(Photo credits to Awaken Realms)
Written by Ed Carter, Staff Writer and creator of Movin’ Meeples
We had a path all along; we just didn’t know it. Carried in the “junk” of our DNA were coordinates placed there from eons in our past, Divine coordinates we named them and now putting aside our petty differences and united as one planet, we have set out to follow those coordinates and hopefully find answers to our biggest questions, where did we come from and why are we here?
ISS Vanguard is a 1-4 player game where the players do not play a specific character, but rather one of the four sections of the ship (Security, Science, Engineering or Recon) where recruits are trained and taken to planets to explore, and investigate along the path “the builders” have left. The game takes place in two phases, the exploration, and the ship phase.
The game is built to be set up and torn down easily, and the two phases are seamlessly connected Since the game has a very extensive setup detailed when you first open the box, and a guided tutorial to learn the game as you go, I am just going to touch on how it plays.
After all of the decks and the section boxes have been sorted, choose your first 4 crew members; one for each section. Take the character board, crew member, the section cards, and dice and charge tokens indicated and set up your board. Each section has a number of dice that they can use based on their rank. Take out the Planetopia book, card tray A, the ship log and set them aside. Each player creates a deck of 10 section cards and draws the set number based on their rank to their hand.
Take the ship book and go to the preparation for deployment section. Choose your lander and upgrades, set a counter for the amount of supplies, and gather equipment you want for the mission. Each lander card has details on how much equipment, crew, upgrades and supplies you can bring. Once the lander is ready, take out the lander card and go to the log section indicated. This will tell you what pages in the Planetopia, that your team will explore. Select a miniature for your crew member and place them at the lander location along with the lander standee or miniature. Find the unique discoveries required and place them on the indicated section of the planet. Take out the wounds, events, and discovery decks and set them out. Draw two rank-up cards, and choose one for the mission. Follow the log and you are ready to start exploring!
The ship book instructs on how to land, and the log book explains the steps in detail. Sometimes a danger die is rolled and compared to the section indicated on the reference card. Players can encounter perils, lose supplies, incur injuries, or make a smooth landing with no issues. Once completed, place the lander in a designated landing zone with the crew miniatures.
The planet has sections that will indicate what log entry to select, the global conditions, the mission cards, and what point of interest cards to set up. Each point of interest card has challenges that will need unique actions to complete and pass. The global conditions explain how to travel and what costs are needed to travel from area to area. Some areas have time tracks to move and some have instructions to move when conditions are met or failed.
A player will take two actions on their turn and they can be to travel, rest, prepare, lift off, or perform a special action (can only perform one per turn). Travel actions allow a player to move from one area to a connecting one. Check the global conditions and if you can pay the cost, if any, move your crew member. A rest action allows a player to recover half of their dice from the spent dice pool and costs one supply from the lander. A prepare step allows you to draw a section card, and perform a dice check to match the symbols on the card. To lift off, a crew member must be in the section where the lander is located. Taking this action will end planetary exploration and begin the ship phase of the game. A special action is an attempt to make discoveries, research or fight with threats. A special action usually requires a dice check to pass on a point of interest card. select a number of dice from your available pool, roll them, modify the roll with any conversion abilities, then check the results of the task being attempted. Follow the instructions and move any tracker along based on passing or failing the test. Go to any required log sections and follow the instructions. Completing challenges may provide success token, discoveries or discovery leads.
After a player has performed two actions, they draw an event card, comparing the biome symbols on the card to their current location; if any match, follow the card instructions. Play then continues to the next section, and continues until the players complete their mission and take off, or have an emergency evacuation and fail.
Once exploration is complete, the ship phase begins with following the docking and debriefing procedures. Here crew may be promoted, new dice can be acquired, and discoveries are added to the ship. Injured crew are placed in the medical section to recover and any uninjured crew are to report to the resting area of card box B. Follow the instructions to either save the game or continue to the ship phase.
Each ship phase starts at the bridge and based on the tech level and objective, gains the designated energy and command tokens. Energy is spent to move the ship, and to check the landing cards for the next planet for clues to what dice, what threats and ideas for what section is best suited for the next exploration. Take any cards from the awaiting bag and install them as instructed for bridge upgrades, or new objectives, tech level and place any situations at the top of the book to either be resolved or not. Situations that are not resolved, have negative effects on the ship and crew if not addressed, so it is best, if possible, to resolve them as soon as possible. After spending the energy to scout and move, then decide what sections of the ship to activate with the command tokens. They are the situation room, production, research, and barracks. The ship book details each area’s actions in detail and will need to be followed but in short, production generates new equipment, research creates upgrades, barracks recruit more crew, and situation is where the current situations are addressed.
ISS Vanguard is a big game, in scope and detail but mechanically is very easy to play. Players roll dice and play cards to achieve results on cards that indicate success or failure outcomes. There is a lot of following the log book that provides specific instructions to follow. There is an awesome companion app that provides great immersion into the game with scripted dialogue that can be used in place of the log book entries. It requires a LOT of bookkeeping as one whole phase is using and following cards; placing them in the assigned slots and pages of the ship book or binder. The game is beautifully set up and organized with guided instructions to lead you through the various stages. It comes with the card boxes, dividers, and section boxes to store the dice and cards for each section. The ship book is set up to easily follow and complete the tasks in that phase. The game does not take up a large space for the scope of it, the Planetopia is a spiral-bound book; the deck boxes are set up to work with each phase so the cards in Deck box A are not needed when using Deck Box B. The more familiar I have come with the game, the shorter and easier the sessions are, I love the simplicity of saving the game and resuming; it is wonderful for a large campaign experience the game provides. The story it weaves is a fascinating one, taking on the big questions of our existence and bringing it into a rich playable experience. The game scales at player counts really well. In addition to the campaign, there is a book of one-shot missions that are playable for a single gaming experience.
Dice games are luck driven, but the use of cards and conversion abilities greatly reduce the raw luck of the roll and gives some players great opportunities to work together. There are lots of choices to be made in both stages, what areas of the ship to activate, is it worth spending energy to get to a farther destination and risk less scouting or is it better to crawl along and take it very conservatively gathering as much intel as you can when landing at the various locations.
I have not had such an in-depth and rich space-themed exploration game as ISS Vanguard. It focuses much more on the journey and the exploration than say big space games like Twilight Imperium or Eclipse. This is not a 4x war game, it is a guided journey with many decisions to make while working toward an ultimate goal of finding answers.
In summary, Awaken Realms has delivered another game that tells great stories with top-shelf design and components. If you are looking for a space exploration game, you may not find one designed better than ISS Vanguard.
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