[Previously posted on BGG - Vantage - Forums - Reviews]

This isn't technically a review. The word "review" suggests some sort of quality standard to which a product is then compared. I don't think that it would be useful to do that with Vantage. Vantage is an experience first, and a game second. So I would rather talk about Vantage in terms of who should or shouldn't play this game.

If you wanted to put Vantage into a category, you could call it an adventure game. The focus of the game and your actions in the game is to experience small adventures. Oh, look, there is something shiny, let's interact with it and see what it does! With some luck and imagination, the small adventures you experience everywhere coalesce into some sort of emergent personal story. That works extremely well as a solo game, and also in small groups as a shared experience. While technically Vantage can be played with up to 6 players, you'd end up with 6 emergent personal stories in parallel, which would be confusing, and less fun because of the downtime.

Vantage is fun in a group of players who are curious and open to surprises. I would not necessarily recommend it to people who prefer hard Euro games in which you have to think several turns ahead and where outcomes are calculable. In Vantage there will be many times in which you choose an action without being certain of the result; however, there is a certain common sense logic usually, so if you decide to pluck a fruit, chances are that you'll end up with a fruit. You just can't know what that fruit does in terms of game mechanics in advance. And if you were on a mission to gather several fruits, it often wouldn't be obvious in which direction you'd need to go to find the next one. While Vantage has missions and destinies, and you'll want to keep them in mind if you want to keep playtime within reasonable limits, you would not want to be too fixated on those goals, as there isn't necessarily a sure way to progress them. You might get hints or vague maps towards your goals, but for some goals it works just as well to walk the world randomly until you stumble across something that looks like it corresponds to that goal.

Every action you do in Vantage succeeds. You roll dice, but those aren't like skill checks, where you could succeed or fail. Instead, the dice represent something like the effort you need to put into the action. The more dice you roll, the more likely it becomes that you end up losing resources like health, time, or morale. Running out of one of these resources is technically the fail state of the game. The game mechanics part of Vantage is all about risk mitigation, with the cards you collect over the course of the game allowing you to prevent resource losses by storing the dice on the cards instead. The game resets the dice every time they run out, and once you have lots of cards it isn't very hard to deal with most dice rolls. There is also an interesting aspect that cards are often specific what dice they can store, being limited to a certain color of action, or even a very specific action. If you have a card that makes it less risky for example to enter somewhere, you'll be more tempted to try the enter action when it becomes available. To enjoy Vantage, you must be okay with the inherent randomness of dice rolls. And if you are looking for very deep game mechanics, this might not be the best game for you. Vantage also isn't terribly difficult once you added a few cards for your grid, as the number of dice in the pool remains constant, while the number of locations to store dice increases.

On the box it says that Vantage is for players age 14+. I do think you can play it in a family context with children younger than 14. But Vantage involves a lot of reading, and it involves a good amount of administrative work, looking for cards in an index, so it probably needs one responsible adult. Between adult players, it helps if at least one of them doesn't mind doing the index card work, searching for cards of specific number, and potentially later putting them back at the right location in the index.

If you compare Vantage to other narrative games, it has to be pointed out that it is closer to games like Lands of Galzyr or Sleeping Gods, and less comparable to games like Tainted Grail or ISS Vanguard. That is to say that Vantage contains a multitude of small stories, with some connections, but not really an epic overarching main story. There is no campaign in Vantage. The obvious advantage of that is that it is easier to find people who don't want to commit to a long campaign and just want to play one session, and that if you play with the same people repeatedly, the replayability is still very good. There are 126 different starting locations, and the rules prohibit you from doing too many of the possible actions in one location in one game, so even encountering the same location again isn't boring. The disadvantage of this is that the various story bits you experience can feel a bit disjointed. It helps if players are creative and fill in the gaps themselves. Players are told to not show their location cards to other players, and rather tell the other players what they are seeing. A roleplaying approach works extremely well here, where you tell the other players what you see, and what makes you decide to go for a specific action. Yes, you could say "I take the yellow action because I have yellow skill tokens and a card that lets me store dice from yellow checks", but maybe "I see an alien merchant, who looks quite rich. I think I'll try to pickpocket him, using my sneaky boots" is technically the same action and more interesting to the other players.

If you enjoy open worlds, emergent storytelling, and a bit of roleplay, Vantage can be a fantastic experience in a small group, and offers a great many hours of entertainment. For people who play games to win, or at least to try to optimize their turns, Vantage might feel a bit shallow and random. Don't be surprised if the reviews you see on Vantage are all over the place, this game simply isn't for everybody.

Labels: Board Games

- posted by Tobold @ 11:04 AM Permanent Link