If you stay in touch with crowdfunding related news, you have quite likely heard about ISS Vanguard. Games published by Awaken Realms always have lots of hype each time they launch, but this case was more special. The company has decided to create their own crowdfunding platform and promote it by releasing a huge game that was being teased for almost 2 years. 

Did the game and platform do fine? Well $4.912.097 pledged by over 28.000 backers speaks for itself. So what’s all the fuss about? Is the game worth adding to our shelves when it releases? Let’s take a look.

A Space Opera

The story is similar to a space trip movie with a big mystery serving as the motivation to travel. Players play as members of a team sent to faraway space to discover a mysterious location. How do they know about its existence? Well, apparently scientists have discovered a set of space related coordinates in the human genome. Where do they lead? We’ll have to learn but some speculate that it might be the creator(s) of the universe themselves.

The Concept for ISS Vanguard

ISS Vanguard can be played by up to 4 players. Like in most games by AR you can also play it solo. In Tainted Grail it was a great way to play, so we like how they keep designing single player modes each time. The fact that both games share the same scenario writer helps a lot too. 

The spaceship, which happens to also be in the name of the game, consists of 4 different sections and every player becomes a leader of one of them. There are engineers, a recon team, security people and scientists to choose from. Depending on who you pick, you will have different tasks and unique gameplay elements.

Gameplay

A single game of ISS Vanguard usually goes like this. First you decide on a planet you want to visit and land on it. Next a team leaves the ship and goes exploring and after a successful venture to an uncharted planet, you can add some upgrades to your vessel and either end the game or go and visit another planet. 

The game is quite story heavy, which we love, as the previous storytelling in AR’s games was right up our alley. It’s also non-linear. You choose which planets to land on, how to organize your team and most importantly: the game forces you to make difficult plot related decisions that affect the entire storyline and your team’s future.

You might expect the usual Awaken Realms fare when it comes to components but the reality is actually surprising. The very core of everything in the game comes in the form of a binder, that hosts a manual, various cards, its own saving system, your discoveries, gear and much more. You fill it when playing but despite that, ISS Vanguard is by no means a legacy game (although we also enjoy these quite a bit).

There are also tons of great looking cards and minis. Some of the latter might be optional, like in Tainted Grail but they enhance the looks of the game by miles. 

Exploration

Apart from the story, upgrading the titular ship and making decisions, there’s still the exploration itself which is quite important and looks pretty fun. This is performed by rolling and placing a number of dice on your crewmember’s board. You can pick whichever you want, but there’s a limit of how many you can refresh (make rollable next time you need them).

Exploring, apart from dice rolls, means lots of tactical resource management, avoiding possible threats and lots of planning. Interestingly: the game has much smaller combat focus than other titles by AR.

The Bottom Line

The Gamefound campaign offered quite a lot in terms of add-on content and expansions. Some of them are free while others need to be chosen as buyable addons. On one hand you get a bunch of full story campaigns for free thanks to stretch goals, but on the other, to have all the story content you may need to pay additional $59 for Deadly Frontier Campaign and $16 for (kind of optional) Personal Files Expansion. Considering most previous campaigns by AR, that’s actually quite well planned and not super expensive. We hope they’ll continue with this approach.

In the end ISS Vanguard looks like an original and addictive adventure game, that not only looks good but also plays good. We can’t wait to test it on our board gaming tables. Shipping is planned between August 2021 (Phase 1) and April 2022 (Phase 2).