Wave 2 includes 2 more expansions of the game set after the main campaign, so you don’t lose any game content without it. Roughly 6 months after each wave, the game is also released in other languages different than English (Polish, French, German, Italian, Spanish).

Restoration Games and Mondo unveiled the board game Unmatched at Gen Con in 2019. Since then, the light tactical miniatures game has taken off, bringing together pop culture heroes like Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Jurassic Park’s velociraptors with public domain icons like Sinbad and Medusa. Now they’ve secured a license with Disney’s Marvel Universe, and a whole collection of wild new matchups is on the way. At all times you will need to carefully manage the limited resources you have available, so you will not be able to do everything at once. The most relevant resource is the dice you will use for each section. Those represent the type of activities you can perform, but also your health and how many actions and turns you have left.The first important point is how many players are going to play the game with you. While it is recommended to have all 4 sections represented in the exploration phase (and they are mandatory in the Ship Book phase), you can decide to land with only 2 characters. That way you could play solo with 2 characters or you can have 4 players each with their own section or any other combination in between.

Richard Garfield will go down in history as the man who invented Magic: The Gathering, the world’s most popular collectible card game. But he’s not been resting on his laurels since the 1990s — far from it, in fact. It is a campaign based game that will see your ship, the ISS Vanguard, progress with your crew across different sessions. You play using mostly dice with different symbols and cards that allow to manipulate your rolls. In terms of storyline, without giving away any plot spoilers, you’ll find yourself in pretty standard sci-fi territory here. Each play session feels like a Star Trek episode, while the overarching plot is more like an Alastair Reynolds hard sci-fi book. The two mesh together nicely enough, and there’s a nice air of mystery and discovery throughout.Ensure that you scrolled all the way to the bottom of the log that you are reading. While the narrated voice creates a nice immersion, don’t forget to then read any other instruction and scroll all the way down. Sometimes you may miss a sentence and everything will start to not make sense. That’s when I start using the log to retrace my steps and verify what I missed, while using the app for the narration and the flag editor. But being careful, everything works (the app is automatically updated with the errata). ISS Vanguard has currently a rating of 9.0 on BoardGameGeek, that classifies it 62nd in the thematic category. I tried playing solo with 4 characters and the memory bank required is daunting. It is hard to remember all things to do, which cards you have, whose turn it is, etc. Finally you have multiple type of cards available in game: from the cards representing the recruits, to those representing the various equipment you can take with you on the mission. Each section also has its own set of section cards they can take, to a minimum of 10. Those can help in manipulating dice rolls, like allowing re-rolls, swap dice, etc. They are ranked, so the more experienced is the recruit, the more powerful cards he will have access to.

As the leader of the newest branch of our military is keen to tell you, space is hard. But, as classic science fiction novels have been saying for literally decades now, the future of labor in space is even harder. That fact has led to all manner of absurdist fantasies, from violent xenomorph stowaways to hard labor and indentured servitude. On the other side, playing with only 2 characters means that you will have mathematically less actions available in a single exploration. Most of the time, you will be able to complete enough in a single mission to not justify a second landing on the same planet. Unless it’s only 2 of you. In that case, you may have to perform the most tedious actions just to complete a part that you could have done easily with 4 characters. Of course, there’s always the possibility that the Miner will simply pass through the Beast’s system, and then the player with the most points wins!

Customer reviews

If you’d have preferred Gloomhaven to have been set in the Star trek universe, ISS Vanguard is for you… To complete the game, you will need to go through all missions in a campaign-based system, so that it is not possible to play single planet explorations outside of the campaign. Apart from this, the Ship Book phase provides interesting avenues for deciding what happens on board, how to advance technologically and scientifically and there’s almost always interesting decisions to be made.