I can see clearly now…
I grew up in the 90s and 00s and so computer games were the most central part of my life. There was nothing else that could allow you to enter another world and just explore like a computer game. Over the following couple of decades open world gaming has become huge! Games like Zelda Breath of the Wild and Skyrim have become huge open world experiences. Well here lies the inspiration for Jamey Stegmaier’s new game Vantage. Over the years Stegmaier, via his company Stonemaier, has created some of the biggest selling board games with some of the most interesting new mechanisms. Viticulture gave us the Grande worker, Scythe gave us duel, top/bottom action selection, and now Vantage gives us open world, sandbox exploration in an immersive and thematic tabletop experience.
Having been developed over the last 8 years, Vantage is a cooperative game that boasts 800 locations to explore and another 700 items and abilities that you can discover and more importantly, in a world of so many app driven games, this is completely app free. There is a digital version of the story books for accessibility, but you can explore this huge world without looking at a single screen.
Suddenly I see…
Thematically you are all crew members on an exploratory ship when a mysterious traveler reaches out to you. Your ship is about to crash into a strange undiscovered planet and so you and your fellow crewmembers jump into escape pods. This is your first individual ‘vantage’. You each get a card showing your personal view, looking out of the pod window as you fall to the planet’s surface. You roll two dice which will give you a random crash site. From this point on you are on your own. The rules dictate you can speak to each other via your comms system and so can explain what you see but you can’t show each other your location cards. The one thing you share as a group is a mission. Decided before you land, a mission is placed on the central board and will be the main focus in order to ‘win’ the game. This is essentially all you have to go off, giving you the tiniest of direction, otherwise you just need to explore. But how does it play?
I can see clearly now…
I grew up in the 90s and 00s and so computer games were the most central part of my life. There was nothing else that could allow you to enter another world and just explore like a computer game. Over the following couple of decades open world gaming has become huge! Games like Zelda Breath of the Wild and Skyrim have become huge open world experiences. Well here lies the inspiration for Jamey Stegmaier’s new game Vantage. Over the years Stegmaier, via his company Stonemaier, has created some of the biggest selling board games with some of the most interesting new mechanisms. Viticulture gave us the Grande worker, Scythe gave us duel, top/bottom action selection, and now Vantage gives us open world, sandbox exploration in an immersive and thematic tabletop experience.
Having been developed over the last 8 years, Vantage is a cooperative game that boasts 800 locations to explore and another 700 items and abilities that you can discover and more importantly, in a world of so many app driven games, this is completely app free. There is a digital version of the story books for accessibility, but you can explore this huge world without looking at a single screen.
Suddenly I see…
Thematically you are all crew members on an exploratory ship when a mysterious traveler reaches out to you. Your ship is about to crash into a strange undiscovered planet and so you and your fellow crewmembers jump into escape pods. This is your first individual ‘vantage’. You each get a card showing your personal view, looking out of the pod window as you fall to the planet’s surface. You roll two dice which will give you a random crash site. From this point on you are on your own. The rules dictate you can speak to each other via your comms system and so can explain what you see but you can’t show each other your location cards. The one thing you share as a group is a mission. Decided before you land, a mission is placed on the central board and will be the main focus in order to ‘win’ the game. This is essentially all you have to go off, giving you the tiniest of direction, otherwise you just need to explore. But how does it play?
On your turn you get to take one action. Actions appear on your character card, the mission card, any items cards you cain which will join a 3 x 3 grid in front of you, or on a location card There are six flavours of action, move, look, engage, overpower, help and take, each with their own associate colour. These are overarching actions within which are hundreds of variants. For example, at one location, the red overpower action may be called ‘dig’ whereas at another it may be ‘duel’ or ‘pluck’. When an action is selected, then someone reads the entry from the action assigned storybook, giving a small line of flavour text and a number of skill dice to roll. The best thing about Vantage is that you will always pass the test but what you lose to pass it will change from roll to roll. Each player will have a health, time and morale marker on a central track. If any of those tokens reach zero, the game ends. Whenever you roll dice, you have the chance of rolling, a blank, a return to pool, a health, a time or a morale. For every dice you can’t place on a dice space on a card, you must move down the designated tracks. This means that the more you explore and find more items and abilities, the more cards you have to place these dice on. There are also slots that allow you to place other players’ dice on their turns. Finally there are skill tokens you can collect which allow you to roll less dice for certain actions. So, as the game goes on you will find yourself with more and more ways to explore without taking the damage. This system is so fun to play. The fact that you can always do what you want to do is so much more rewarding than other games that punish you for not rolling what is needed.
See what you wanna see…
It’s hard to review this game without giving away too many spoilers but there is so much to discover. No two games have been alike but the more you play it, the more you start to understand what to look out for, how the game is nudging you in certain directions or suggesting certain helpful things but I feel I haven’t even begun to scratch the surface. Despite not being a campaign, there is a real benefit from repeat playing. Without giving away specifics, I remember finding something at a location that I placed in my grid, with no explanation as to what it was or how to use it. It was weird and a little frustrating but soon I forgot about it. Then it popped up in another game and then again and then finally I unlocked the purpose and the mini game it was connected to and it was a fantastic moment. The game is filled with these moments when things drop into place much like in real exploration. Like the designer has said, ‘if you found something out in the world, it’s unlikely it will come with an explanation’ and it is this thematic exploration mechanism that makes Vantage unlike anything I have ever played before. It is worth highlighting that at the higher player counts the game can play very long and gets a little drawn out between turns, and I have found that 2-3 players really is the sweet spot. My husband and I also set it up on the table and dipped in and out like we would a computer game, which world really well.
If you like agency and rules that hold your hand, then this is not the game for you, but if you loved ‘choose your own adventure’ books growing up, or love computer gaming that allows you to explore without pressure then Vantage may well become your game of the year!
