Vantage

I watched the lead-up to this one for close to two years before it actually showed up, and honestly the discourse around it soured me a little before I’d touched a single card. There was a whole thing where the designer rated his own game a 10 publicly, which reads badly no matter the intent, and a metal coin upgrade people were buying before the base game even existed. I went in wanting to be annoyed.

I wasn’t, mostly. The pitch is an open world spread across hundreds of interconnected location cards, co-op, one to six players scattered across the map communicating what they’re finding as they go, and that scope actually holds together at the table instead of collapsing into busywork the way a lot of “explore everything” games do. The sense of a real, connected place is the thing that got me, less a board game map and more a world you’re describing to your teammates as you uncover it, which is exactly the roleplay-adjacent pull that keeps me coming back to co-op games generally.

Solo works, which matters to me since a fair amount of my shelf gets played alone on a weeknight. It also holds up fine at higher counts since the communication constraint scales the difficulty naturally rather than the rules changing underneath you, so the player-count sweet spot is wider than most co-ops manage.

I’ll be honest that I don’t have years of other people’s plays to compare notes against the way I do with an older game, this one’s too new for that kind of layered community wisdom. What I can say is it earned the shelf space, coin gimmick and internet drama aside.