The Board Game Vantage Is Too Big for Its Own Good

By Keith Law | November 12, 2025 | 1:07pm

Images courtesy of Stonemaier Games

Games Reviews vantage

The Board Game Vantage Is Too Big for Its Own Good

Vantage is the newest game from Jamey Stegmaier, designer of Scythe and Viticulture as well as publisher of Wingspan, but it’s something completely different—a cooperative adventure game that has an enormous amount of content in the box so that you can play it repeatedly and get different experiences each time. It is clearly a huge labor of love for Stegmaier that took around seven years for him to complete. The concept, the art, and the story are all very impressive, but I simply can not imagine bringing this game to the table with anyone but the most experienced gamers—and even then, I’d be worried about how much time we’d all spend referring to rulebooks and looking for clarifications online.

Vantage is an open-world exploration game, where players work together to complete at least one mission or destiny card, and with over 1700 cards in the box it offers many different paths for you to play the game again and again. It takes the experience of those great Choose Your Own Adventure books from the 1980s—there are a couple of actual CYOA games out there, by the way—and brings it to the tabletop with a massive sci-fi experience. The players are space travelers whose ship has crashed on an unfamiliar, inhabited planet, and they’ve been scattered by the crash so that they can communicate but can’t see each other. Thus each player will pursue their own separate adventure within the larger one, talking to other players without disclosing their precise location (not that it would help anyway, given how the game is designed). Each play session starts with one Mission card that players will try to complete, but along they way they can pick up other Destiny cards that present different win or completion conditions. After any session, you return all cards to their places in the box, in order, saving nothing—each play is self-contained, with no campaign or legacy elements.

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The heart of the game is the action system, which involves rolling ‘challenge dice’ and using skill tokens and/or open spaces on your cards to try to mitigate negative rolls. Every location card has from one to six possible actions listed on it, each tied to a color. When you select an action, you pick up the booklet matching that color and look up the entry for the location’s number. That entry lists a cost in dice: You must roll that many challenge dice, which can reduce your health, morale, or time, reducing the dice count by one for every matching skill token you can discard. Your action always succeeds, however, unlike most games of this ilk (or the CYOA books; I definitely died a lot reading those), so Vantage allows you to lean into the thematic elements rather than forcing you to consider what you can afford—although that’s a mixed blessing, as I’ll get into later.

There is a tremendous amount of content here, and I can’t say I’ve seen even a quarter of it. I’ve encountered a mini-game, a hidden city, magic spells (so I guess we’ve got fantasy as well as sci-fi), and more things I won’t spoil, and if I didn’t find the game so hard to manage, I’d love to dive back into it and discover more stuff.

I played this game solo, because after watching the official how-to-play video and reading the rulebook, I figured I had to muddle through it once myself before trying it with anyone. The experience was long and frustrating, and I spent more time trying to learn what symbols and icons meant or trying to figure out why I couldn’t do something than I did actually playing the game. There is just way too much going on, way too many terms and pieces, and way way too many restrictions. In one play, I ended up in a sort of infinite loop of locations, and had several items that didn’t appear to have anything to do with those locations, making their utility quite limited.

You can choose any of the main actions depicted on your location, up to all six, but Vantage doesn’t tell you the cost for any action until after you’ve selected it. Your choice of what to do may, and should, depend on how many dice you’re going to have to roll, because if your health or morale indicators are low you might prefer a lower-cost action to keep yourself from hitting zero. Instead, you choose the action, and if the cost is six dice, well, tough. I ended up just ignoring that and looking at the cost before choosing because I would have been dead long before I’d accomplished anything in the game if I hadn’t. In most cases, you only get that one main action, and then you have to move on to another location, rather than getting to more fully explore the current spot to see what you might have missed.

I can’t imagine how much time and effort went into creating this game. There’s a huge amount of text, outstanding art on many of those 1700+ cards, and many mini-games and stories within the larger game itself. I wanted to like Vantage and explore much more of the planet and the narratives within the box. There’s just too large a barrier to entry for me to keep trying to fight the game, let alone try to teach it to others.

Keith Law is the author of The Inside Game and Smart Baseball and a senior baseball writer for The Athletic. You can find his personal blog the dish, covering games, literature, and more, at meadowparty.com/blog.