Vantage Review – Sci-Fi Exploration Without The Hand-Holding

Disclaimer: Vantage was provided for free by Stonermaier Games although the writing and opinions of this article are my own.

Vantage, designed by Jamey Stegmaier, taps right back into the roots of why I’ve enjoyed so many games from Stonemaier Games over the years. Jamey has a real knack for telling stories through artwork and short snippets of writing. It was one of the things that made Scythe so memorable, and that same strength is on full display here.

The difference is that in Vantage, the story is not just flavour around the edges. The story is the game, unfolding across a planet that somehow feels both familiar and completely strange.

But this is more than just another narrative adventure. Vantage feels like a genuine passion project from the Stonemaier team. It works as both a love letter to the genre and an attempt to push it forward, with a surprising number of clever ideas and upgrades woven into the design.

So let’s jump in.

How to play

Vantage is a cooperative game that drops you onto an alien planet and then, like a parent at a playground, basically tells you to run off and figure it out. Go find your friends. Climb on the strange equipment. Maybe even burn the underside of your legs on the metal slide for fun. It is a sci-fi adventure sandbox where exploration and experimentation are the whole point.

Each game starts with a randomly chosen character, starting location on the planet, and a mission you must complete to win. The overall idea is simple. You will travel across the planet, visit strange locations, and interact with the local plants, animals, and strange environments.

From there you begin exploring the planet one beautifully illustrated location card at a time, across more than 400 locations. Each card represents a different area and offers a range of colour coded actions, broken into the categories move, look, engage, help, take, and overpower.

On your turn you choose one of the available actions, or move to a new location. Either way you open the relevant story book and read aloud the entry that matches the number on the card. And yes, there are a lot of story books. One for each category of action.

Most entries follow a similar structure. A number shows how difficult the task is, followed by a short piece of text that gives the acting player a taste of what is about to happen. The good news is you never truly fail an action. The bad news is that actions usually cost you morale, health, or time. To find out how much, you roll a number of challenge dice equal to the task difficulty.

Your items and equipment help absorb these dice. Depending on the colour of the action, the verb used in the action, or the symbols you rolled, you can assign dice to your gear to soften the consequences. Some cards even let players help each other by taking dice from someone else’s roll.

If you cannot assign a die, you move the relevant tracker down. If anyone hits zero on morale, health, or time, the game ends in a loss.

Once the challenge is resolved, the rest of the entry is revealed, which often rewards you with items, money or skill tokens.

Otherwise, you keep exploring the planet until you complete your mission and win the game, or push for an even bigger victory by discovering and completing a destiny card.

That covers the basics. As you explore, new rules and systems are introduced through the encounters you discover. So while this gives you the general feel of the game, you rarely know exactly what you will be doing next or how the story will unfold.

A world you fill in yourself

One of the best things about Scythe is the event cards. They show you a picture, present a couple of options, and then let your imagination fill in the space between the artwork and the text. It is minimalistic storytelling, and it really works for me. And it is exactly what Vantage does over and over again.

Each location pairs a picturesque scene with just a few words of text, letting your imagination do the heavy lifting. Sometimes you’re staring up at a towering titan of a monster, feeling its presence loom over you. Other times you’re in a bustling market square, or watching an alien twirl through a field of glowing plants.

The artwork is stunning across the hundreds of locations, and the text is deliberately spare. Just enough to hint at what’s happening and give you a choice to act. That combination makes it effortless to slip into this strange world of aliens and sentient creatures, filling in all the gaps with your own stories as you go.

Another thing Vantage does really well is pacing. Turns move quickly, which is surprisingly refreshing for a narrative driven game. One of my criticisms of Sleeping Gods was how uneven the turns could feel. One player might have a five minute turn, while another might take thirty. And if you are not invested in their story at that moment, it is easy to lose focus and start fiddling with your phone… Not that I have ever done that at the board game table, of course.

Vantage avoids that problem entirely. Turns stay sharp and the spotlight never drifts too far away. Part of that comes from the story entries themselves, which are usually only a couple of sentences long. But it is also because the game is organised so well that finding the right passage to read, or the correct card to hand out, takes almost no time at all.

With multiple books to reference and cards numbered all the way up to 1300, it is as impressive an organisational achievement as it is a game design one. Honestly, the amount of care and thought poured into the game is incredible.

Because beyond everything I have mentioned so far, the game simply runs smoothly. Despite everything going on, there is a real sense of freedom in how you explore the planet. It is very easy to get lost in the adventures, and occasional misadventures, of your travels.

One thing that particularly surprised me was the variety of quests I found myself on, along with the small mini games scattered throughout the experience. Most involve dice or some form of random chance, but they are fun little diversions that add a lot to the overall journey.

Then when it is all done, you pack it away and start again. There is no need to save characters or track long term progression. That approach works really well here. It is actually the opposite of my criticism of Lands of Galzyr, because Vantage does not rely on a single overarching campaign. Each playthrough gives you a completely new mission, which feels refreshing.

A brilliant adventure… with a couple of caveats

Now I am head over heels for Vantage. I have played a lot of narrative driven games over the years, but this might be the best one yet. It really worked for me. That said, there were a couple of things that did not quite hit the mark.

The first is game length. There are a few different ways to “win” in Vantage. You can complete the mission, complete your destiny, or complete both. In our games we managed to finish the mission fairly quickly. So quickly, in fact, that it left us wanting more.

But when we pushed on to complete the destiny as well, the playtime almost tripled. By the end we were a little exhausted. I kind of wish there was a middle ground between the two lengths. Something that felt like a full adventure without relying on the right locations appearing at just the right time.

That leads to my next small gripe. Occasionally you will gain the ability to look at the world map, which can hint at specific places you might want to visit. The problem is that neither my wife nor I could ever quite work out where we actually were. At one point we joked that we needed Google Maps. And even if we did figure it out, remembering all the different locations scattered across the planet would be nearly impossible.

Those were my two minor complaints. The other thing worth mentioning is that Vantage takes a design cue from modern RPG systems like Blades in the Dark. When you attempt something in this game, you will almost always succeed.

For example, at one point my son decided to rob some aliens on the highway. There was no dice roll to see if he pulled it off. It simply happened.

What the game cares about is not whether you succeed, but what it costs you.

I can see that approach rubbing some people the wrong way because it removes a lot of the traditional tension. It is not a “will they or won’t they” moment. It is more about what complications appear along the way.

Even with those small caveats, this is about as close to perfection as narrative board games get. Plenty of games promise a unique experience every time you play. But with more than 1300 cards and an enormous world to explore, that promise has never felt more true than it does in Vantage.