Vantage

Everyone is on the same planet. Nobody is in the same place.

Jamey Stegmaier's open-world adventure game, and unusually for Stonemaier it is not an engine builder at all. You wake on an unnamed planet and explore it from a first-person view, one card at a time: nearly eight hundred interconnected locations across four hundred cards, plus another nine hundred or so cards of things waiting to be found. There is no campaign and no legacy element — each session is its own attempt, and the box resets afterwards.

It is co-operative, but the players are scattered across the world and can only help one another by talking, which turns out to be the entire design. What you find stays sealed until you find it, so the map assembles itself differently every time. At 2.3 on the weight scale it is far lighter than the size of the box suggests; the difficulty is navigation and description, not rules. Runs two to three hours.

Perfect for: Groups who enjoy describing a room badly to someone who cannot see it.

1–6 players | 120–180 minutes | Age 14+

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📖 New to the genre? What Is a Cooperative Game? — how they work and where to start.