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ISS Vanguard (Gamefound: Ultimate All-In Pledge – Sundrop)
90m - 120m
1 - 4 Players
Ages 13+
Card drafting games are games in which players pick cards from a limited subset, such as a common pool, to gain some advantage (immediate or longterm) or to assemble hands of cards that are used to meet objectives within the game.
Card Drafting
Dice rolling in a game can be used for many things, randomness being the most obvious. Dice can also be used as counters. The dice themselves can be unique and different sizes, shapes and colors to represent different things.
Dice Rolling
In storytelling games, players are provided with conceptual, written, or pictorial stimuli which must be incorporated into a story of the players' creation.
Storytelling
Miniatures
470.00
€
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Kickstarter – Gamefound
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Azurith
Ultimate all-in pledge (sundrop) ISS Vanguard Core Box (sundrop) ISS Vanguard Stretch Goal box (sundrop) Personal Files Expansion Deadly Frontier campaign (sundrop) Galactic Almanac Close Encounters miniatures expansion (sundrop) ISS Vanguard Miniatures Stretch Goals (sundrop) Section boxes (sundrop) Section pets (sundrop) ISS Vanguard Poster bundle (3 posters) ISS Vanguard Dice Upgrade ISS Vanguard Dice Tower ISS Vanguard playmats ISS Vanguard All in Sleeves Story Dice
Ambar88
Probably about 60% of the way through the campaign and thoroughly enjoying it so far. The main criticism of others that the dice mechanics wear thin and are anti-thematic is not present for us so far, although we also enjoyed Roll Player Adventures which has the same dice check system with arguably less mechanics and theme. The complaints about there being too much equipment available also doesn't hold true for us - you have a lot of choice, but limited space on your lander, so having to choose the right gear seems thematic enough. Main criticisms at the moment would be: 1. Story feels a bit disjointed. I know this is written by the same author as Tainted Grail, so a disjointed story is to be expected. But it would be nice in a sci-fi exploration game to have a bit more of a cohesive narrative. There seems to oftentimes be gaps in the story that make you question whether you've skipped over some crucial information, and coming back to the game after a break often leaves you wondering who certain factions are or what your motivations are. 2. The app is great for tracking your choices throughout the campaign, but that's about it. I don't really get the praise for the great voice acting, one or two actors are decent, the rest are very amateurish. And the background music is way too short and repetitive. I can't complain too much however, since they really didn't need to make this app, so to offer it for free is just an added bonus. UPDATE AFTER CAMPAIGN COMPLETION: Lowered to a 7.0 as the main criticisms that the mechanics start to wear thin unfortunately did come true for us as well. This wouldn't have been that big of an issue, but as you approach the final chapters of the game, you also run into the problem that plagues all Awaken Realms campaign games: lack of end-game balancing. The final 20-30% of the game (as with Etherfields and Tainted Grail) are a cake-walk. You are drowning in discoveries, the situations on the ship are instantly solvable and pointless, morale always remains High and never drops, you have so many crew-members that you start to run out of sleeves, production and research projects don't feel impactful anymore (or just run out entirely), you have way too many command and energy tokens per ship phase, success tokens don't mean anything because each section is already maxed out on dice, so on and so forth. Because of this, the planetary explorations start to feel like a chore. You know you will eventually overcome the hurdles of exploration after throwing enough resources at the problem, so any delays in achieving that just feel like filler. Exploring a location in the end game just for it to give you success tokens or discoveries for your troubles (both of which are no longer relevant) feels bad and again, like filler. When you are sprinting towards the end of a campaign just so you can say you finished it, you know something has gone wrong in terms of balancing. Tainted Grail suffered from the same issue, where the combat/diplomacy becomes so trivial because of an overabundance of XP that you start rushing through encounters, which cheapens the whole experience. Tainted Grail, however, at least had a gripping story that kept you invested. As stated earlier, ISS Vanguard's story is just too disjointed and the major story beats come too infrequently to keep you invested as a player, so it doesn't even have that to fall back on. I'm still excited to see what AW can do in the stretch goal and Lost Fleet expansions, as I think there was a lot of unexplored potential in the game mechanics that may have kept the experience fresher for longer. The expansions of AW games are typically more balanced as well, so hopefully they will address these issues.
baltruce
Right up my alley as a whole:nice story evolution, nice mechanisms, challenging enough, with quite a bit of luck but a lot of mitigation too, especially through cooperation. Constantly looking forward to my next play of this. Probably will get bored of this after my second back to back campaign but remains to be seen (and the same can be said about most legacy games and I like most of them as long as I am mechanically satisfied with the loops the game takes me through. For now, I can't say I'm close to saturation, quite the contrary.