Vantage

To set up Vantage, place the double-sided center mat in the play area, along with coin supplies, boost cubes, skill tokens, dice, and the various story books and card piles. Players choose or randomly receive initial skills, taking their matching character cards, boost cubes, and a hidden location card placed inside a stand so only they can see it. You also set up morale, time, and health trackers on the center mat according to your chosen difficulty level. Finally, set up the initial mission card and deal starting items and locations, ensuring that all unrevealed cards and story book pages remain hidden until instructed otherwise.

The main objective in Vantage is to survive and explore an uncharted planet as a cooperative team of players who have crash-landed in different areas. While you all work together on the shared group mission and discover new destiny goals, you must carefully monitor your individual health, morale, and time trackers. If any marker drops to zero, it can trigger the end of the game for everyone, making mutual support vital for success.

The game is played over a series of clockwise turns where each player performs one of three main action types: location actions, card actions, or depart actions. When taking an action, you choose an option without knowing its exact cost or outcome. Another player reads the relevant story book entry to determine how many challenge dice you must roll. You can spend matching skill tokens to reduce the dice pool, assign rolled dice to open slots on your cards to gain bonuses, and finally resolve any remaining penalty dice before reading the action's final outcome.

Vantage is not a legacy or multi-game campaign experience; each time you sit down, you play a complete, standalone game. While you will uncover secrets about the world that might inform future playstyles, nothing permanently carries over. Everything is fully reset after each session, offering entirely new exploration opportunities and objectives with every fresh setup.

The game ends in one of several ways. If players fulfill the requirements of the shared mission, they can read a passage and choose to end the game or continue toward a destiny goal. Completing a destiny allows you to trigger an ending immediately. Alternatively, if any player's health, morale, or time tracker hits zero, you consult the story book to see if the game ends instantly or if you get a final chance to continue.