Finished ISS Vanguard

I have a regular gaming group for campaign board games, which meets about twice per month. We played Agemonia from June 2024 to February 2025, and then started playing ISS Vanguard. We finished ISS Vanguard yesterday, 5 months later, so it was a bit shorter than the Agemonia campaign. But then, while Agemonia is designed so that in one playthrough you see nearly all locations, in ISS Vanguard in one playthrough we just saw 60% of the available locations. In theory one could play the game again, but I don't think I'll want to.

While it was interesting to play a Sci Fi game instead of Fantasy for a change, I generally prefer Fantasy as a genre. But apart from that, I also found ISS Vanguard to be a less good game than Agemonia. ISS Vanguard does have a rich story, with good voice acting in an app if you want to, and a good number of scenarios that can have exciting moments. But it felt a bit more scripted, with the challenge often being that there was just one way to solve a planet, and you just had to find it by trial and error. While the ship book was an innovative take on the administrative tasks needed to run a campaign game, the administration part could get a bit heavy sometimes. And character development stalled about half way through the game, with every player having a limited number of sleeves to put characters in, and once they are full, you don't really progress much anymore.

I wouldn't say that ISS Vanguard is a bad game, but Agemonia was an excellent one, and ISS Vanguard just paled a bit in comparison. Still, we played ISS Vanguard from start to finish, and didn't regret it.