BoardGameGeek, the biggest database / forum on board games, has a section called The Hotness, where games are ranked by how much buzz there is currently around them, as measured by user engagement and activity. And the hottest board game right now is Vantage, from Stonemaier Games. As I had pre-ordered that game, copy 11,457 out of 50,000 of the first edition arrived here yesterday. Nice to have that printed on the box, although I doubt this will one day have collector value. I haven't played it yet, but I studied the rules and watched videos about Vantage on YouTube. And as this is a bit of a weird game, I'm not sure yet when and with whom I am going to play it.

Vantage is not a campaign game. That is to say that at the end of any game, there is no information retained about your characters. They don't level up, they don't retain any items, and you could very well play a different character in the next game. However, Vantage is a game in which you are exploring an alien world, and you can potentially learn things about this world which still will hold true in the next game you play. The best description is probably that Vantage is an adventure game, allowing you and some friends in parallel (with some limited interaction) to explore that new world. Vantage has "missions" and "destinies", and a game ends when you fulfil either or both.

Vantage is trying to emulate something like an open world. There are nearly 800 locations, and what a player does during his turn is to look at the image and description of the location he is in, and choose one possible action. For example you might come upon a huge dragon skeleton, and be offered actions like climbing on top of it, or crafting something from dragon bone. There are 6 different skills in the game, and in general a location has one action on offer for each of those skills. There are also actions on you character card and on the mission card that aren't linked to a specific location. Interestingly, you can only do one action at a location, which means that if you climbed the dragon skeleton, you won't be able to craft something from the bones in this game. You might find the same location again in a future game and then try another action, but 800 location cards time 6+ actions would take pretty much forever to complete.

With each player starting in a random location (and potentially never even meeting), and the outcome of each action not being very predictable, the whole game has a lot of randomness to it. If you don't do the mission-specific actions, which are obviously designed to nudge you towards the mission goal, you might play for hours without reaching a victory or defeat condition. The game tries to nudge you to an end, by giving you a destiny card once you collected 8 cards to fill the 3x3 grid around your character card. But a typical question about board games, "how long does it take to play one game with X players?", can't really be answered for Vantage, other than "it depends". You can potentially finish it in an hour or less per player, or potentially play much longer.

I don't think this randomness is for everybody. It reminds me of the way that I am currently playing Tears of the Kingdom, ignoring the main story, and exploring corners of the world to gather shrines and korok seeds. As far as I can tell, there is no epic overarching story to Vantage. Epic overarching stories in games require a certain amount of player railroading, so they follow the story. The more any game is truly open, the more freedom it offers to the player, but that comes at the expense of intensity. You can't have epic events happening at every corner. Vantage only has the option to explore a somewhat interesting world with somewhat interesting stuff at every corner, while in Tears of the Kingdom or Baldur's Gate 3 you can always stop exploring and decide to now pursue the epic but more or less linear main story.

Besides the exploration, Vantage has a dice and resource management system. Actions only have one possible outcome, there are no skill checks that decide about success or failure. Instead each action has a difficulty, and you need to roll that many dice, and then deal with each of the dice by either being able to place them on some card on your 3x3 grid, or losing the respective resource (like health or morale) if you can't. Every time the dice pool gets emptied, you remove all the dice previously placed on your grid, and the cycle starts over. Which means that the start is always the most difficult, as you only have your character card, and the more cards you add to your grid up to the maximum, the more likely it becomes that you can deal with dice by placing them on a card without losing resources. The game ends if any resources of any player drop to zero. There is a good amount of dice manipulation, so the whole system looks interesting, but maybe not extremely difficult. This certainly isn't a game for people who mostly love complex Euro games with intricate but predictable game mechanics. When you make that decision of whether to climb the dragon or carve his bones, either option might result with you getting a card, but you can't know which one, or in which way it will improve your character. You need to make the decision based on gut feeling and "oh, that sounds interesting", not calculable game mechanics.

I think I'll actually play Vantage as a solo game (possibly playing multiple characters) before suggesting it to any game group. One possible negative for this game is that it appears to not play very well with too many players, as every player is mostly active during his own turn, and then needs to sit around and wait until everybody else has done their turn. While technically up to 6 people can play, the community recommends 1 to 3, with 4 players being already not recommended by half of the reviewers. I'll have to see whether the interaction with other players is actually fun, at least in a smaller group, because interaction with other players in board games is important to me.

Labels: Board Games

- posted by Tobold @ 12:26 PM Permanent Link