After a turbulent journey through space, an unknown planet appears on the horizon. Systems begin to fail. You crash-land at a random spot on the planet with only limited equipment. Your most important ally is knowledge. You might be able to share that knowledge with friends who have landed elsewhere on the planet. Your advantage? Your view, your Vantage.
Development
Jamey Stegmaier worked on Vantage for more than eight years. Jamey Stegmaier (Stonemaier Games) is known to many for games like Viticulture and Scythe, and as the publisher of Wingspan. For me, Scythe and its successor already felt like true journeys of discovery and narrative games. And I don’t mean a pre-planned story or campaign, but games that craft a narrative through gameplay—through the experiences of the players. “Remember when this happened, and then that!” Thanks in part to that feeling, Scythe is my favorite game of all time.
Vantage intentionally gives players that sense of discovery. Jamey Stegmaier has written extensively about the challenging and complex development of Scythe and is very open about his sources of inspiration. He drew inspiration from games like Zelda: Breath of the Wild and numerous video game RPGs with choices. So-called sandboxes, where players are given freedom and, above all, the choice in what they do and what their next step is.
Gameplay
Every game of Vantage starts with your spaceship crashing, after which you end up at one of the starting locations. This location is randomly determined by rolling dice. Fate also determines your character, mission, and the skill tokens you start with.
Once you arrive at your location, you can enjoy the view. Each player is in a spot that other players cannot see and that you must therefore describe to them.
The cards not only have an image and description, but also the different actions you can perform at that location and the directions you can move in. The actions correspond to certain categories, allowing you to somewhat predict what direction an action might take you. Each action has its own book, and if you want to perform an action, you flip to the correct page in the appropriate book to execute and read the action.
Actions have costs, but you don’t have to pay for them in the traditional sense. The costs are more about the effort you need to exert. With experience, an action becomes cheaper. For the remaining costs, you roll the same number of dice. You can potentially place these dice on cards in your own grid; otherwise, you may incur a penalty, such as loss of life force, time, or morale.
During the game, you also collect cards to place in your grid. These cards provide extra actions or bonuses.
With the actions, you get various choices to shape the story and determine your direction. Throughout the game, you gather information to achieve your goals and may receive extra objectives, missions, and quests to complete.
Verdict
The name Vantage is very appropriate. It’s a pity that the Dutch language does not have a comparable word with so much nuance. Vantage means not just ‘viewpoint,’ but also your positioning and perspective, and the possible advantage you have from your information. Vantage is not just the title of the game, but also an important game mechanism. You continually base your actions on a location card—on what you can see at that moment—but also on everything you know up to that point. Think of the information you’ve gathered during the game, heard from other players, and your previous adventures in this beautiful and rich world.
Vantage is a sandbox: although you can fail if you lose all your life, time, or morale, individual actions can never fail. An action always succeeds, but the outcome varies depending on your approach. The game encourages you to try and experiment. It challenges you to literally and figuratively walk and discover new paths. The world of Vantage is literally at your feet, with more than enough secrets to uncover.
The gameplay can best be described as a ‘choose-your-own-adventure’ on steroids. Do you remember those books or video games from the past? The player was given choices, and based on those, the story went in a certain direction. Vantage is not the first game to take this as a starting point, but it turns the mechanism where players must continually choose into an endlessly replayable adventure, which you can experience in different ways each time. In principle, a player at a location during a game of Vantage can undertake only one of the available actions. That already provides many different possibilities, which are only a small part of your path. There are many locations, many actions, countless possibilities, and on top of that, different characters, missions, quests, mini-games, items, and cards with unique properties, actions, and choices.
Vantage is a brilliant sandbox in which the player can experience and discover a lot. It truly is a journey of discovery in board game form, with more than enough to explore, experience, and play.
