Vantage

Your escape pod hits atmosphere at an angle you were not trained for. When you pry yourself out of the seat the horizon is wrong, the sky is the wrong color, and your crewmates are somewhere else entirely. You can talk to them over comms, but only you can see what is in front of you.

Vantage is a cooperative adventure game for 1 to 6 players from Stonemaier Games, designed by Jamey Stegmaier. Each session starts with players scattered across 1 of 126 crash sites on a shared alien planet. You pick one of 6 characters, chase one of 21 missions, and explore a world of nearly 800 interconnected location cards and over 900 other discoverable cards. Each game is a standalone session, so you get the campaign feel without the campaign commitment.

The thing that makes Vantage click is the first-person perspective rule: only you can see your current location card. You can describe it, ask for help, and coordinate with the rest of the table, but you explore with a real sense of place. The comparison Stonemaier draws to Sleeping Gods and Breath of the Wild is about that feeling, not about copying their mechanics.

This is a game for cooperative groups that want more than a tactical puzzle. It rewards players who enjoy narrating what they see, running through options out loud, and making decisions together. Solo players will also find a proper single-player experience here, not a second-player simulation tacked on.

Plan for 60 to 120 minutes per session and a first play that runs toward the longer end. The setup is heavier than most Stonemaier games, and that is the honest tradeoff for a world this big on cardboard.