Vantage

I mostly bought this because a customer at an estate walkthrough wouldn’t stop talking about it, kept saying it was the game of the year before it had even shipped to most backers, which is a sentence that should set off alarms and mostly did for me. There was a whole minor controversy online about the designer rating his own unreleased game a 10, and about the metal coin add-on selling out before anyone had actually played a full session, and I went in half expecting a good marketing campaign wearing a game’s clothes.

It isn’t that, not entirely. The premise is a full planet, hundreds of interconnected location cards, everyone scattered and radioing discoveries back and forth cooperatively instead of playing shoulder to shoulder at a shared board. That’s a genuinely different table feel than most co-ops I’ve played, less huddle, more each of you off exploring your own corner and reporting in. When it clicks it’s got a real sense of scale to it, bigger than the box has any business feeling.

Where I land more skeptical is durability of interest past the discovery high. A lot of what’s driving the excitement right now is still the newness, the not-knowing-what’s-around-the-next-card feeling, and I genuinely don’t know yet how that holds up on repeat plays once the map stops surprising you. I’d rather wait and see than hand out a rating this thing hasn’t fully earned from actual replay, the same way I don’t price an item at an estate sale off what the seller swears it’s worth.

The metal coins, for what it’s worth, have real weight to them, satisfying to stack, and I get why people wanted them before the base game even shipped. That much of the hype I can vouch for firsthand.