Faster than light
🚀 ISS Vanguard is humanity’s first and only spacecraft capable of faster than light travel. It was built over decades using the salvaged technology of a wrecked alien spaceship 🛸, after scientist found something truly extraordinary - coordinates hidden in the DNA shared by every living thing on Earth. Where do these coordinates point to?
You play as the crew of the ship headed towards this place to uncover the greatest mystery humankind has ever faced.
Gameplay switches between two modes:
📖 Ship Management Phase
🌏 Planetary Exploration Phase
Let’s talk about Planetary Exploration for now. This is where all the action happens. You land on planets to find answers to your questions, gather samples and tech and deal with all kinds of threats.
The planets themselves are quite abstract - you just have sections in a book with point of interest cards as locations. They do have nice detailed thematic descriptions though. You move around these, trying to advance the mission and doing skill checks to uncover things.
On your turn you get to do 2 actions, then you have to draw an event card - this is always a bad thing that happens or it moves time tracks which brings you closer to the end of the mission - so you have to hurry. Actions include traveling, resting or preparing, and doing skill checks.
Your characters use dice to make all kinds of actions. You choose dice to roll and have to allocate them as you see fit. You spend your used dice and have to often rest to get them back. As the mission goes on you also might lose some, so they kind of act like your vitality. There are a lot of different dice you can acquire throughout the game with different icons.
You also construct a deck of cards before each mission that you can use for a wide spectrum of effects - including modifying your rolls. Each card has a top and a bottom effect so they are quite versatile.
We are absolutely loving the game right now; the story is really intriguing and the mechanics themselves are also tight and offer interesting decisions. We love Tainted Grail and Etherfields too from the same publisher, but ISS Vanguard might have the best supporting gameplay.
👉 Stay tuned for more😁
