I really didn’t mean for this much time to pass between talking aboutFinal Fantasy VIII and Final Fantasy IX, but life kind of got in the way in a way I didn’t fully expect. One of the biggest barriers to actually finishing and sitting down to talk about this game is that I got laid off from my job last August, and as strange as it sounds, that job had plenty of downtime where I could just have a game running beside my desk and chip away at it throughout the day. On top of that, I transitioned into being a stay-at-home parent, and it turns out if you actually want to be a good parent, spending all your time grinding random encounters isn’t exactly conducive to that goal. It’s kind of ironic that losing my job ended up meaning I had less time for video games, but here we are.
Regardless, I’m finally here and ready to talk about Final Fantasy IX. This one released on the original PlayStation in the fall of 2000, right at the tail end of that console’s life, just before the PlayStation 2 came along. Just like how I grouped Final Fantasy I,II, and III as the NES trilogy and IV, V, and VI as the SNES trilogy, you can similarily group Final Fantasy VII, VIII, and IX together as the PS1 trilogy, but what really makes IX stand out immediately is how hard it pivots back toward the series’ roots. Especially when contrasting it against Final Fantasy VII and VIII, as they leaned much harder into a more modern, sci-fi aesthetic with experimental systems. Final Fantasy IX is a love letter to the series, a return to it’s roots after a sabbatical in the futuristic sense.
The Final Fantasy call backs come fast and hard, starting with the aesthetic. Airships, castles, knights and princesses dominate the setting here. And again, contrasting against the more realistically preportioned character models from the previous games, the character models in IX are much more exaggrated, more chibi in nature. I’m not totally against this art direction, the moments when the game is trying to be funny, the aesthetic lends to the goofiness of the situation. But the child-like character models does make some of the more emotional or dramatic scenes to feel a bit flat in my opinion. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s start by talking about the story.
Story
Final Fantasy IX begins with a plot. The Tantalus Theatre Troupe are en route to Alexandria to perform the famous play I Want to Be Your Canary for Queen Brahne and the royal family. Inside Tantalus, we meet Zidane, a plucky young thief with a monkey tail and a can-do attitude. The play is a ruse; their real goal is to kidnap Princess Garnet. As the play is underway, Zidane sneaks into the castle and bumps into Garnet, wearing a classic white mage robe to keep her identity hidden. Before Zidane can say anything, she asks him to kidnap her. How serendipitous.
During their escape, Captain of the Knights Steiner catches onto Zidane’s plot and gives chase. In the mayhem, a lone black mage named Vivi gets caught up in the action, and all four end up on the theatre ship, which soon crashes into an evil forest. Garnet is separated from the group, so Zidane, Vivi, and Steiner set out to find her, Zidane always eager to help, Steiner determined to return her to Alexandria, and Vivi simply happy to see the world.
The forest is filled with a malevolent mist that turns people and animals violent, and after an encounter with a Black Waltz, the forest begins to petrify itself. The party narrowly escapes, though Blank is left behind, and they pass through the Ice Cavern to the village of Dali. There, Garnet adopts the name Dagger, and Vivi is kidnapped. Finding him leads the party to discover black mages being manufactured as weapons of war. For Vivi, who has never seen anyone like himself before, the revelation that these mages are lifeless golems raises sincere questions about his origin.
From there, the party heads to Lindblum to meet Regent Cid, who refuses to offer help. This splits the group. Steiner smuggles Garnet back toward Alexandria while Zidane and Vivi travel to Burmecia. Upon arrival, they find it destroyed by Alexandria’s forces and encountering Kuja for the first time. Meanwhile, Garnet and Steiner are captured and imprisioned upon returning home, and Zidane’s party moves to warn Cleyra, only to witness Queen Brahne use Garnet’s extracted eidolons to destroy it.
Back in Alexandria, Zidane and Steiner reunite and free Garnet before her execution. Up to this point, Steiner has been unwavering in his loyalty to the crown, dismissing any claims of Brahne’s warmongering. But when forced to choose between his queen and the princess he swore to protect, he finally sides with Garnet, asking Zidane to protect her while he stays behind.
As the story unfolds, Garnet learns more about eidolons, while the party discovers Kuja has been supplying Brahne with black mages, all tied to the mist’s mysterious origin. On the outer continent, they encounter a village of sentient black mages who have defected, and Vivi learns that his kind have a limited lifespan, forcing him to confront his own mortality.
The party meets Eiko, a young summoner connected to Garnet’s past, and Amarant, a lone wolf who joins after being defeated by Zidane. Their journey leads them to the Iifa Tree, where they stop the flow of mist, only to witness Queen Brahne launching a final assault on Kuja. Her attempt to destroy him backfires, and she is killed when Kuja captures and turns Bahamut against her fleet.
Before dying, Brahne admits the war was her own ambition, Kuja only gave her the nudge towards war. Garnet returns to Alexandria and is crowned queen, only for Kuja to attack again. With Eiko’s help, Garnet summons Alexander to defend the city, but Kuja is ultimately driven off by Garland, a mysterious figure with ties to both Kuja and Zidane.
Chasing Kuja leads the party deeper into the mystery of Terra, where Zidane learns the truth of his origin. Terra, a dying world, sought to assimilate Gaia by replacing its souls through the Iifa Tree, with Garland orchestrating the plan. Kuja was created to accelerate the process, and Zidane was created to replace him, making the two basically brothers. Garland seeks to discard Kuja, but refusing to accept his fate, Kuja rebels, ultimately choosing to destroy everything when faced with his own mortality.
The final act takes place in Memoria, a realm shaped by memories, where Zidane and his allies confront Kuja who’s trying to destroy the original crystal, from which all life was born. Upon defeating him, Necron, a being born from nihilism that seeks to return everything to nothingness appears. The party prevails, affirming their will to live despite the inevitability of death.
In the aftermath, Kuja uses his remaining strength to save the party. Zidane returns alone to the collapsing and writhing Iifa Tree to save Kuja, but the screen fades to black when all possible routes of escape seem closed. Time passes, and Alexandria gathers for a performance of I Want to Be Your Canary. Vivi has passed on, leaving behind “Vivi’s sons,” and the cast reunites. Freya is rekindling her romance with Fratley, Eiko has been adopted by Cid and Hilda, and Steiner and Beatrix are at Garnet’s side. During the play, Zidane returns, revealing himself at the play, and Garnet runs to him. the crowd chears as she leaps into Zidane’s arms.
I don’t know if I’m in the minority or not, but I never really found the story of Final Fantasy IX to be particularly gripping. I never thought the story sagged at any particular point, but it also never really had me on the edge of my seat. There were some moments, like when Queen Brahne ruthlessly destroyed Cleyra, that were devastating, but overall I felt like the story didn’t ebb and flow. The plot just continually moves from one scene to the next in a straightforward escelating progression, instead of the narrative arcs that we’ve seen in previous games. In Final Fantasy VII, when you end the Midgar arc, it feels like a definate shift. You’ve moved on from Act I. But I didn’t feel that in IX. I think at least some part of it has to do with the fact that so much of Zidane’s background and Kuja’s motivations aren’t revealed until the very last dungeon. For most of the game, Kuja is just the mysterious character who keeps showing up as things are getting destroyed.
I also perpetually question Zidane’s motivations for continuing with this quest. Zidane as a character would say, “I don’t need a reason to help someone,” and some part of his motivation for sticking close to Garnet has to do with their mutual attraction for each other, even if neither will admit their affection until the final scene of the game. But the happy-go-lucky thief perpetually gathers people around himself and encourages them to help everyone they come across. As said in Klaus, “A truly selfless act always sparks another.”
The characters in Final Fantasy IX represent both high and low points in their personal arcs. Vivi is an obvious standout. A charming, naive black mage who is excited about life and the world, it’s difficult to imagine anyone not falling in love with Vivi. The story also presents sweet Vivi with his own mortality, and Vivi comes out the other side as optimistic as ever. If his time is short, he better start living now. Zidane’s unending optimism, Garnet’s growth as she rises to the role of monarchy, Steiner’s growth from blindly loyal and contemptuous toward Zidane to making his own decisions and considering Zidane a comrade-in-arms, and even Freya’s short bit of story, her intense longing for Sir Fratley, the elation she has when she finds him, only to have her joy ripped away when he announces his amnesia, are all emotional high points.
While some characters have strong growth, others remain relatively flat. Quina is a one-note comic relief character whose only goal is to seek out new foods. Amarant is prickly and emotionally unavailable for the entire game, only slightly coming around to Zidane’s way of thinking right at the end. I even find Eiko to be relatively flat, as she serves more as a way to provide Garnet’s history than any kind of growth herself.
Mechanics
Mechanically, Final Fantasy IX returns to the series to familiar ground, especially after VII and VIII were such departures. The party is back to four members instead of the three-person setups from the last two games, and the combat is more straightforward, with each character falling into a clear archetype. Zidane steals, Vivi nukes things with black magic, Garnet and Eiko keep everyone alive and can summon, Steiner hits hard and tanks big hits, and so on. There’s comfort in this structure, but it also comes at the cost of flexibility. Unlike VII and VIII, where anyone could concieveably do anything and you could often of break the system in half if you really wanted to, IX keeps everyone to their prescribed archtypes.
Character progression is tied to equipment, which grants abilities that you learn over time by equipping the equipment and earning AP in battle. Once learned, those abilities can be enabled independently of the gear with each skill costing a number of skill crystals. The skill crystals are limited in number and acquiring more for each character is tied to their level. In theory, this creates an interesting decision space where you’re choosing between better equipment stats or prioritizing learning new abilities, but in practice, it almost always felt like the correct choice was obvious. If a piece of equipment teaches a new ability, you equip it until you learn that ability, and then you move on. If it doesn’t, it often felt borderline useless, even if the stats were just a bit better that what you were doing before. Often, instead of feeling like I was customizing my characters, it felt like I was just checking all my equipment for new skills, and if there weren’t any skills left to learn, just picking the one with the highest stat. Some equipment in the late game let you absorb certian types of elemental attacks, rendering some bosses absolutely trival, providing you know what elemental attacks they’re going to use ahead of time. But in the year 2026, who isn’t following a guide these days?
The battle system itself also suffers from pacing issues. First off the loading screens are brutal. From the moment your character freezes due to a random encounter starting, the screen swirling, 6 whole seconds of black, another 4 seconds of the camera panning and zooming around before you get to do a single action. the loading time after the battle to get you back into the overworld, it’s a lot. Now, saying 10 seconds of loading doesn’t sound like a lot, but keep in mind that you’ll do hundreds of battles throughout a playthrough. And sometimes when you’re just aching to get to the next story beat, the long loading time of the random encounters is brutal.
The Active Time Battle system is still here, but everything just feels slow. The bars fill up and then prompt you to take an action. You choose what they’re going to do, and then you wait. If another one of your characters bars fill up while you’re waiting for your action to take place, you choose thier action too. The challenge becomes when you’re balacing 4 characters and multiple enemies attack animations. It seems the orders you make are put into a queue, and will activate in the order that you make them. But the enemy attacks and ATB bars are hidden from you, so they might take actions inbetween your characters, which will often make you wish you could undo the actions in the queue. Like when you’re going to cast cure on a low health character, only for them to be attacked 3 times before Garnet gets her turn to act. Even worse is Doom, more than once a character afflicted with the curse, only for the timer to tick down to 0 before I was able to input a new command. But on the flipside, it’s certainly handy to cast Regain on a character, then launch a long eidolon animation, letting your regain activate several times before any enemies continue their assault. It’s not usually a game breaking feature, but I certainly found it to be annoying.
Another annoyance is the Trance system. A seperate bar under your ATB metre fills up as your character takes damage, and when full, activates their Trance form. Every charcter’s trance form has a unique ability, but in general for the time they’re in Trance they are much more powerful. Think, Super Sayain from Dragon Ball strong. The challenge with this system is that the Trance often fires during a random encounter, then the metre is completely depleted for the next fight. It’s a power I certianly would have preferred to be able to trigger during the boss fights when I actually needed the power boost.
On the positive side, the combat camera usually remained locked in a single view, not swinging around wildly, making it difficult to know who exactly you’re targeting like it did in the previous couple games. And unless you have boost equipped, you only really see the full summon animation the first time you use a ediolon. Everytime after that, you get a much more cut down version of the animation, which after the lengthy movies that VIII used for it’s summons, it was a very welcome change.
Tetra Master
While Final Fantasy VIII had it’s card game, Triple Triad, Final Fantasy IX sought to level up the card game with Tetra Master. You can challenge most characters in the world to a game of Tetra Master at any time, but not many characters actually reference the game. In Tetra Master each player has 5 cards cards each on a 4 by 4 grid. Each card has it’s own stats and arrows. If you play a card somewhere and your card’s arrows point at another arrow, the cards engage in a “battle” and whomever is the stronger card wins, and flips the opposing card to the opposite colour. The tutorial of Tetra Master walks you through that much, but then refuses to tell you what the numbers on each card means. “Figure that out on your own!”, it says.
I messed around the Tetra Master a bit, but grew really fusturated with not understanding how the mechanics work. This is something I already know about myself and my game group, we are not the “figure it out as we go along” type of gamers. We’d rather spend an hour going over the rulebook until we all understand the game before we make any decisions. So the in-game tutorial of Tetra Master being so sorely lacking and purposefully opaque, absolutely fusturated me. I figured out that if you place a card with an arrow pointing at nothing, you simply capture the card, but arrows at each other initate battles, but then in one game of Tetra Master I had conqoured almost the entire board, then the opponent put down his final card and flipped 8 cards due to a chaining mechanisim that I didn’t understand, I almost threw the game across the room.
Looking at a guide online lead me to discover that the stat line works in a base 15 hexadecimal format, with the numbers (in order) corrospond to attack value, attack type, physical defence, and magical defence. If you have an arrow pointing at them and they have an arrow pointing back, you enter combat. You attack them with your cards attack value against the defense value on their card based on your attack type. if you win, you capture that card and any card that card has arrows pointing at, this is a chain.
But how is the attack and defense calculated? Randomly. During a battle each card is basically rolling their attack die and smacking into the opponent, but that attack die’s highest limit is based on the attack stat. So a low attack has a low ceiling, and then the attack is subtracted from the opponents appropriate defence which is also a random number based on the stat line. If the attacked card is still alive (it’s randomly determined defence didn’t fall to 0), it takes a turn attacking, and back and forth the cards swap until one of those cards loses.
Convoluted to say the least, but what fusturates me the most is that Tetra Master is absolutely pointless. There are no tangiable rewards for playing this stupid mini-game. At least in Triple Triad you could mod the cards to get items or spells. Sure, the card mod system absolutely broke the game, but it was a reason to play the little game. Tetra Master on the other hand, gives you nothing for sumbitting this random and arcane system into your brain. There is one spot halfway through disc 2 where you HAVE to play in a Tetra Master tournament, but other than that, curating a deck list and engaging with this mini game offers you nothing in return. But on the subject of a fusturating mini-game that does offer you rewards…
Chocobo Hot and Cold
Everyone knows the apex of fun exists at the intersection of randomness and tight time limits. add in a healthy dose of blindness and button lag, and you have yourself a rollicking good time. Chocobo Hot and Cold shows up early in the game, but unlike Tetra Master, this one rewards you in items. And some of the items you can dig up are the strongest items in the game!
To play Chocobo Hot and Cold, you basically run around a little field and peck the ground. Then your Chocobo will say “keh” if you’re far, while “Kweh?!” mean you’re closer, and “Kwehhh?!” means you’re very close. The challenge is that you need to be pixel perfect to get the coveted “KWEEEEEEEH!!”, indicating that you found an item. At this point you just need to mash the peck button until you dig the item out.
The real treasure from Chocobo Hot and Cold are the Chocographs. These are little treasure maps that have a screenshot of somewhere out in the world, that require you to take your chocobo out to find the exact spot. But the rewards for doing so can be pretty lucrative, the very first Chocograph gives you 2 Elixers along with some other decent items considering how early in the game it shows up. Several of the characters best gear in the game are rewards you get for finding Chocographs.
The real problem with Chocobo Hot and Cold is that you only have 60 seconds to peck the ground and find items. And then you’re just running back and forth trying to get closer and closer to the item. The Kweh?! system had me circling items only to finally hit the KWEEEEEEH!! just as the time ran out.
I found Chocobo Hot and Cold to be utterly fusturating and boring. I don’t think pecking the ground and having someone yelling out “warm, warmer, warmer, hot!, hot!, YOU FOUND IT!” is intresting or clever game design. To find all the chocographs would take hours that I’m just not willing to pour into this luck based mechanic. Too bad, as I really could have used some of the gear at the end of the game.
Final Thoughts
Obviously, I have criticisms that I could levy at Final Fantasy IX. The game is too slow, the story didn’t grip me, Tetra Master and Chocobo are bad mini-games, some character arcs are flat, and so on. But the more I reflected on my time with Final Fantasy IX, the more I realized how charmed I was by it. It’s unfortunate that I lost an hour of progress halfway through playing it and then put the game on hiatus for four months, but it is what it is. I can’t change the past now.
I’m very glad I finally played through this. The focus on characters and their interactions between each other is something I adore in video games, and it’s interesting seeing how some of my favourite games that came out after IX were obviously inspired by this game. I know there are legions of fans that adore this game, and it’s easy to see why. Even with all its blemishes and nitpicks, Final Fantasy IX succeeds in being an emotional and touching entry to the series. When people ask, “What’s a Final Fantasy?”, this is the entry that they should point to.
Final Fantasy IX absolutely succeeds as a love letter to the franchise that came before it. There are so many great references that would have went right over my head, had I not embarked on this Final Fantasy project. Like, Garland and Sarah’s names appearing from Final Fantasy 1, the reference to Kefka kicking Ghestal when Kuja kicks Garland off his pedastal. The elemental fiends showing up and mini-bosses, Ramuh’s story being a retelling of FF II, all the musical references, the list goes on and on.
It’s safe to say that Final Fantasy IX is the swan song of Hironobu Sakaguchi and Nobuo Uematsu. A celebration of everything that made Final Fantasy a beloved series of games up to this point. And looking forward from here, the series was ready to leap off the PlayStation onto the PlayStation 2, and with that leap, it started to move in bold new directions, often breaking some conventions that had been in the series from the beginning. Many of the games that come after Final Fantasi IX would often make people question what it even takes to be called a Final Fantasy game anymore, but that’s a question to explore on another day.
Sometimes I wonder how much designers end up living in the shadow of their own biggest hits. Does Agricola loom large in the mind of Uwe Rosenberg, affecting everything he touches? Is every new Stefan Feld release inevitably compared to The Castles of Burgundy? And more importantly, do those comparisons subtly shape how designers approach their next projects?
That was my thought that kept creeping in while I was playing Recall, the follow-up from most of the designers of Revive, a game I’ve held in very high regard since it came out. Honestly, it might be my favourite release of the past five years. Recall shares the same artist and overall production aesthetic, which makes the comparison between games almost unavoidable. It looks like Revive’s cousin, and that alone sets certain expectations before you’ve even taken a single turn.
Recall is, at its heart, an action selection game played over just 13 rounds. Each round is a single turn, either sliding one of your action keys into your board and taking the corresponding actions, or taking a recall turn to pull them all back. That recall turn does give you a bit of income based on how many keys you retrieve, but it also costs you something precious: time. Thirteen turns for the game is not a lot, and you feel that constraint almost immediately.
Before even getting into the mechanics, I have to say there’s a really satisfying physicality to the whole production. Slotting a cardboard key into a slot on your board is completely unnecessary from a functional standpoint, but it looks and feels great. It’s satisfying watching the little orange “eye” peek through the keyhole, and it’s a tactile way to represent the actions you’ve already taken. The production doesn’t need to be this elaborate, but I’m very glad that it is.
At the start, your two keys are basic. Actually, they’re totally blank. But pretty quickly you’ll acquire better ones with abilities printed directly on them. So when you take an action, you’re not just doing the action on your board, you also trigger what’s on the key, in whatever order you want. That flexibility is where Recall starts to open up. Suddenly a simple action becomes a small engine, and later, a full-on cascade of actions and benefits.
The actions themselves are fairly straightforward at a glance. You can spawn more meeples on the main board wherever you already have a presence, move groups across the hex map, ferry across connected bodies of water, reveal new tiles, and excavate. Excavation is the big one, the action that feels like five actions rolled into one. It’s also the most mentally taxing at first, because each building you can build requires its own specific terrain. In addition to building, you can excavate, which has you taking stones off the board and paying a variable cost based on the number of stones on that hex, and getting a variable reward based on the number of stones and the colour of the one you’re taking off the board. Thankfully, the player aid is printed right on your board for easy reference.
Interestingly, there’s no real blocking in Recall. You can move freely without interference, which gives the map a more open feel than you might expect, especially if you’re coming in from Revive. That being said, if you do choose to build where someone else already has, you’ll pay an extra meeple for the privilege, and your opponent will get to spawn a meeple there. It sounds punishing, but in practice, at least in my three-player games, it didn’t come up often enough to feel oppressive.
Where Recall really shines is in how it builds toward these sprawling, satisfying turns. Many actions are bundled together, move twice and excavate, or reveal a tile and move and excavate. Then once you start layering in key abilities, clan powers, gadgets, and bonuses from building next to camps on the board, turns can stretch in that delightful, “wait, I can also do this… and then this… and then that lets me do that…” kind of way. It’s not quite a full-blown engine builder, but the combotastic nature of your turns ends up feeling very satisfying, very quickly.
But it’s not all smooth sailing. The map is tight, and movement is more restrictive than I previously alluded to. Water is a hard barrier unless you use the specific ferry action. Then there are the volcanoes, which are a hard barrier, unless you’re playing the one clan that can actually use them. Adding to that are the cubes scattered across the board. You must pick them up when you encounter them, which can disrupt your plans in frustrating ways, as they cost an increasing number of meeples. Hopefully you brought enough along on your movement to continue onto your actual destination and still have enough remaining to complete your building. The compensation for the cubes is often progress on knowledge tracks, which is valuable, but if a cube is in your way, and you’re short on meeples, it feels like a tall wall you can’t get around.
Those knowledge tracks, though, are where Recall gets really interesting. At the start of the game, you draft a clan with a unique ability, often powered by the stones you excavate. You also get a unique gadget, which is essentially a bonus action. As you advance on the knowledge tracks, you’ll unlock additional clans and gadgets, layering more powers into your toolkit. By the end of the game, if you’ve invested heavily, you could be juggling four clans and four gadgets, all with their own abilities. It’s a lot, but in a good way. It creates this sense of growing versatility that I found genuinely exciting. Further to that as you earn points, you automatically upgrade your actions, with each upgrade seeming small, but almost always 50% more powerful.
And all of this is happening under the pressure of those 13 turns. You simply cannot do everything you want to do. The game becomes about stretching each action as far as it will possibly go, like trying to scrape the final bits of peanut butter from an empty jar for that last slice of toast. That tension is excellent, and it makes recalling your keys feel painful. You know you need to do it, but giving up a full turn to reset your board stings a little. The tight 13 turn structure really encourages you to upgrade your actions early to squeeze as much juice out of your remaining actions as possible.
Layered on top of that are the scoring decisions. Three times during the game, you’ll choose between two scoring conditions to amplify for endgame. Everyone scores all base conditions, but the ones you boost can be worth significantly more. The twist is that each choice also gives you immediate income, and inevitably, the worse scoring option for you just so happens to have the income you desperately need right now. Those moments are great. Do you play for the long term, or take the short-term boost to fuel your next few turns? There’s a similar tension with your personal scoring cards. You start with two and eventually have to discard as you approach the end of the game. But the one choose to discard offers you some income as well. Surely the income you need would be on the scoring condition you’d rather give up, right? Again, it’s that same push and pull: what helps me now versus what pays off later?
All of this adds up to a game that feels full of smart, deliberate design choices. It’s tight, but not suffocating. You always have something you can do, but never enough time to do everything you want. It’s a familiar kind of tension, but executed with a lot of finesse. The modularity of the clans and scoring objectives keeps subsequent games fresh and interesting.
If I have a lingering thought, it’s that I’d love to see more clans. There’s 14 in the game, but the system that has you mixing and matching clans practically begs for more. There are also some small oddities, like scoring icons printed on the board that correspond to some of the scoring cards, but not all, which makes me wonder if there’s already room being left for an expansion. But those are just some minor niggles that don’t get in the way of a great game.
The comparisons to Revive are inevitable, and maybe even a little unfair. Recall clearly shares some DNA, but it never felt like it was trying to be Revive at the table. If anything, it feels sharper, more complex and confident than its predecessor. It delivers a satisfying experience of juggling your meagre resources as you stretch yourself for just one more round before succumbing to your recall action. It may look similar, but Recall doesn’t feel overshadowed by Revive. Recall feels distinct, and more importantly, like a game I’d happily come back to on its own terms again and again.
Disclaimer: a copy of Vantage was provided by Stonemaier Games for review
It’s kind of hard to know how to approach Vantage. The box is big, black, and heavy. Physically heavy, sure, but also weighed down by expectation. This is a project that Jamey Stegmaier spent nearly eight years bringing to life, a self-described labour of love built on over 800 unique location cards and 900 other cards besides. That kind of effort is something that makes you pause a little before diving in. You don’t just crack it open and give it a whirl, you need brace yourself for it.
In Vantage, every game begins with one to six players crash-landing on an alien planet after receiving a mysterious signal from a being known as The Traveller. Right from the start, Vantage does something interesting: It’s a cooperative game, but everyone has been separated. All those years of drilling “Don’t split the party” into role playing gamers heads, Vantage does it immediately from the outset. You’re all on the same planet, chasing the same broad mission, but your individual journeys begin in completely separate locations. It’s a cooperative game, so you can talk, share information, and offer advice, but for the most part you’re each having your own little adventure that might occasionally overlap with everyone else’s.
Each turn begins with your character standing on a single “vantage” card, which represents your current location. Every one of those cards (usually) offers six possible actions. These actions are tied to general traits like Move or Overpower, but the specific wording changes from card to card. One location might let you “climb,” while another might tell you to “leap,” another might ask you to “push” or “steal.” On your turn, you pick one of those options, and another player flips through the corresponding book to find your entry and read out what happens.
And this is where one of Vantage’s more interesting ideas shows up: you never really fail. The game leans heavily into a fail-forward system. You always succeed at what you attempt, it’s just a question of what that success costs you. Maybe you make the jump across the cliff, but you take two hits to your health while doing so. Maybe you manage to steal the item, but it took 3 time and 1 moral to make it happen.
Those costs are always resolved through challenge dice. When attempting an action, there will usually be a number cost, with the more valuable actions costing more. You pick up the number of challenge dice the action asks for, but before you roll them, you do have the chance to reduce the die pool by spending corresponding action tokens. And other players can even contribute their own tokens to help you out, which is a neat bit of cooperation. Thematically it’s like someone talking you through a tricky situation over a comms channel. Then, once you have your dice pool set, it’s time to roll them bones.
The dice themselves can hit your health, time, or morale. After rolling your dice you can slot them into any open slots in your personal tableau. Almost all the characters, gear, and items you encounter in Vantage will live in your tableau and offer slots for you to hold your dice, often giving you a reward cube for doing so. Many of them with certain restrictions. Some slots will only be available to certain die faces, while others will be restricted to being available when you’re using a certain type of action (i.e. you can’t slot a die into a spot with the Move tag when you’re doing an Overpower action). Some will be a bit nebulous and require that you are somewhere, like on water. There’s a good amount of flexibility in the system. Many of the book entries don’t explicitly say that you’re ‘on water’, so we made context appropriate calls as to when someone was on water or not.
And Vantage supports this, the rulebook specifically calls out for players to follow the golden rule of fun. If an interaction isn’t clear based on the context of verbiage on the card, just follow your gut and choose what makes the most sense, or what your group would find the most fun.
Back to those challenge dice. After you’ve slotted all the dice onto your cards and equipment as possible, any remaining die must be paid. That means losing stats, ticking your character one step closer to failure. Except even in failure, Vantage plays fast and lose. When any player stat drops to 0, you can choose to accept defeat, or, you can just keep going. There are options for both. If you’re not done with your adventure yet, Vantage is ready to support your whims, rules and consequences be damned. After all, it’s just a game. Who cares if you fudge the losing condition a little bit?
The challenge dice on your cards are generally locked to their slots until there aren’t enough dice for a player to take an action. Then a refresh happens where all the die come off and go back into the challenge pool. It’s a good system, but one that makes me frustrated when I’m playing solo. The number of dice in the challenge pool scales with player count. Eight by default, then plus two per player, which might sound reasonable at first. But in practice it means that larger groups will have a much easier time managing the challenges. In a solo game, you’re dealing with ten dice all on your own. In a three-player game, you’re dealing with fourteen dice total, but they’re spread across three people with three tableaus that naturally have more slots and more flexibility. The result is that solo play can feel punishingly tight, while multiplayer feels much more forgiving simply because the burden is shared.
And that flexibility matters. In one game, a character ended up stacked with boat-related abilities and could basically dominate anything involving water, and was able to take on dice from the other players rolls with ease. In another game, I couldn’t find anything useful and just quickly bled out after just a handful of turns, because I had no way to manage the dice being thrown at me. There’s a huge swing in how your game can unfold depending on what you happen to find.
But that variability is also part of the appeal. There’s a genuine sense of discovery here that’s incredibly charming. Every vantage card is a new location with 6 little stories to explore. Each time you move you get a whole new set of possibilities. In one game, I repaired a bridge and was rewarded with a bedroll that protected me from the cold. In another, we were trying to fish up a kraken, but I found myself wandering aimlessly across cliffs and plains, desperately searching for any body of water so I could start progressing our mission. The feeling of being lost is palpable, especially in your first few games. Even as you start to piece together a mental map of the world, everything still feels vast and unknowable. Like groping around an unfamiliar place in the dark.
My tableau is really good at handling green actions, and almost nothing else
That sense of discovery is easily Vantage’s biggest strength. I love exploring in games, and this one feeds that desire constantly. Every turn is a new choice, new threads to pull on, a new story beat to uncover. But that also comes with some trade-offs. You only get to take one action per location before you’re usually forced to move on, and sometimes that feels really disappointing. There were plenty of moments where I wanted to dig deeper, to try a second option on a card, to see what else was there, but the game ushers you forward instead. It creates this lingering feeling of “maybe next time,” which is exciting, but occasionally frustrating.
Initially, I assumed Vantage would be best as a solo experience. After all, you’re mostly off doing your own thing. But I was surprised by how much I enjoyed it with others. Taking turns reading for each other, reacting to each other’s discoveries, nudging someone toward a risky or ridiculous choice, it creates a shared storytelling experience that’s more engaging than I expected. Even if the mechanical interaction is light, the social interaction fills in those gaps.
That said, the variety doesn’t always hold up under scrutiny. There are moments where the game feels like it’s offering you meaningful choices. Like, do you duel this companion, or flirt with them? But the outcomes can feel a little samey, with only minor variations. It actually reminded me a bit of Charterstone, where the differences between resources or factions didn’t always translate into fundamentally different experiences. Sure there are 6 resources, but they all feel the same. Sometimes in Vantage I got the vibe that there was an illusion of choice happening under the hood. Where the journey felt dynamic, but no matter what choices I picked I would have been shepherded along the path the game wanted me to go.
And then there’s the question of what you’re actually working toward. At the start of the game, you’re given a mission, and you might uncover additional “destinies” along the way that can serve as alternate or additional win conditions. But the endgame is as loose as anything. You can complete your mission, chase a destiny, do both, or just stop when you feel like you’ve had enough. The game doesn’t push you toward a climactic finish so much as it invites you to decide when your story is done. And Vantage is not a legacy or campaign game, every time you sit down at the table, you should be crash landing back on the planet, starting from square one. The rules don’t encourage you to ‘save’ your game and pick up your threads when you come back. Instead you take nothing but knowledge into your next game.
For some players, that’s going to be a feature. I was the player who landed and immedately started chasing squirrels off into the sunset, my mission long forgotten. But then when I wanted to go back to it, I wasn’t really sure how I was going to get back on track. Vantage isn’t about winning or losing, but it’s about the stories you discover along the way. It’s challenging to wrap my euro-game brain around this idea, that the win and lose conditions aren’t really important, but when I do let go of my old preconceptions of what a game is, I find myself delighting in the shiny objects scattered around the world for me to pick up.
Sorting the cards back into the box at the end of a session is pretty tedious
And if you’re wondering, yes, it took me around 100 hours to finish the storyline in Breath of the Wild. I was that player that set a pin for an objective in the distance, and then spent 3 hours doing a dozen tasks completly unrelated to my pin, often sending me sprawling in an entirely different direction.
It would be a mistake to say Vantage isn’t a good game. It absolutely is. What it accomplishes from a design perspective, this sprawling, interconnected web of over a thousand cards is impressive. It may not have the mechanical heft of something like Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon, but it doesn’t need to. It’s a fundamentally different experience.
And for me, more often than not, it works. There’s a sense of wonder here that’s hard to shake. Even when the systems creak a little, even when the choices feel thinner than they first appear, I keep coming back to that feeling of stepping into the unknown and seeing what’s over the next hill. And after just a few plays, I can say pretty confidently that I’d rather be wandering around Vantage than grinding my way through something heavier.
Disclaimer: This review is based on plays of the game on Board Game Arena.
I don’t usually like to review games solely based on a Board Game Arena play. I recognize that the platform has some sincere benefits, from the wide variety of games, the plentiful amount of people to play with, and the ability to play games asynchronously, letting me get my board game fix all week long. But even with all those benefits, it’s just not the same as playing a game face to face with your friends, handling and admiring the physical production, and heckling each other over each of our moves. But sometimes I get a sense of everything a game offers just from the BGA plays, and so here we are.
Seashells, by designer Bruno Faidutti and published by KTBG in 2026, is a grid movement set collection game for 2 to 5 players. In Seashells, you’ll randomly place all the seashell pieces onto a grid, with a red pail in the middle. On your turn, you can move that pail any number of spaces along the X or Y axis from where it currently sits. Then, you take the piece that’s on the spot you choose to stop the red bucket on and put it into your own supply, and the next player takes their turn. Turns progress until the bucket is put on a spot with no pieces in the X or Y axis, and the game comes to an end.
The score in Seashells is mostly achieved via set collection majorities. There are 7 types of seashells in 7 colours, and whoever has a majority in each of the 14 categories at the end of the game receives 3 points. Sand dollars are 1 point a piece, and each fossil pair you have (1 head and 1 tail) is worth 3 points as well. The player with the most points at the end of the game, wins!
I won’t beat around the bush. Seashells is fine, but it’s not very interesting. All of the scoring comes from getting and maintaining majorities, so you’re encouraged to gerrymander to the best of your ability, that is to say to only collect the items that you’ll be able to win the majority for and eschew everything else. Heaven help you if you get caught in a battle with another player for a colour.
The grid movement is slightly interesting in that the choice you make for your turn is what sets up your opponents options for their turn. But it’s frustrating in that it’s nearly impossible to control, if your opponents are happy to hate draft you, you’ll never have the opportunity to take the pieces you want. But with the nature of scoring only your majorities, choosing a piece you won’t win can almost be equated to a wasted turn.
Which leads me into the endgame for Seashells. As the grid gets picked clean, your options start to diminish. Your last few turns you’ll be forced to pick from one or two options at most, and often they’ll be effectively worthless to you, as they’ll be the first item or colour you’ve collected of that set. Wasted turns feel bad, and the endgame of Seashells is full of them.
The advance scoring variant helps with this problem slightly, in that if you miss majority but have the second most, you’ll earn a single point. Or if you tie for first, all tied players earn 2 points instead of the 3 given for a clear majority. At least then you’re slightly more encouraged to spread yourself out in hopes of scooping up half a dozen second place victories.
I think the nicest thing I can say about Seashells is that looking at pictures on BGG shows a very nice production. The pieces you’re collecting are made of very thick wood and look really attractive.
At the end of the day, Seashells feels like a game that belongs at a beach house. Something to mindlessly play after a long day of soaking up the sun. I appreciate that the gameplay is simple and approachable, that each turn doesn’t ask too much of the players at the table, but the frustration of being forced to take pieces that will never score had me thinking “What’s the point?” more than once during my plays.
Maybe the physical production does some of the heavy lifting that I’m missing when I play Seashells on Board Game Arena. I can imagine those chunky wooden shells, the bright colours, and the tactile act of holding the chunky pieces adding a layer of charm that smooths over some of the mechanical flatness. There’s definitely been games where the aesthetics and table presence elevate what is otherwise a fairly straightforward game.
But even giving Seashells that benefit of the doubt, I don’t think it offers enough interesting decisions to sustain repeated plays. The combination of rigid scoring incentives, limited control over your options, and an endgame that often devolves into low-impact turns leaves it feeling a bit too passive for my tastes. It’s pleasant enough, and certainly not broken, but it never quite gives me a reason to come back.
When is too much of a good thing… actually a bad thing?
It’s a question I’ve been turning over in my head a lot lately, and like most of my rambling blog posts, the question started with a board game.
On March 25th, Restoration Games announced the return of Star Wars: The Queen’s Gambit with The Lord of the Rings: The Kings Gambit. I saw this announcement immediately after I was listening to the Board Games Insider podcast where host Stephen Buonocore announced his co-designed game with Geoff Engelstein, The Lord of the Rings: Circle of Conflict.
Now, my wife and I have always been fans of the Lord of the Rings series. The books and the original trilogy of movies, mind you. We didn’t care for the Hobbit movies (although I found this fan-edit to be significantly more palatable), and we only watched a single episode of The Rings of Power.
But ever since Embracer group acquired Middle Earth Enterprises, it feels like a deluge of Lord of the Rings games have hit the marketplace. In just the past few years there’s been The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers Trick-Taking Game,The Lord of the Rings: Duel for Middle-earth, There’s The Lord of the Rings: Fate of the Fellowship, You’ve got heavier titles like The Lord of the Rings: Foes of Middle-earth and The Lord of the Rings: Journeys in Middle-earth. And then there are others ,The Lord of the Rings: The Adventure Book Game, Exit: The Lord of the Rings, Spot It! The Lord of the Rings, and more! All these games circling the same source material, each trying to carve out its own little piece of Tolkien’s world.
At some point, I start to wonder: when does one of my favourite IPs being in a game stop being exciting and is actively hurting my intrest in it?
There was a time not so long ago when a new Lord of the Rings anything felt like an event. Maybe it was because releases were so spaced out. A movie trilogy in 2001, then a decade break before the Hobbit movies. I know that part of the reason was because so few people had access to the license, famously gate kept by Christopher Tolkien. But to go from a drip feed of Lord of the Rings content to the veritable deluge of releases that I’m seeing today, it causes a bit of an emotional whiplash.
I feel like that scarcity gave the games that did exist some weight. I have vivid memories of playing through the Lord of the Rings video games on the Game Boy Advance and the Nintendo Gamecube. Those games felt like they belonged. Like they had a reason to exist beyond simply wearing the skin of a beloved IP.
Nowadays, I can’t help but wonder if some of these games coming out NEED to be Lord of the Rings themed, or are they just slapping the name on because they know it’ll catch the attention of long-time fans? I received Lord of the Rings: Spot It for Christmas this year, and I’m sure that I never would have received that game if not for the LOTR name on the package.
I’m not trying to say that any of these games are bad, some of them are genuinely clever. But because LOTR games are no longer rare, they no longer feel special or unique. Which hurts my heart, just a little.
To be fair, there’s a very real upside to all of this. More games set in Middle-earth means more entry points into the hobby. A trick-taking game might appeal to one group. The narrative adventure that is Journeys in Middle-Earth will appeal to another. A quick, portable game like Spot It! might be the thing that gets a non-gamer to sit down at the table in the first place.
And there’s something comforting about a familiar setting. You don’t need to learn a new world, new characters, or new terminology. You already know who the factions are. You already understand the stakes. That familiarity lowers the barrier to entry in a way that original themes sometimes struggle to match, especially when it comes to High Fantasy, which has a tendency to copy Lord of the Rings anyway, in a way that makes them feel generic.
With that context, having a wide spread of games tied to the same IP is beneficial. It increases the chances that someone will find a version of that world that clicks with them mechanically. Not every game needs to be for everyone. But maybe there should be a version of Middle-earth for everyone.
But there’s a tipping point. And I don’t think it’s tied to a specific number of releases. It’s more of a feeling than a metric. A moment when I hear another game announcement and instead of thinking, “Oh, that’s interesting,” I thought “Of course there’s another one.”
And that’s when the cynic inside of me wakes up. These Lord of the Rings games are starting to feel less like a creative decision and more like a branding exercise. Because the real question isn’t whether a game is good. It’s whether the theme feels earned.
Does this game need to be set in Middle-earth? Does the design draw something meaningful from that world? Or could you strip away the names, swap in generic fantasy art, and end up with essentially the same experience? Is the only reason this is a Lord of the Rings game is so that long time fans like me will buy it?
And when those thoughts start popping into my head, I start to feel fatigue.
Even if each individual game is solid, even if each one targets a different audience, there’s still a cumulative effect. Seeing the same IP over and over again, across wildly different genres and weight classes, starts to wear down my sense of excitement. The same thing happened when Marvel really got their ball rolling. At first, a new Marvel movie was an event. It was an exciting thing to look forward to. First it was Iron Man in 2008, then Iron Man 2 in 2010, then Thor and Captain America in 2011, and Avengers in 2012. Now, there have been something like 17 movies and TV shows over the past 4 years. Absolutely exhausting, trying to keep up. I’ll be honest, after Infinity War and Endgame in 2019, I started ignoring everything Marvel.
And I’m worried I’m going to do the same with The Lord of the Rings.
I don’t think there’s a clean answer to when “too much” becomes too much. It’s not a total number of games. It’s not even a trend. It’s a feeling that creeps in when the connection between theme and design starts to feel thin, when the IP stops being a source of inspiration and starts being a marketing shortcut.
I don’t mind seeing more games set in Middle-earth. In fact, part of me enjoys it. It means the world I grew up loving continues to find new ways to exist. But I do find myself becoming more selective. Not because I’m tired of The Lord of the Rings, but because now I’m needing to mentally strip the LOTR theme off the game to decide if it’s an actually interesting game underneath the pretty wrapping paper. LOTR has stopped being a selling point for me, and is starting to be an active deterrent. This doesn’t mean I’m not going to buy any LOTR games in the future, but I’m certainly going to be more selective about them.
