Not all those who wander are lost…
Vantage is a cooperative game of exploration and discovery, seeing you build a tableaux of items and companions as you try to complete your collective mission. It’s very hard to talk about the game in detail without getting into ‘spoiler’ territory, and whilst the game is a vast playground of things to do, the setup and gameplay is relatively straight forward.
Out of the box, the first thing to do is to lift the larger ‘location’ cards up into their ends so you can see their card numbers in the top left then place the board in the middle of the play area. Pull out the three boxes that will create shared supplies of money, boost tokens, skill tokens, skill dice placing 8 challenge dice plus two per player on the designated challenge dice pool area. The story books are placed within reach, each player gets a card holder and you place the ‘Book of Vantages’ face down so you can all see location 000 are you ready to begin.
From this point on, the game will guide you through the rest of the set up, including choosing your company mission, your character, their stats (made up of time, health and morale) and also your starting location.
However, let’s explore the core rules you will need to discover this fascinating planet!
One must travel to learn…
The first probably the most important rule of all is the ‘Rule of Thematic Fun’. In other words, if there is any rule that you are unsure of or any card that causes confusion then choose the most thematic and fun way to resolve it. This is, at its heart, an open world adventure and you will only get from it what you put into it and so fun should always lead the way.
The other universal rule is that location cards cannot be shared when in your player area, unless another player is at that same location. Otherwise, you may only describe what you see. Imagine you are scattered across the planet and only have your coms through which to speak to each other. There is hidden information at every location and some things that may not make sense to you might be important to someone else so learning what to share and what to look for will become imperative to the game.
The main element of Vantage is the action selection system. There are 6 types of action categorised with a category and a colour:
● Move (blue)
● Look (purple)
● Engage (orange)
● Help (green)
● Take (yellow)
● Overpower (red)
However, throughout the game you will find many different words to represent location specific actions but they will also be coloured with a matching symbol so it will be clear which ‘type’ of action it is. For example, a purple ‘look’ action may be ‘study’ on one location or ‘master’ on another, but will always be considered a ‘look’ action.
These actions will appear on most cards, however actions on your tableaux in your play area (normal sized cards) can be taken as many times as you want unless told otherwise, whereas you may only take one action at each location (large card) before moving on.
When taking an action you or someone else in the group will read the corresponding extract from the matching storybook. At first you will be given a bit of flavour text and a number of dice you need to roll which will be in bold. You then roll that many dice. You can spend matching skill tokens as a group if you want to reduce the number of dice you roll, one for one, and can even reduce it to zero dice. It is important to note that you will never fail a task, you might just take ‘damage’ in one of the three stats in order to do it. Once dice are rolled there are five options. A dash means you can move the dice to the ‘penalty pool’ without any negative effect. An arrow means you return it to the dice pool, however any of the three stats (health, morale or time) will need to be placed in one of three places.
- Into the penalty pool lowering your stat one point for each dice of that type.
- Onto a dice slot on any card in front of you that matches the skill test. Some dice slots are open, some have specific symbols you need to place and some have specific colours or actions.
- Onto another players dice slot providing it not only matches the colour or symbol but also has a lightning symbol on it. This means that anyone can place there, not just the owner of the card.
Once this has been completed and provided the player did not move a stat marker down to zero (the game ends if any player ever reaches zero on any of their stats) then the rest of the storybook passage is read. Any instructions are then followed.
You can alternatively move location. On each location card, in the top right, there is a compass symbol showing North, East, South and West. If there is a number you may roll one skill dice and simply move to that location card, returning yours to the box. If there is an asterisk, however, you must go to the matching storybook and resolve the action like any other.
Each player takes one action per turn, whether moving, a card action or a location action, before moving onto the next player.
Some actions will gain your cards to place in your play area. Your tableaux must only be a 3x3 grid with your character card in the centre, if you ever need to take a card when you are full, you can replace one but taking one out and placing it in your ‘reserve’ area. The amount of cards you can reserve will depend on what active cards you might have.
Finally there are some cards that will have slots for ‘boosts’. These small cubes can be gained in different ways and placed on your cards and each card will give you a different way to spend them for benefits. Boosts cannot be shared and they must be placed on the cards that were gained through or if given them from a storybook, they must go on your character card.
To travel is to evolve…
The game ends in one of three ways.
- If any player reaches to the bottom of the stats track, the game ends for everyone.
- If you complete your mission (there are several actions on the mission cards to help you as the game goes on) then you can end the game with a victory.
- Throughout the game you will discover various ‘destinies’. These are alternate objectives that are linked to things you explore on your adventure. There may be multiple destinies in play at once but if you complete one it will automatically end the game, either as a victory or as an epic victory if you first managed to complete your mission.
Vantage is unlike most games and often feels aimless and unfocused and in that, is the most joyous experience. Explore. Discover. Play. And have fun!
