Vantage Review – It’s Just A Box of Cards
Vantage is a heavy game. I don’t mean in the sense that the rules are fairly complex and the strategic and tactical decisions demanding, because it’s relatively straightforward to learn. I mean it’s laden with over 1400 cards and a bunch of tokens and dice. The box is a chonk. These days such boxes fill me with trepidation, a reluctance to take them down from the shelf and actually get the thing inside played. Revising the rules, lengthy setup and teardown, scouring BGG forum posts for errata or clarification… it’s exhausting just to think about. I’ve built the process up in my mind to the point that I rarely get back to games I enjoy because I’ve convinced myself it’s too difficult a task. Designer Jamey Stegmaier knows this is some BS gaslighting on my part, and obviously sent Vantage my way to teach me this lesson.
Vantage is like a ‘roided-up Choose Your Own Adventure, familiar to fans of Sleeping Gods or Legacy of Dragonholt. Mixing elements of sci-fi and fantasy, a session of Vantage sees players journey across an alien planet after crash landing, tasked with guiding their Character (card) on initial Mission (card) that could then expand into a Destiny (card) which can be met by finding Item (cards) or engaging with Inhabitant (cards) found on the hundreds of Location (cards). To paraphrase Ben from Parks and Rec, it’s about the cards. Vantage is a card-sleeving addicts’ nightmare, not only because it will in no way fit back into the box or be more functional sleeved, but because it’s oh-so-very hard to even justify why you’d spend almost more money than a copy of the game costs to keep it pristine. Evocative artwork by Valentina Fillic, Soren Meding and Emilien Rotival bring the world to life primarily through titular Vantage cards, large landscapes showcasing the many biomes of this world. Although there isn’t an artwork slouch in the whole box – every card has a solid illustration or image. No surprise then Stegmaier has said Vantage was close to a decade of work. Unfortunately, showing much of it would constitute spoilers, as even the artwork on a card can reveal story information or clues about what the player could or should do.
Vantage may be heavy on cards, but the gameplay exists at the opposite end of that spectrum, and is light as a feather (or about 35 dice to be exact). Each turn players select a single action option on their current Vantage card. These actions are based on a coloured keyword, each of which corresponds to related verb set – an ‘Overpower’ action could be ‘Raid’ on one card, and ‘Fish’ on another. Once the action is selected, flick through its matching booklet, find the number matching the current Vantage card and roll the required number of Challenge Dice from the CHALLENGE DICE POOL (so dramatic!) without sneaking a peek at the result just yet. Toss the dice and bingo bango, read the rest of the text. The decision space can feel wide, while the mechanics of resolving the decision are rather trite. That is, outside of choosing whether you’d like to spend matching Skill Tokens to remove Challenge Dice from the total amount rolled. When dice can’t be removed, they can be mitigated by placing them on result-matching spaces on… drumroll… your cards! In this way, it’s possible to push further before emptying the CHALLENGE DICE POOL, because once these are all used up, players have to…. refresh the whole dice pool and have a better shot at success? Realistically, the limited amount of Challenge Dice in the pool serves to make the card mitigation mechanic more viable – Vantage really wants players to succeed wherever possible, because in order to get the most out of the game, you’ll need to play it a lot. I’m talking tens of times at least to really start making sense of the world. A single play will only give a glimpse of maybe 25 Vantage cards which number in the hundreds.
‘Legacy’ is a word that is often bandied about in boardgame circles, usually as something irreversible, like destroying game components, permanently altering them or making something that changes slightly but is ultimately resettable as if it never occurred. Vantage instead makes the player the Legacy component, each game peeling back more of the vast world, its inhabitants and its secrets. The cards in Vantage don’t get torn up and replaced, nor do the die faces change or a secret box with new components get opened (OK wait so this sort of does happen, but it’s for the weirdest reason). Instead, the knowledge the player gains reframes and recontextualises the experience going forward, the world of Vantage slowly coming into focus and feeling less like a series of unrelated postcards from exotic locales and resolving into something more cohesive. I don’t know if Jamey Stegmaier would count it as cheating, but Vantage has me taking notes, small things about what I’ve seen on cards or places to return to when fate wills it.
Selfishly, I don’t want to share Vantage with anyone. The box states 1-6, but real ones know boardgame boxes play fast and loose with player counts and playtimes. A trusted partner or friend can bring another dimension to the experience, but I’ve thoroughly enjoyed my solo sojourns across the lush jungles, scorching deserts, stormy seas and treacherous caverns. Much like a good book, Vantage can be incredibly absorbing and having someone else interrupt the process didn’t work for me personally, like trying to read a book and every so often someone tries to speak to you about something semi-related. One trick I found to increase this immersion was by throwing on a good soundtrack, the kind that is all ambience and atmosphere and readily available on Minodice. I’m fairly surprised one wasn’t explicitly commissioned by Stonemaier as the game benefits a lot from the vibes – maybe a series of scented candles for a future expansion, Jamey? Often with immersion of this level though comes the sudden realisation that it’s 2:30AM in the morning and I have work in a few hours. Thank goodness then that finding time to squeeze in a game of Vantage is a breeze due to the generously flexible length of play, with some real ‘Everyone’s a winner!’ energy meaning players get to choose exactly when the game is ‘done’. To be clear, I am very bad at this. My skin crawls at this sort of delineation of success and failure – what do you mean I choose if I ‘won’ or whether I ‘lost’? There aren’t even scores, it’s just a self-measurement of my internal sense of satisfaction! Where’s the slight sense of superiority over others I can feed off when I eke out a win in the latest hotness newro? Vantage is the sort of game whose BGG Strategy forum could seriously contain posts about what Yankee Candle goes best with which Vantage card numbers as opposed to ways to improve play.
My own issues aside, this design choice makes Vantage perfect for anyone short on time, provided they can make peace with there not being any ‘real’ winning or losing – it’s the journey, not the destination. Fail states are so ingrained in how I see games however I found myself chafing a bit at my first “loss” and grumbling at the unfairness of it all. For those who tend to move in patterns and find themselves treading the same paths over and over, Vantage may also wear out its welcome early; the level of buy-in to the world and its many mysteries and surprises is a yardstick for the longevity it will have in your gaming rotation. Simply put, for those wanting more explicit goals and fierce competition in their games, Vantage isn’t going to deliver.
On reflection, Vantage is a game I shouldn’t really like at all. If anything, it’s done a great job of solidifying for me exactly what it is I like about tabletop games, but I can’t help finding things to admire about. I lean towards more robust mechanics and prefer my game narratives a bit less open-ended, so on multiple occasions found much of Vantage difficult to follow or engage with. Keeping notes in order to track what areas of the game I’d experienced and which I would prefer not to experience again greatly improved my ongoing plays – one particular cave system had me going in circles for quite a while to the point I snuck a peek in one of the books to see how the flip I could get out of it. Another sojourn to a lovely series of islands ended when I couldn’t quite find the thing I needed for my personal quest, so instead decided I would become good friends with every Sentient in the area until I ran down the ‘booby prize’ end-game timer card. Vantage is a story generator disguised as a tabletop game, Myst if puzzles were solved by dice rolls. If it were a digital game, I fear it would be derided as an RNG riddled walking-sim.
Yet if Jamey Stegmaier worried too much about what critics thought, it’s doubtful Stonemaier Games would have achieved anywhere near the success it has in the modern boardgaming marketplace. I know people for whom Vantage will be exactly the sort of game they’re looking for, much better equipped as they are to handle a story with the odd dice roll as opposed to more mechanical overhead and mechanisms I crave. How many more journeys in Vantage I have in me I’m not really sure, but nothing has made me grapple with the question as to why I play quite so intently. Vantage is just a box of cards inasmuch as the world is (according to the late great Robert Hunter) just a box of rain; open up Jamey Stegmaier’s creation and “maybe you’ll find direction, around some corner where it’s been waiting to meet you”.
A second edition printing of Vantage was supplied by Stonemaier Games for review purposes. The Trail and Sail errata pack and Storybook update pack were purchased by the reviewer independently.
