Stonemaier Games has an all-star lineup, including titles such as Wingspan, Scythe, and Viticulture. Vantage is the publisher’s latest hotly anticipated release, and it’s the culmination of eight years of work from studio head Jamey Stegmaier. It’s a game full of secrets and exploration, capturing some of the same vibes as mystery box series like Lost and Scavenger’s Reign. It also just may be Stonemaier’s most revelatory game yet.
Vantage begins with a simple premise. Players take on the role of crew members of an intergalactic spaceship en route to an uncharted planet. Before landing on the destination, something goes wrong, and everyone bails in isolated escapade pods. You are now hurtling towards this heretofore unexplored world with zero understanding of what you will find.
That’s the setup. While each player receives an individual named character with a specialty, there's no lengthy backstory. You don’t even know what organization, government, or coalition you work for. Beyond a relatively light ruleset, you know nothing.
This is the mystique of Vantage. It’s an open-world exploration board game built atop the bones of video games like The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Subnautica. This style of board game isn’t novel. There have been some popular entries in recent years, including the fantastic Sleeping Gods and 7th Continent. But those other tabletop games are based on a foundation of historical reality with a fictional layer on top. Vantage turns this idea on its head, providing no footing for understanding or tradition. Everything is weird and unusual, sometimes bearing a resemblance to what we know, but even then, this is often used as a device to subvert expectations.
Each player arrives on the planet at a randomized location. You are lost, like detritus heaved into the wind and violently scattered across a foreign body. Your position, and the conduit for the bulk of interaction, is the location card. This large rectangular card depicts your current perspective in the first person. This is your vantage.
Each card lists a half-dozen actions, each mapped to a separate skill. These categories are broad in application, with titles such as “take”, “look”, and “help”. They are denoted by colors, with the specific use of each category given a name corresponding to the circumstances you’re currently in.
This means the location card will often list a separate colored action for each of the six categories. For example, the overpower action may be displayed as a red “steal” on the card, while the blue move could be listed as “chase”. This is where the game is murky, requiring players to lean on intuition by studying the card’s artwork and trying to infer a sense of context.
After selecting the action you want to perform, another player picks up the narrative booklet of the same color and flips to the entry with the same number as your location card. Each action type has its own bespoke book of story entries, making for a massive amount of content on the whole.
The story entries list a difficulty and a brief description of what you are trying to do. So the steal example above could be: 4 – steal the satchel laying next to the sleeping sentient. Tests in this game are straightforward. You roll a handful of dice equal to the difficulty of the action, and then either lose health, stamina, or morale based on the roll. Some dice results avoid losing any vital signs, and are typically the best possible outcome.
Cleverly, your character – as well as other cards you may have attained on your journey, such as items or other followers – may store rolled dice so you don’t have to suffer the consequence. Other players may even absorb some of these dice depending on their abilities, effectively representing support or encouragement. This is the main throughline of the system, performing actions and then eating the results while hopefully maintaining enough mental and physical integrity to keep the adventure going. The more tools and followers you can amass during the journey, the more complex your system of mitigation becomes allowing for more interesting abilities and effects.
Crucially, you never fail an action in Vantage. Every test automatically succeeds, with the tension residing completely around the cost. If any of your three core stats is lowered to zero, whether as the result of a roll or triggered effect, the mission immediately ends. The action system is also where the core frustrations may arise. The fuzzy context regarding descriptors, such as what “steal” actually means, and not knowing how many dice will be rolled prior to the selection, can feel too unpredictable. This approach folds into the central philosophy of discovery quite neatly, but it’s not a particularly strategic system and can sometimes take you by surprise. This can lead to abrupt endings that are unsatisfying.
One of Vantage’s most compelling details is the mission. You are assigned a random goal at the outset of play that the whole group must work towards. This could be something like “attain two artifacts” or “build a home”. These are invented to avoid spoiling content, but the actual missions parallel this methodology. In pursuing your goal, you may also come across a destiny. Destinies are organically discovered objectives which can be pursued in tandem with your mission. They’re more impactful emotionally, as they arise naturally through play and often flow from actions. As a device to spur creative dynamic interest, they’re superb.
While I don't view the murkiness of Vantage’s action system as a substantial flaw, I do have a more critical view of the destiny and mission structure. Mostly, this system is problematic in conjunction with the unique format of multiplayer play. Since each player is scattered in an unknown land, sessions can often feel as though several characters are playing their own separate games. This leads to slow progress, uneven investment, and a finish that can be unsatisfying. In one session, a player was pursuing a series of odd developments and weird discoveries. They were learning a mysterious craft and building a life for themselves on the planet. Meanwhile, another player on a completely separate side of the world accomplished our goal and triggered the end game. The first player was never able to pursue their own interests and felt as though they were not linked to the greater story at all.
Vantage tries to correct for this. It allows you to keep playing if you’d like, but this rarely feels satisfying. Should we all have sat by, spending another hour or so wandering around while we waited for the other player to reach the conclusion of their own goals? It’s not a great position to be in.
The isolated positioning of players works much better when pursuing a destiny or mission that can be accomplished in pieces. Occasionally, narrative will align perfectly with players calling out landmarks they're near and trying to orient themselves. Sometimes you have to work together across massive distances. When this occurs it’s magical. Everything feels right and Vantage is hitting its peak. These moments, however, emerge unpredictably. This is why the game works much more reliably with lower player counts, or even as a solo board game. With no downtime, the tempo just hums along and the exploration is wholly immersive.
Beyond the unique approach of scattered perspectives and its quirky take on mission objectives, Vantage’s real innovation is in how it approaches discovery. Most games of this ilk are campaign board games that ask you to commit to a scenario and play it over a handful of sessions. Vantage shoves its gameplay into a single two- or three-hour engagement. Although, that’s not the whole story.
While a game begins and wraps in a single session, the true experience of Vantage is one of extended play. The knowledge you gain is the primary achievement and what you take with you. In future sessions you'll learn more about the world, various key locations, and the mysterious nature of “the traveler” who continually reaches out to you. It’s a single-session game on the surface, with a campaign format smuggled in. This is frankly brilliant. Much of this rides on the sheer amount of content offered and the compelling nature of discovering it. The things you will find are wild and powerful, often impressing beyond expectation.
This box will stand up to dozens and dozens of hours of play. There are hundreds of locations and hundreds of items and characters and creatures to discover. Every time you arrive at a location you can only trigger a single action. You cannot engage in a second action on that card in the same session. This is artificial, but it highlights how every single set-piece has multiple things to discover. Returning to previously seen spots yields new revelations.
This is subtle, but perhaps the design’s strongest mechanical trick. One of the weaknesses of games like 7th Continent is that you must retread previously broken ground. Many locations in that game lose their wonder and spontaneity upon repeated play. Vantage overcomes that problem by presenting richer locations, as well as mission objectives that can be accomplished in many different ways. It’s structurally very different to locate two artifacts on a planet that holds dozens, than it is to locate a temple at a specific location.
All of this ties in with the core motif of creativity. The rulebook explicitly suggests you may bring your own personal goals into a session and even forego the assigned mission. The nature of play reinforces this as well, as the outcome of any particular objective is a sparse section of text lacking fanfare. Vantage is about the journey and your agency in shaping it. This cuts right to the spirit of the design, highlighting that the central experience is yours, and yours alone. Make of Vantage what you will. What I make of Vantage is that it’s one of the best games of 2025.