Verdict

There's been some debate about whether Vantage, with its lack of win conditions and 'choose-your-own adventure' structure even counts as a board game. What it definitely is, however, is stunning, compelling, immersive, interesting, and thought-provoking. It's play at its purest. You should try it.

Pros

Immersive and compelling
Innovative mechanics
Full of surprises
Gorgeous components

Cons

Unconventional pacing
I prefer to play solo

In 2014, French philosopher Frédéric Gros said "walking is not a sport". "Sport is keeping score: what's your ranking? Your time? Your place in the results? Always the same division between victor and vanquished that there is in war - there is kinship between war and sport."

Vantage is a board game about walking. There is no competition, and there are no distinct win conditions. It's a game about journey and perspective. It's a meditative experience, an exercise in psychogeography, and a storytelling tool. It carefully explores the concept of walking, just for the sake of walking.

It's certainly not a sport, and naysayers have claimed it's barely a game. But I think it's easily one of the best board games of 2025.

Vantage is a simple, elegantly packaged adventure game. Your space ship crew is sent to an unfamiliar planet with a set mission, but you crash land in separate locations. Each turn, you'll wander across the landscape, performing actions at its varied locales.

Each location is represented by a vibrant card that only you can see. You can describe the unusual flora and fauna to your fellow players, and you can discuss the best actions to take together. Your friends can even lend skill tokens to reduce the dice pool you roll when taking actions. But, ultimately, the sights you see are unique to you.

This is a thematic, narrative game in true choose-your-own adventure style. Once you've chosen your planned action for the turn (summed up by a single verb like 'Wander', 'Steal', or 'Harvest'), you find its corresponding entry in one of the game's storybooks.

Crucially, you always succeed on an action roll. The dice instead determine which of your three key resources - time, health, and morale - were affected by your efforts. If any one of these reaches zero, it's (usually) game over for the whole team.

Games that don't end this way conclude with the completion of a mission. That might be the mission you first arrived on the planet with, or it might be a 'destiny' mission one of you discovered on your travels. With enough luck and perseverance, you might complete your core mission and a destiny.

These missions are the side dish of the meal, though. More important is the secrets you discover on your rambles. One player flirts with a sentient plant that's joined them for a stroll, while another amasses an army of alien animal friends. You might climb to the planet's highest peaks to get a better look at your surroundings. You might while away hours refining strange gems, learning spells, or playing one of Vantage's multiple minigames.

There are so many secrets to discover here, and that's the real magic. There's even a mysterious SPOILER PACK (whose contents I won't reveal). Vantage offers all the tactile delight of a legacy board game without asking you to commit to hundreds of gameplay hours.

You can if you like. Vantage encourages you to journal and make maps as you go, suggesting that your findings will be useful on future adventures. But there's no linear campaign to follow. The path you take is yours, and it can be as long or short as you like.

Vantage offers a curious, childlike act of play rather than the hyper-competitive feats we usually associate with strategy board games. Or, as Gros would say:

"The walker who marvels while walking (the blue of the rocks in a July evening light, the silvery green of olive leaves at noon, the violet morning hills) has no past, no plans, no experience. He has within him the eternal child. While walking, I am but a simple gaze."

It's immersive and relaxing. One might even say 'mindful'. So enthralling is each quiet moment of contemplation, that I actually prefer playing alone than with friends. There's something peaceful about wandering from place to place, journaling what you find.

Extra players add some structural hiccups. You may grow impatient with the added downtime, where you hang on your friends' descriptions during their turns, eager to advance your own private narrative. You might feel dissatisfied when one player's adventure becomes more clearly crucial to the core mission. You might balk when the actions of another suddenly end the game - and the story you were eager to tell.

None of this is enough to mar the overall experience, but it gives me a distinct preference for player count. All other complaints about Vantage stem from, I believe, pre-existing expectations about its status as a 'game'.

A more goal-oriented person might find the gameplay loop aimless. The verbs on each location card often summarize an entirely different course of action than you expected - and, since you can't go back on an action once you've reached its storybook entry, this could prove frustrating for some.

Forgive the pun, but it really is all about perspective. If you can let go of the idea of 'winning', Vantage is an unmissable experience. It's simply a delight to discover.

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