that's not the case. Perhaps for the first few turns players will nervously eye their various markers as they creep downwards but as you explore you'll be collecting cards representing tools and equipment that will steadily increase players' ability to accommodate dice, often giving a player bonus for doing so. The dice all reset (come off the cards and return to the dice pool) when the dice pool empties, so there's an incentive to keep recycling the dice, and that's not difficult to do. And in any event, the dice aren't as punishing as we initially feared: two of the six sides have no effect at all and another side simply returns the die to the pool, so for every dice rolled there's a 50% chance of it having no adverse impact whatsoever. Still, if you want to make the game more challenging the rules offer the option of starting with your health, morale and time lower on the tracker.
Players can see each other's character card and the 3 x 3 tableau of cards built around it but players' location cards aren't visible to other players (they are propped up on stands, supplied with the game) and, unusually, you don't build a map of location cards as you play: when you move, you take a new numbered location card and return your previous card to the box. This means that, unusually for a cooperative game, Vantage is largely immune from being hijacked by an 'alpha player' who tells everyone what to do on their turn.
You only add two dice to the pool for each additional player so the game feels easier at higher player counts because there's likely to be more opportunity to accommodate dice, and the dice will anyway recycle more quickly. That said, the game can drag at higher player counts. This is a game of exploration rather than deep strategy; there's really not much to do in terms of planning your next turn in advance, so with three or four players, and certainly with five or six, you must expect to have a high proportion of downtime while you're waiting for your next turn to come around. Vantage, of course, works brilliantly as a solitaire game: there's no need for any faux opponent, bot or automata, you just play the game exactly as you would with more players. For us tho' the game is at its best with two players because that way when you choose an action, the other player can read you the relevant numbered paragraph and you're not at risk of seeing the result before you decide whether or not to spend skill tokens to mitigate a roll.
Vantage is a light sandbox game but it comes in a very heavy box because the game comprises a huge number of cards, both the large-format location cards and the massive quantity of cards you'll be drawing from for your various encounters. There's some great art too from Valentina Filic, Sören Meding and Emilien Rotival. It's very much a story game, in the tradition of Arabian Nights (Z-Man Games) and Tales of the Arthurian Knights (WizKids). If you're a fan of either of those games then you'll certainly want to venture into Vantage. The game is designed to be completely re-set after each play, so it's not a campaign or legacy game, but it nonetheless rewards multiple plays as you gradually build a picture from your various vantage points of the planet' geography and ecology as your explorations uncover more of its story.
