Are you strapped in?

Are you strapped in? Yes? Then let’s proceed with the landing manoeuvre! 😏
We already gave an overview about the 2 main phases of ISS Vanguard, since that we dived even deeper in the experience. We got some great questions in the comments, we haven’t fully covered yet. So here we go:

✒️ The first one is about story progression:

After a few Planetary Explorations I can say that the story is great so far. 😁 It has an overarching plot complemented by a lot of interesting and thematic log entries that are mostly additional impressions of the crew and reports of encounters. Those together with the beautiful art and the flavour text on the cards helps the immersion. 🥰 The voice acting in the app is also great. I’d say the story seems to be shorter than Tainted Grail if you look solely at the size of the logbook, but the complementary gameplay is that much more interesting here.

🏋️ Challenges in the game:

🎲 The main challenge is to use the dice wisely: you try to roll specific symbols for actions, or sometimes you need specific colored dice to succeed in a task at your location. Travelling between sectors on the planet often takes a die too, and other effects like end-of-turn events can force you to spend dice as well. Using more dice increases your chances, but it also brings a necessary rest action closer. When you rest, you get some of your spent dice back, however this is limited by the supplies you have for the mission. As it is with dice rolls, randomness plays a huge role, but luckily your section cards can help out with that.
🃏 A lot of cards will allow you to modify dice or reroll, but they also have secondary effects which you can pay for with your rolled symbols. All in all we found it well balanced so far.👌

🎲 Threats: we encountered a few aliens already, those are called “Threats”. This aspect is a little bit abstract, as there is no real combat in the game - you can neutralise a threat using dice checks, same as any other location specific action in the game. They move around and attack depending on the event cards drawn. Suffering damage can give you injuries or make you lose dice too.