Vantage Board Game Review – IGN

Vantage

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Vantage starts with a simple premise. Players play the role of crew members of the ship on the ship on their way to the unknown planet. Before landing at the destination, there was a problem and everyone was bailed in isolated escape pods. Now you're helpful in this world that has not been explored so far, and have zero understanding of what you'll find.

That's the setting. While each player receives a professionally named character, there is no long backstory. You don't even know the organization, government, or alliance that you work for. You know nothing except a relatively light rule set.

This is a favorable sense of mystery. This is an open world exploration board game built on the bones of video games The Legend of Zelda: Breathing in the Wild and Yanatuka. The style of this board game is not novel. There have been some popular entries in recent years, including the Wonderful Sleeping God and The Seventh Continent. However, other tabletop games are based on historical reality, with the top being fictional. Vantage puts this idea on its head, providing no basis for understanding or tradition. Everything is weird and unusual, sometimes similar to what we know, but even then, this is often used as a device to subvert expectations.

Each player arrives on Earth at random locations. You are lost, like debris sinking into the wind, spreading violently on foreign objects. Your location and most of the catheters that interact with are position cards. This large rectangular card depicts your current first person perspective. This is your advantage.

Each card lists six actions, each card maps to a separate skill. These categories have a wide range of applications, titled “take”, “Look” and “help”. They are represented by colors, and the given name for each category corresponds to the situation you are currently in.

This means that the position card will usually list individual colored actions for each of the six categories. For example, a forceful action can be displayed as a red “steal” on the card, while a blue action can be listed as a “chasing.” This is where the game is blurry, requiring players to rely on intuition by studying the artwork of the card and trying to infer a sense of context.

After selecting the action to perform, another player picks up the narrative manual of the same color and flips to the entry with the same number as your location card. Each action type has its own customized story entries, which gives a lot of content overall.

The story entry lists the difficulties and brief description of what you are trying to do. So the above steal example might be: 4 – A piece of stolen lying in sleep makes sense. The test in this game is simple. You roll a small amount of dice equals the difficulty of the action, and then lose health, stamina, or morale based on the roll. Some dice results avoid losing any vital signs and are usually the best results.

Cleverly, your character – and other cards you may get on the go (such as items or other followers) may store dice rolls, so you don't have to suffer the consequences. Other players can even absorb some of these dices based on their abilities, effectively representing support or encouragement. This is the main thread of the system, performing actions and then eating results, while hoping to maintain adequate psychological and physical integrity to maintain risky development. The more tools and followers you can accumulate on the go, the more complex your mitigation system will be, allowing for more fun abilities and effects.

It is crucial that you never fail in favorable actions. Each test will automatically succeed, and tension will revolve completely around the cost. If any of your three core statistics drop to zero, whether due to scrolling or triggering effects, the task ends immediately. The action system is also where core frustration is possible. It may feel unpredictable to be a blurred background about the descriptor, such as what “steal” actually means, and not knowing how many dice will be rolled before the selection. This approach is very neatly integrated into the core philosophy of discovery, but it is not a particularly strategic system that can surprise you at times. This can lead to an unsatisfactory sudden ending.

One of the most compelling details of Vantage is the mission. At the beginning of the game that the entire group must work hard on, you will be assigned a random goal. This could be something like “achieving two artifacts” or “building a house”. These were invented to avoid damaging content, but the actual task is similar to this approach. You may also encounter destiny when pursuing your goals. Destiny is the goal of organic discovery that can be pursued with your mission. They are more emotionally influential because they appear naturally through the game and often flow from the action. They are great as devices that inspire interest in creative dynamics.

While I don't see the blur of the Vantage action system as a big flaw, I do have a more critical view of fate and task structure. Most of the time, the system is used in conjunction with the unique format of multiplayer. Since each player is scattered on an unknown land, the meeting usually feels as if there are several characters playing their own independent game. This can lead to slow progress, imbalance in investment and potentially unsatisfactory performance. In a meeting, a player is pursuing a series of strange developments and strange discoveries. They are learning a mysterious craft and building life for themselves on earth. Meanwhile, another player who is completely independent in the world achieved our goal and triggered the final game. The first player never pursues his own interests and feels that they don't seem to have a connection to the bigger story.

Vantage attempts to correct this. It can keep playing if you want, but it is rarely satisfying. Should we all sit down as we wait for another player to reach the conclusion of their goals? This is not a good location.

Players' isolated positioning is better when pursuing fate or missions that can be completed with fragments. Sometimes the narrative will be completely consistent with the players who call near them and try to locate their landmarks. Sometimes you have to work together on a large distance. When this happens, it's amazing. Everything feels right and the vantage point is reaching its peak. But these moments emerge unpredictably. This is why the game works more reliably in lower player counts, even Solo board game. With no downtime, the rhythm just buzzes, and the exploration is completely immersive.

Apart from the unique approach to the dispersed perspective and its quirky attitude to the mission objectives, Vantage’s real innovation is how it handles discovery. Most of the games of this kind are Campaign board game That requires you to commit to a scene and play it in a few meetings. Vantage pushes its gameplay to two or three hours of engagement. Although, that's not all.

Vantage's real experience is one of the extended games when the game starts and wraps up in a session. The knowledge you gain is the main achievement and what you accept. At future meetings you will learn more about the world, the various key locations, and the mysterious nature of the “travelers” you are constantly in touch with. This is an ostensibly single-section game, campaign format smuggled. Frankly, this is really great. Much of this depends on the amount of content provided and the discovery of its compelling nature. What you will find is wild and powerful, usually exceeding expectations.

This box will reach dozens of hours of competition. There are hundreds of locations, hundreds of projects, characters and creatures to discover. You can only trigger one action each time you arrive at the position. You cannot perform a second operation on the card in the same session. This is artificial, but it highlights how each setter has multiple discoveries. Returning to the attractions you saw before will create new inspiration.

It's subtle, but perhaps the design is the strongest mechanical trick. One of the weaknesses of a game like the Seventh Continent is that you have to reread the previously broken ground. Many positions in the game lose their surprise and spontaneity in repeated matches. Vantage overcomes these problems by proposing a richer location and task goals that can be achieved in many different ways. The structure of finding two artifacts on a planet holding dozens of planets is very different, rather than finding temples at specific locations.

All of this is tied to the core theme of creativity. The rulebook explicitly recommends that you bring your personal goals into the meeting or even give up the assigned tasks. This is also exacerbated by the nature of the game, as the result of any particular goal is a lack of exaggerated textual parts. Vantage is about the journey and agency shaping it. This happens to fit the spirit of design, emphasizing that the central experience is yours and that it is yours alone. Make you helpful. I think this is one of the best games of 2025.

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