I have acquired a copy of Vantage, the latest Stonemaier Games production.
It is a bit of a weird one. The game seems to be mostly like No Man’s Sky before all the missing content was patched in.
That is to say, it is a first-person exploration game where you mill about on a planet after having crash-landed, and discover … stuff.
What kind of stuff? Well, I don’t know as I haven’t played it too much. One time I found a dragon. Another time I found some some gems. Another time I found a flower.
It evokes a nostalgia for times long gone, where people had to read text from books, look at static artwork printed on cardboard, and interpret an unfolding story that is personal to you.
I might sound as if I am not a fan of this, but I actually am. I love all that stuff. Yet I am surprised that this game was made at all.
I even decided to go all in and get the upgraded skill tokens, coins, and player boards1.
In the five or so games I have played thus far I have taken a single coin from the box. However I love the look and feel of those chunky skill tokens.
The gameplay is very simple. You have the four cardinal points on each location you visit, and you can choose to do one out of six actions at the location.
You are assigned various skill tokens at the start of the game matching a certain action that you can take.
You always succeed in your actions, but you do not know how difficult it was to complete the action before you chose to do it.
This difficulty is represented by “challenge dice”, and you roll one of these for each action value you could not mitigate with your skill tokens. You resolve the outcome of these challenge dice and can lose health, morale, or time as a result of carrying out your actions.
I am planning on doing a couple of playthroughs of this game to see how I get on with it.
2nd September 2025
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I just can’t help myself ↩︎