VANTAGE (2025)

PLAYERS	TIME	DESIGNER	ARTIST	PUBLISHER
1-6	30-120 mins	Jamey Stegmaier	Valentina Filic, Soren Meding, Emilien Rotival	Stonemaier Games

METHOD

Players crash land on a strange planet, seperated from each other while still remaining in radio communication.

Using just cards and dice, you’ll head out and explore this world, interacting with local wildlife, discovering strange artifacts, and maybe completing missions.

The game plays like a classic ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ book on steroids. Each location will let you try something while themed story books relay the results. You’ll then choose which direction to head off in next, either to come across something new, or to continue looking for something that might help with answers to questions you just found.

Go to card 278. Roll a dice. Learn more of this strange new world.

POINTS OF INTEREST

Let’s start with a simple fact; VANTAGE is a game where what you get from it is directly related to what you put in. Upon its release there was a strong ‘marmite‘ feel to it from reviews. Some jumped in and loved how different it was to other games while other’s didn’t enjoy the lack of direction, the vague mystery, and the simplicity of it’s fail forward mechanics.

And it’s true. While it plays like a deluxe ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ book, it has dared jump into a board game space where it stands out as something quite unlike any other experience for people who play board games.

I myself wasn’t quite sure what to make of it when it was first announced. Part of this was due to designer Jamey Stegmeier holding back on a lot of info leading up to it’s release, something he was right to do, even when I was hoping to know more before a purchase. It’s perhaps only because of the Stonemaier clout, and the earned trust in Jamey as a designer, that it stood a chance of success upon release.

And I’m glad that it did.

In VANTAGE you’ll be doing a lot of reading. There is so much story here within the pages of the story books for players to discover. Every stop, every location you visit, has a number of things that could occur based on the choices you make. If you see a strange creature across a clearing you can pick from a nice variety of options; hide and observe, approach and befriend, or attack and kill. It all comes down to how you want to play.

It’s here we reach an interesting point that I discovered on my second play. There’s a little room for some roll playing here. I’d randomly rolled the orange character, Emilien, The Scholar. Based on his character artwork alone I started to play the game in a way based off of his look. I created a character for me to inhabit. Wandering this new world, he actually enjoyed the solitude of his lone journey, and was keen to observe and discover as much as he could. If Emilien saw a new species of creature, he wouldn’t try to kill it. He’d record everything he could about it, even if it put him behind schedule.

This aspect helped give me my own story through the gameplay, one that wasn’t contained within the pages of the various story books, though certainly a little guided by them. I look back at the more negative reviews of the game upon launch and wonder if those people require defined gioals and tight direction to be able to enjoy games. The same players that wouldn’t enjoy minecraft because there’s no obviopus starting mission other than ‘do what you want’.

Because in VANTAGE you can do whatever you want.

The game starts with a shared mission, one that you are all free to work towards. These missions are great because they give you a sense of purpose from the second you all emerge from you escape pods. But that sense of purpose is temporary, because the second a player stumbles across something new and strange, all bets are off.

That’s not to say that missions cannot and will not be completed. We’ve ‘won’ games of VANTAGE by completing said missions. But we’ve also never been disappointed with another player when they get distracted by something else that has come up in their area of the planet. Players only really interact via communication, but this leads to me being just as invested in what you’re finding as I am with what’s right in front of me.

VANTAGE uses a fail forward mechanic for it’s gameplay. This doesn’t make the game easier. Instead, if keeps the game going at a healthy pace. When you want to accomplish something, you have to assess the risk, mitigate that risk if possible, and then witness the consequences. You succeed the action you were trying, but at what cost?

When you pick an action, another player (unless you’re playing solo) will read out a sentence based on your location and choice, and tell you the challenge rating. Effectivly, how many of the blasck dice you’ll need to roll. You can use skill tokens that match the colour of the skill you’re testing. Then you roll and assign these dice to slots all around the play area.

Three of the faces will affect your morale, health, and time. If you can’t assign these dice to your cards, or a team mate’s cards, they will move down to a box on the main board and require you to move the assossiated token of your colour closer to zero. And yes, zero marks game over. Sort of.

There are also u-turn arrows that mean the dice gets returned to the stockpile of black dice to be used again in future checks. And then there are blanks, which basically mean nothing and are the best face you’ll see on these dice.

Now, you’ll have cards in your tableau, as will other players. And these cards normally have spaces on them that allow certain die faces to be placed within them. This is how you prevent the negative affects of the skill checks from affecting your player markers and bringing about the game end. It’s an abstract way of saying you used some equipment or knowledge to assist in whatever you attempted and this made things easier on you. Some boxes even allow you to pass dice to other players, as if they calmed you down and talked you through a process over the radio in something they were better skilled at.

It’s brilliant. Sometimes you take big risks accepting a roll of five or more dice, and then frantically look around for where you can nestle those pesky dice so that they do no harm. And when you need to roll more black dice than are available . . . the dice pool gets refreshed and all spaces are available again. Yay!

Stepping away from the text and tactile components, we have to talk about the artwork. There are so many cards in this game, divided between the location cards, or ‘Vantages’, as well as all of the characters, and items, and creatures, and <spoiler>, and <spoiler>, and each one has such beautiful artwork.

The location cards could each be a large, framed painting on your game room wall. It’s a beautiul style. And it also does well to hide or reveal little details about where you are that might not come from the text on the card. Little things on the horizon you might not notice unless you look really hard. And it’s all there for you to describe it to other players. Because no one can see your location card except you and this means that you’ll need to paint a picture to your teammates to share what you see.

And then the other cards, the items and characters, have a different style, one more akin to explorer notebooks. Items and creatures are depicted in a mix of colur and pencil , as if you only had time to quickly skecth what you saw in the moment before resting for the evening and adding more colour to the picture now that you have time. It’s very distinct.

At the end of the day, VANTAGE is a game about exploration and discovering story around it all. And it’s not just discovery between the story books or the artwork. There are mechanics and other things that you’ll uncover within the game itself. The more I delve into the game, the more I commend Jamey Stegmaier for what he has managed to create and share here. It’s extremly unique and worth ever minute of my time.

ROOM FOR IMPROVEMENT

So what is there that could put players off from enjoying such a fantastical jouney?

Well, reading for one. While the sections of text are mostly short, there is a lot of reaching for a story book, tracking down the section number, reading a paragraph out, then putting thebook down again. While this is a big box game with a lot of cards and some (very nice) dice, it’s almost a book in sheeps clothing. There is an app available now that apparently makes this easier to manage, where you can type in the location number and the choices and be immediately presented with the text, and just that text. I myself don’t mind searching for the next paragraph too much, but I can see it adding a cumbersome level to the game.

This also slips into the amount of cards you’ll be digging through constantly. You will be flicking through cards either when players move from one location to another or when they discover some new tool or flower and need it added to their grid. This is (at the adivce of the rule book) left to one person to do, and for that person, it can be a chore. And, unlike the app used for story book sections, it can’t be rectified without making the game completely digital.

All that is to say that, while it doesn’t detract from the design and in no why ruins the game, players will need to accept that for a large chunk of the game, there will be a lot of admin to do.

EXTRA CONTENT?

There is nothing outside of the core box when it comes to VANTAGE. And Jamey has spoken about this game being complete as it is. Which makes sense, as there’s a lot of things that would need to be taken into account before you could allow more locations and items to be squeezed into the existing content. I can’t imaging the amount of work that was required to make sure nothing brought the game to a halt for players due to the insane about of randomess and choice that could dictate where you end up. Trying to insert stuff in amoung all that without breaking things would be a monumental task.

And with the amount of content and replayability, VANTAGE really doesn’t need more.

FOR 2-PLAYERS?

So far we’ve only played at 2-player and solo, and it works just fine. With more players you’ll have better options for dice mitigation, but this brings with it a lot more downtime, even for a game that has pretty quick turns in releation to most games.

– – CONCLUSION – – VANTAGE is a unique experience within the current crop of games that adorn our shelves. It requires you to let go of board gaming norms and fall into it’s world. Players need to choose a direction, not because a victory condition says so, but because they are genuinely interested in what is over that hill. Sure, admin takes up a large chunk of real estate within the gameplay itself, but the wonder and discovery make each step forward completely worth it. Ambitious and exciting, there will be many, many more plays before I grow tired of this world.

Review #0209