Vantage: Reading the Room Before It Ships

Have to be straight about this one. Everything I’ve read is pre release chatter, not a single account of an actual finished session, so what follows is triage on hype, not a debrief on a real play. Take it as early impressions and nothing more.

The pitch is big. Stonemaier’s open world co-op, one to four players depending which listing you trust, exploring a planet spread across something like eight hundred locations on four hundred cards, no campaign, no expansions planned, the whole box meant to be self contained. That’s an ambitious claim to make before anybody’s actually sat with it for six hours. People are already collecting the metal coin addon before the base game even ships, which tells you where the excitement level sits right now.

What I keep noticing, and this is the part that actually gives me pause, is a real vein of skepticism running under all the enthusiasm. More than one comment flags that the designer rated his own unreleased game a 10 publicly, and at least one reviewer says flat out to avoid it on that basis alone. Another, writing in Hungarian, goes further, arguing that self scoring like that says something about how the studio’s quality has slipped over the past several years and that they’ve stopped buying Stonemaier games entirely as a result. I don’t know this game well enough yet to agree or argue, but I noted it, because that’s not the kind of complaint you usually see stapled to a hype thread.

Downtime clock, solo mode, actual teachability, none of that exists as data yet. Just a coop shell, a mid or maybe July 2025 release window that’s already slipped once, and a lot of people saying some version of cannot wait.

I’ll run it solo the first few times, see if the exploration actually holds up outside the marketing copy, and file a real review once there’s something real to debrief. For now, cautious interest, held at arm’s length.