ISS Vanguard: The Review

When my good pal, Ace, asked me and my other pal, Marty, to try out this game she kickstarted called ISS Vanguard, I was immediately intrigued. The artwork looked great, the photos of the game components looked great, and I very much like the growing trend of long-form campaign-like board games.

As we advanced into the campaign, there were a ton of stuff we liked and a ton of stuff we didn't like. The quality of production in the game was immense. The game contained so much stuff and so much detail that it really begged the question, "should this be a video game?" This could have been a sign of what was to come. I appreciate the ambition, but the more you try to pack into the game, either because you're trying to impress your Kickstarter backers or you've become Icarus flying towards the sun, the game is going to be harder and harder to "get right." This game came with an app that include log messages and voice acting, which is wildly unnecessary. It was somewhat fun, but honestly, I zoned out a lot during them.

Ultimately, we never finished the campaign, and it looks pretty clear like we are never going to go back to it. Our endless frustration at certain design choices wore us down, even with us trying to make house rules to "patch" the game to make it bearable. It ended up at a point where we were basically walking through the missions making the die rolls a formality, just so we could advance the story and see what happens. That's pretty much the death knell of a game. For a board game, especially, it's the game itself that should be fun. Any narrative component should be background at most.

The game

The first thing I appreciated is the "one session" loop the game created. Ship phase, explore phase, clean up, done. The ship phase is the most rewarding part of the game, because that is phase in which you see the progress you've made. You visit systems, move cards around, sometimes pull new cards out of the "bank" and stuff happens. It's great. It reminded me of XCOM the most; where the player is putting together the resources they found on missions to gain new tech or items or whatever. It embraces the best parts of a co-op game. You're all examining the situation and making decisions together, figuring out whether you should recruit or produce or research or whatever else. This may have been so enjoyable because there are no threats in this part of the game. You're trying to be as efficient as possible.

I liked the design of the characters and sections. The four sections are both diverse and have some overlap. They clearly specialize in different things, but you can make sure you can cover all bases and have some redundancy. Players can choose what types of dice to add to their pool, and you can customize your deck differently for each mission. While the armory cards are seriously limited and redundant, the design of them are great, as they give the players more tools to survive missions and give them a chance to be clever and "outsmart" the game. I generally like games with custom dice and effects that manipulate the outcomes of those dice, and ISS Vanguard does this pretty well. Each section has plenty of tricks to get around tough challenges.

The start of the problems

The game starts out in weenie hut junior mode. The first mission is very easy and essentially a tutorial. I generally hate the concept of tutorials, but I'll give it a pass, because this game is so complex that it needs one. In our second mission, the logs that were read strongly implied that this mission was also going to be easy and that we should just explore and gather resources.

We cruised through it, and on the way found some new threats, but they were avoidable, and we easily dodged them and went back up to ship and considered dealing with them later. This becomes the first issue I have with this games design: what does this game expect you to do? I feel strongly that a game should, by its design, show the player how to succeed.

On this second mission (and also on the third and many others) there was more stuff on each planet then we could do in one away mission. This was pretty tough as we weren't sure whether we were supposed to move on to another planet, or stick around and send another team down, or maybe come back later and try again. We definitely skipped content this way, in hindsight. We did repeat a few planets later on, and sometimes we did reap extra rewards. However, this extra content came with repetitiveness. We already explored a lot of sectors on the planet, we repeated stuff, saw the same threats again, and wasn't the best use of our time especially given this is a board game with set up and tear down time. This is something I think about with Gloomhaven, as awesome as it is, needs to be worth it in order to justify that set up and tear down time for each session. And it works there because each encounter in Gloomhaven is unique and you play it once as long as you succeed (unless you fail, in which case maybe you try again or maybe you never go back).

As we advanced in the game, the difficulty got higher and higher and never really let up. If I remember correctly, there was maybe one planet that felt doable -- the one with the Idemian Pilgrim. This made me think in retrospect that we should have advanced more slowly and repeated planets even if it was boring, because we simply weren't prepared. By the end, we never really figured it out.

The attrition

The main problem with playing ISS Vanguard is the difficulty mostly comes from brutal, taxing nature of the gameplay. When you finish an away mission, it doesn't feel like you figured out a puzzle or defeated a strong enemy, it's rather like you accomplished some maybe lucky die rolls before the game's internal timer says "you die now". Everything you do has a cost. There's a cost for moving, there's a cost for doing actions, there's a cost for ending your turn. It's one big loop of attrition.

There are so many things that eat away at your resources, which is mainly your dice pool and your health. Each character can take three injuries. The fourth injury will result in an immediate mission failure (extremely punishing, especially with some bad luck). The injuries feel like fouls in basketball. If a good player picks up two fouls early in a game, the coach will always sit them until the second quarter because they don't want them to pick up another and increase the chances of fouling out. In ISS Vanguard, your characters are in constant threat of fouling out. And you can pick up a cheap injury just like a ticky-tack foul. Injury rolls eventually become a constant occurrence. There are quite a few travel costs, events, items, and threats that make you roll an injury die. And the variance can sometimes let you dodge an injury or pick up some cheap ones. It's immensely frustrating. A couple of our crew had an ability that let them block an injury to themselves a couple times per mission, and this ability is seriously one of the best in the entire game.

Your dice pool, even late in the game where you feel highly equipped, gets chewed up by nearly everything. Using dice to complete special actions on the planet seems like enough, but like injuries above, traveling and events eat away at your dice all the time too. You often have to make tough decisions and throw away dice you want to keep to simply survive and press on.

You might think I'm whinging at a good challenge. In my opinion, a game making you may a cost for every action you do and calling it "a challenge" is like playing Nightmare mode in DOOM. Which is not meant to be a real challenge. It's a mode added by the devs as a kind of joke where all the monsters revive endlessly until you eventually run out of ammo and die. Yes, Nightmare is a challenge, but it's a challenge because it's designed to be impossible. It's not a challenge in the same way as scoring as many points as you can in Agricola. The challenge in Agricola comes from the player interacting with the game, trying a strategy, planning ahead, and reacting to other players. The challenge in Nightmare is the game fucking with you.

The best example of this is the Apex Predator, a threat that appears on not one but two god damn planets. The Apex Predator is a card I read over and over again because I could not believe the designers would actually put this into the game. The Apex Predator might strike at the end of each players turn (depending on the event card). When it strikes the player might take an injury. If the players work hard they might be able to lure the Predator out into the open. They can then attempt some die rolls and defeat it. The Apex Predator then flips over and leaves the players alone -- for two turns. And then it comes back and starts attacking, possibly every turn, again.

This design is absolutely brutal, and is literally the same Nightmare mode from design DOOM that was literally put in as a joke. The players can't do anything to stop the Apex Predator from attacking them. If they invest time and resources, they can slow it down for a couple of turns. Not even close to enough time to make investing those resources and actions worth it. Not a single thing can be done to remove this threat. It will keep attacking and rack up those injuries -- fouls -- until the players are forced to retreat. Just like in Nightmare, you can only hope to achieve the mission before the attrition becomes too great. This isn't the only example either. Every away mission feels cruel like this.

This in my opinion, encapsulates the terrible design in ISS Vanguard. It does not give options to the players, it creates a gauntlet for them to run through and you have no choice but to run through it. Maybe if the die rolls are lucky you'll make it.

The framework of a game

ISS Vanguard has a well established framework for the ship phase. It's part of why we like it so much. As the game progresses, things are improved in the ship phase through the framework, but the framework never changes. A new ship facility is added, but you still spend command points in the same way. You get bridge upgrades, but that only changes how you can travel or how you spend energy, you still spend energy just the same.

I recently played the Resident Evil 4 remake, which was pretty good. The game has a clear framework. Over the shoulder shooting. Low mobility. Players have to make the most of all resources. Exploration is rewarded with extra treasure and ammunition. It works well. As you advance, you will find merchants where you buy better weapons. The newer weapons are better, and they change how you play, but the framework stays the same. RE4 also has great enemy design. You learn pretty quickly that shooting enemies in the head is a pretty good way to kill them quickly. Maybe you figure out that a knee shot will cause a running enemy to fall on their face. Later on, some enemies start wearing metal helmets or have shields. This changes how the player has to approach combat. The game is upping the challenge: "whatever strategies you used before, well that's not going to work here, think fast!" But again, this all works within the framework that the game has established. The player understands the rules of the game so to speak. This is all game design 101 shit.

The part of RE4 where this goes off the rails is certain bosses and set pieces where the framework is thrown out the window. One of the first boss fights in the game is this sea monster that lives in a secluded lake. The player goes in and the boss fight starts, and everything they learned up to that point is useless and they have to relearn the game on the fly. The sea monster is dragging your boat. You have a harpoon instead of your normal weapons you've been using up to this point. Can you throw the harpoon? Does the harpoon do any damage? Oh, there is some blood effects, I guess it does. I can steer the boat. I guess I have to avoid the debris in the lake. I guess I have to dodge the sea monster when leaps from the water at me on my shitty, dilapidated boat. Are these harpoons doing anything? Oh my god, a quick time event. I'm glad these aren't in games anymore.

It's a mess.

In ISS Vanguard, we never figured out the framework for the away missions. Sometimes the mission was clear to us. Sometimes it was the most vague shit possible. We often had to look at the physical logbook and read it over and over again slowly to understand. Sometimes exploration and special actions were pretty clear. Other times they led to nowhere. Are we supposed to split up and cover as much ground as possible, or should we stay grouped up so we can assist one another? Traveling is so painful, I'd rather do as little traveling as possible. But the game wants you to explore right? The game wants you to try the special actions in all the sectors, right? We found some especially esoteric sectors to explore, that would have taken us lots of time to figure out. Which is especially cruel in a game that punishes you for taking any time at all to do anything. We ran into so many cases where we couldn't figure out if we missed something or if there was a "bug" in the game.

The reality is that ISS Vanguard never figured out their framework for the away missions. Every one is so weird and different and the designers are definitely throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks. It created a mess that I'm sure they believed was ambitious and cool, but ends up to me, a player, as frustrating and cruel.

House rules

Here are a few house rules we created:

Injury dice don't displace other dice

According to the rules, if a dice cannot be placed on your board (due to rank) because an injury dice is taking up it's slot, that dice is lost to the spent pool. We have chosen to ignore this because it makes injuries just that much more punishing.

Resting crew standby area

When we spend crew on things where their conversions don't matter (such as scanning), we don't immediately put them in resting crew, we instead put them in a standby area so we can swap them later in the ship phase in case we needed one of those conversions for research, production, or situations.

4th injury evacuation

Getting a fourth injury on an away team crew member immediately ends the mission as a failure, regardless of what you have done or objectives you've completed. We have chosen to ignore this and if we have completed the mission objectives, but haven't returned to the landing zone, we count it as a success but discard our discoveries. we play it as if the discoveries couldn't be loaded onto the lander because we had to leave with haste for our injured crew member.

Spoilers below

The surprise mission

ISS Vanguard took a huge risk with one specific mission. It appeared to our group out of nowhere. And I was initially excited because it was cool and unexpected.

But what happened was we were devastated. We were unprepared, our crew was weak, and we got waxed by that mission. We were punished because we didn't get a ship phase because the surprise mission replaces your ship phase. We earned an additional command point for our next ship phase, which is extra powerful for the stage of the game we were in, and never got to use it because we lost that ship phase.

Remember above when I was talking about frameworks? The surprise mission does a doozy on whatever "framework" you could say the away missions had. It introduced a new mechanic where you could send your extra crew onto suicide missions that would maybe have a benefit later. It was extremely confusing to us how these work and what we had to do. You have no idea how many crew, what rank they should be, or what section they should be in before you send them on their task. It's a total crapshoot. The game itself makes some warnings about sending your crew on these tasks, but offers no advice in the way of how much. And frankly, the requirements for some of them made no sense.

It's again, an egregious breaking of whatever rules the game has already established for its players, just to fuck with you.

I can think of plenty of games where a reset like that helped enhance the game. Chrono Trigger, for example, had a great story twist where the main character controlled by the player ends up dying before the end of the game. The players then take over his companions, and they have to find a specific McGuffin (the titular Chrono Trigger) to revive him.

XCOM: Enemy Unknown, one of the finest games of the 21st century, also had a great surprise attack mission. It was a well designed encounter that really caught you with your pants down, and rewarded the player for having a deep roster and extra equipment. In that fight, there was no loadout step. Your soldiers had to fight off the attack with whatever they had equipped. I had soldiers in that fight with high tech armor, but only a conventional assault rifle because their laser rifle was equipped on some other guy. I had my best sniper who sat the last mission out so they didn't have any gear at all, so they entered the fight with the basic starting armor and sniper rifle. They still wrecked, though, because they were experienced and had a bunch of abilities unlocked. Also, if you had causalities, that mission was specifically designed for more of your reinforcements to come in until the fight was finished, even if they were rookie recruits. So you wouldn't run into a situation where you just ran out of soldiers and were fucked.

ISS Vanguard's surprise mission was nothing but a punishment. It felt like a choice to "do something brave" rather than a well thought-out design decision. The game wanted you to lose, in the same way that an old school JRPG would throw a overpowered boss at you, and by losing, the game would advance. I had no idea what to expect, which is a great feeling when watching a movie, but terrible when playing a game. We took it in stride at the time. We accepted it was a teaching moment from the game's designers. But I think the damage was done. This was the point where I couldn't really trust the game anymore. It was Nightmare mode, always trying to get me, not playing to challenge me, but instead to agonize me.

So anyway, ISS Vanguard is fine, but not for me. Sleeping Gods is better.