Vantage Review

Regular readers of BGQ already know my love of open world video games. To not have to be forced into a linear path, but able to just explore where you feel is the dream. And no game did it as well as The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (except the follow up Tears of the Kingdom). This was a game where you could do just about anything. Do you want to climb a mountain? Go ahead, no need to find predefined climbing areas. Want to head right for the final boss the second you get out of the training area? People have done that in a speed run.

There have been a few open world board games in the past (Earthborn Rangers and 7th Continent come to mind), but now, Stonemaier Games is throwing their hat into the ring. A passion project of designer Jamey Stegmaier for over 8 years, welcome to Vantage. It’s a game that promises to let you chart your own path over 800 interconnected locations and 900 other discoverable cards. It’s an ambitious game, but does it achieve its goals? Let’s find out.

Note: I will try and make this review as spoiler free as possible.

Gameplay Overview:

The gameplay in Vantage is pretty unique. The rulebook walks you through the basics and the turn structure and then just kind of sets you loose. Players are given the structure and you need to just kind of find your way.

But the basics are that you (and any fellow players) have crash landed on an alien world. You have a character, some basic skills, a landing location, and a group mission. After that… ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

On a player’s turn, they take an action from one of three options:

Every location card has actions tied to each of the six main skills in the game. If you take the blue action, you are doing something involving movement… climbing, swimming, sliding, etc… If you take the orange action, you are interacting with someone or something. And so on.

If you don’t want to take the action on your location card, you can take one on your player grid. These are made up of your character card and things you find along the way. Perhaps you are going to upgrade this item you found to make it better or chat with a companion you met along the way.

Finally, you can also just walk. Every location has a compass rose and you can just travel to one of the other directions.

Once you decide on an action, another player will open up the relevant booklet and read the narrative section. These are short, usually just a sentence or two. But each entry lists the difficulty rating. The key thing here is that every action will succeed. The question is how much of your resources it will spend (either health, time, or morale).

So, climbing that cliff may be challenging and require you to roll 5 dice. But you can mitigate bad rolls by using open spaces in players’ grid of cards. Or even remove dice from the roll by spending skill tokens ahead of time. But once your roll is done, you find out what happens and your turn ends.

How does Vantage end? That’s a good question. Because that’s really open as well. If one of a player’s tracker tokens reaches zero, the game can end (although it does offer an option for a one-time do-over). But more likely, you’ll end the game by finishing your mission, or maybe a goal you picked up along the way.

Game Experience:

I know we are only about halfway through the year, but Vantage is easily going to be the front-runner for the most innovative and unique board game of the year. Our first game took close to 3 hours… but a lot of that was us just figuring out what we were doing. We picked up the basic turn structure pretty quickly, but after that, we stumbled around a lot trying to figure out just what we should be doing. Vantage isn’t a game that sets you out with a goal and a time limit to do it (ala Unsettled). Sure, you’ve got a mission to start with, but it’s not at all uncommon to ignore that and chart your own path.

And one of the great things about the game is that you never fail to do something. The game uses dice when you perform actions, but it’s not to see if you succeed. Instead, it’s to try and minimize the fallout. Perhaps there is a locked door I want to get past, but I’m not very proficient at the relevant skill. In other games, you may waste time rolling and rolling, trying to get the matching symbols you need to pick the lock. But not in Vantage. If I try and get through the lock, I will. The only question is how much time, morale, or health it all cost me.

And honestly, that’s a great feeling. It takes the “feel bad” moments from skill checks and turns them around. Instead of feeling like you’ve wasted a turn on a bad roll, you instead succeed but have to pay a steeper price than you want. It reminds me of campaign-style games that “fail forward”. Instead of forcing you to replay a mission you failed, it instead, moves you along in the story but with perhaps a penalty.

Speaking of campaigns, Vantage is not a campaign game. Each session is a one shot adventure… but on the same planet. So after a while, you may begin to remember locations. Is that good? Maybe. You might arrive on a card you remember from the past, and know if you chat up the local sentient, it’s going to rob you. So instead, you attack it first and reap the bounties. But since every card has 6 different actions (one tied to each skill), you can take alternate routes when you reach a card you’ve visited in a previous game. And I should mention that you can only ever take an action once on a card during a game, so after you’ve done something on that card it’s time to move on.

I have to admit, I’m impressed with what Vantage accomplishes. This is the most open world game I’ve encountered on my tabletop outside of a role playing game. It lets you go anywhere and do just about anything. I’m going to avoid spoilers, but suffice to say, there are a lot of unique locations to visit in the game, many of which will be really unexpected.

I honestly don’t have a lot of things to complain about with Vantage. The biggest complaint I can see is that it doesn’t scale all that well. I think Vantage plays best at the bottom end of its range (1-3 players). While turns aren’t complicated, if you have 5-6 players, there will be a bit of downtime between turns. Players will need to think about what they want to do, find the relevant book, take their test, figure out where to place dice… It’s just a bit much at the higher end of the range, so keep this one for when you’ve got a tighter group.

The only thing I can say is that the game won’t be for everyone. There is an old saying that “Life is a Journey, Not a Destination” and that applies perfectly to Vantage. If you are a player who likes preset goals and optimizing your way to them, then this isn’t the game for you. But for those who want to embrace a bit of wanderlust and see where things take them, you can get lost in the world of Vantage.

Final Thoughts:

Vantage is an incredibly ambitious game that you can spend hours and hours exploring. I’ve played it a lot since I got it, and I still feel like I’m just scratching the surface of what it offers. The game makes no bones about the fact that this is a game for you to explore and discover things. The rulebook even suggests ignoring the mission card for your first game and just see what’s what (which is solid advice).

I’ve played just about every Stonemaier Games’ release since the early days of Viticulture, and for me, Vantage stands atop the mountain. Both in the uniqueness of its gameplay and just the pure enjoyment I’ve gotten out of playing the game. If you are an explorer at heart, go and grab this one.

Final Score: 4.5 Stars – A unique game drops players in a strange world and tells them to figure out what they want to do with their life.

Hits:
• The closest I’ve seen to a truly open world board game on our tabletops
• Lots and lots of replay value
• Quick, snappy turns
• Narrative text doesn’t get in the way
• Never fail an action!

Misses:
• Downtime at the higher player count.