Have you ever started a game, either board game or video game, played a bit, and then started over, because you realized that you had done a lot of starting mistakes? I kind of skipped the first part of that by watching a YouTube channel play 9 sessions of ISS Vanguard. They didn't do very well. But by watching and learning with them, I was able to identify two major mistakes you can make when starting the game, which will set you up for failure later: The first is that ISS Vanguard isn't balanced for different player counts, as it claims. If you play with just 2 characters, every planetary landing will be a lot harder, and because one important reward is "every character in the landing party ranks up", you get only half of the reward if you take only half the number of possible characters. The second is that you shouldn't advance too fast; in particular you should visit all 4 planets listed on the campaign objective O02, even if you already got the next campaign objective. And some of the planets are best visited at least twice.

After 5 sessions, I already visited Brimstone twice, and the next session will be a third visit to complete everything there. Between those two Brimstone landings, I did one session where I flew by Atropos, but took the option to abort the mission without penalty. You can only do that once, but it allows you to do two ship management phases, and thus advances your research and production projects. That is an important aspect of the game: Every ship management phase advances you in terms of available equipment, landers, and other upgrades. Thus the planned third Brimstone visit, which might not yield much in terms of success tokens and discoveries anymore, but will sure give me another ship phase; and in my case I really want that to unlock another lander. You start with one basic lander, the Space Ranger, and quickly get another lander, the Pelican. But the Pelican is basically useless, due to taking much longer to land, and not having the stats to get through landing very well. Yes, it has a bigger cargo bay for more supplies, equipment, and discoveries; but none of that is very helpful if the landing sequence already shot you into pieces.

I went through my first Brimstone visit as fast as possible. That was basically cheating; I knew from watching it streamed that the first visit ends with a "bad things happen, you need to flee quickly" event. By minimizing my interaction with the planet on the first run, using a rank 1 crew, I was able to bring a rank 2 crew to the second run, and maximize my interaction with the planet to the point where I managed to rank them up to rank 3. That is the highest rank they can be, and having at least one rank 3 crew is very important for some of the harder parts of the game. The third visit will be with a fresh rank 1 crew, and I am not 100% certain that there are enough successes left to get them to rank 2. But if I get just a success token or two, no rank-up, and maybe a few common discoveries, that will already be good.

On planetary explorations, there is an aspect to ISS Vanguard that reminds me a bit of Gloomhaven. Whether you succeed in missions of Gloomhaven depends very much on whether you have understood the system of using, burning, and recovering cards. Whether you succeed in planetary landings of ISS Vanguard depends very much on whether you have understood the system of using, burning, and recovering dice. Especially if you want to gather the 6 success tokens necessary to rank up from 2 to 3, using only your supplies to rest and recover dice isn't sufficient. You need to push beyond that, by sacrificing dice to refresh other dice. Brimstone is an easier version of that, because you will quickly discover camp sites that allow you to refresh more dice per rest. As I am playing 4-handed, which is already easier, and did that extra ship phase at Atropos for better equipment, my second Brimstone run was very easy. As I said, it's a bit cheating by knowing what happens, but if you do know, you can easily set it up to reach rank 3.

One final tip is to not rely on luck for your dice check. By rolling slightly more dice than necessary, using other characters to assist, and using both section cards and equipment aggressively, you can make it rather unlikely to fail dice checks. Which is important, because ISS Vanguard isn't much of a "fail forward" game. Failed dice checks instead can result in things like injuries, which make the rest of the planet run harder. Obviously you can't overdo it, and roll all of your dice on every minor dice check, as you will run out of dice too quickly. But most of the time it is advisable to throw at least one extra die; you can always use the result for some dice combination effect if the roll succeeds too well. Just don't use a Vanguard die if the dice check has a penalty for "accident" rolls, because the Vanguard die has three sides with that.