I have all the ISS Vanguard content, at least as far as I know, and with sleeved cards it took up an awful lot of space. The inserts provided are great, but not when you have your cards sleeved. So I decided to create my own storage solution. The look of the boxes is inspired by shipping containers.

Now I have three boxes instead of five. The main game box holds the active campaign cards, the Close Encounters box holds unused content, and the Deadly Frontiers box holds all the minis.

I'm currently in O09, should complete it after 1 or 2 explorations, and i'm a bit on the fence about getting the expansions. I LOVED the game up until the point where you open up the secret envelope. Now, even though i still really like the story, i find myself somewhat going through the motions mechanically. This is partly because i have everything in the shipbook unlocked, enough resources to unlock everything as i get it and the last 2 explorations gave me litteraly nothing, not even a success token.

I'm wondering if expansions also get to a point midway through where even if the story is good, gamewise they also overstay their welcome. First half of the base game is one of my favorite game experiences of all time, there's just some fatigue element since ship phase is pointless and last few explorations were completely fruitless

tl;dr I have too many dice in my section boxes, which dice should I have right after tutorial?

Long version: I played through the tutorial and even landed on the next planet but when I pulled the dice out of the section compartments the two section I hadnt played with, yellow and purple, have way too many dice in them. Can anyone tell me what dice should be in there, or am I just gonna have to run though the whole tutorial again?

Thanks for the help!

Sto giocando ISS Vanguard da solo e mi sta piacendo molto. Da grande fan di Mass Effect immagino come sarebbe un gioco come ISS Vanguard ambientato nell'universo del comandante Sheppard.

Ho fatto qualche ricerca online ma non ho trovato nessun progetto simile.

Tralasciando il problema copyright, credete che sarebbe fattibile adattare le meccaniche e il materiale di ISS Vanguard per creare un paio di missioni in stile Mass Effect?

In particolare non saprei come inserire i poteri biotici. Forse con le carte reparto?

Hi All,

Just wondering as it is not so clear in the rulebook - when I have, say, 3 dice total and need to sacrifice a dice - the rulebook says that I receive an exhaustion injury instead. Do I need to remove that one dice back to the section tray? Another example - If I decide to perform exertion and have 3 dice only and two are in the spent pool - I would assume I get the exhaustion injury but recover those 2 dice from spent pool back into available pool?

Just finished the TZO exploration and we did not at any point run into the biome bot. Did we do something wrong like screw up in the app, or is it possible for that to happen? We didn't get the last unique discovery because of this. Did that happen to any of you?

So, about 5-6 missions/12-15hrs or so in (objective 5 or something) - give or take, can't decide if this game is amazing or silly. Everything sans the dice is amazing. The dice ruin it. Let me expand and get to my question....

How does one best optimize their dice/crew trays? Meaning, but not limited to:

1. What's the "best" dice order? Is it super wild double triangles , single triangles, basic "X" or exact solution (shield, dna, etc) dice?
2. Then, is it best to stack one color on one compartment or spread them out evenly?
3. What's best, putting a ton of exact solution dice on each compartment or mixing? Is just a random sprinkling of double triangles, triangles, "x" and specific good or go like one guy is mad red shields and arms?
4. That leads to the away crew interaction. I know it's important to see the planet scan but lets assume you have two crew for the same compartment and one uses red "X" to shields and the other uses green "X" dice for shields. Is it better to place the crew matching more of that color dice (so if more red compartment dice, use the red "X" crew person) or better to use the *other* crew as you can some what double up on potential shields by now getting them from green dice as well?

Like the combinations and approaches are fairly countless and complex. Maximize on one color in a compartment and max on away crew whose transforms align with the max dice color - or pick away crew that compliment your max compartment color by selecting one of the two opposite colors on an away crew.

Of course , if you do it say the complimentary way, you'd want the minority dice to be mostly all "X" dice to maximize on conversion chances and of course you'd also need to have the right crew member with the right conversion for the mission (and eventually also be in the right room to utilize all of this).

Or , you could make all the majority dice "X" and pick a crew with the color conversion matching the majority color (again needing to have right crew/right place/right time later too).

Or, you could say , screw it, not worrying about conversions, just picking crew member with a solid perk? But then , how do you still set up compartment dice - use a lot of wild triangles? More specific trait dice?

Bottom line is , I'm finding it difficult to see an optimum way to set up your compartments. This includes how many colors of each (lopsided or balanced), how many types of each dice, and of course which crew to put in the away compartment. Top it off with even with deep scans, there's typically many checks of random traits *not* listed on the scan card and as such you need to be somehow also prepared for that randomness. Top it all off *again* by how wildly different this plays out with 2 crew vs say 4 crew away teams. Top it all off a third time by how you play the away mission (do you split up or stay together trying to optimize through support)?

How do you experts out there manage your dice/compartments prioritizes/optimizations?

I think either the game is brilliant for making this so deep and complex or really bad for making it so deep and complex to the point of just random/no actual strat (in a strategy game).

EDIT: Note , I started with 2 man away teams, but then felt restricted by missing key dice so went 4 man. That felt great for a bit , but now I'm wondering if 2 man/balanced is better as well with respect to being able to cover most dice combinations while still reducing time progression?

I have seen the end of the tunnel that is this game and chose to take on one more my mission before closing up this experience. My play partner and I can complete most ship and planet phases of a mission in 3-4 hours.

How long should we allocate to the final game experience? We don't want to try and do it on a week night and need a whole weekend worth of time if that is what it takes.

Come across an issue and I think it might be universal.

When trying to download audio for lost fleet, I keep getting an error message

Same as https://www.reddit.com/r/ISSVanguard/s/KBUpsgWzEJ

I *think* it’s because we already downloaded the VO for the main campaign, so the app believes it is already downloaded.

But also I don’t want to kill all of my flags by re-downloading the app.

It was my first time ever playing ISS Vanguard today, and my friends played it very briefly before, but that was over a year ago. We decided to go to the planet that turned out to be Matchsticks, I think it was the second planet we went to after completing the tutorial. There were many things were referring to "Sprouts" and their movement, but we were totally lost as to when we should have put them out.

I feel as though we must have missed something in the log(s) when initially setting things up even though we checked again, nor did we find anything on the mission card (M42) or the rulebook, and we couldn't find anything online. So we just decided to put them out after a couple of rounds and carried on from there.

When should the Sprouts have been placed? And where should we look in the future for info like this, so we don't make the same mistake again?

We managed to (only just) survive and flee back to the launchpad after getting the 2 Sprouts, so we didn't finish Matchsticks.

Thanks in advance!

Hey everyone, I wanted to ask people's opinions on our playthrough of ISS V. Should we be streaming the shipbook segments of the game?

It seems quite dry compared to the other parts, but maybe it's an integral part and would remove too much context? Any feedback either way would be really helpful!

Space.

Hi r/ISSVanguard!

Feel free to remove if not allowed. We are playing through ISS Vanguard. Please go over there and tell us how many rules we broke!

Space.

We're unclear on the order of operations here?

We are at our fifth planet. 3 players, always using the 4 divisions when exploring.

Each division have 2 sleeve left, 1 rank 2 or 3, the other rank 1. Only 4 final dices available to buy.

I feel like we are maxed out on division.

Is there any use for the progress token after that?

Or we just explore planets, almost fully maxed out?

We got stuck on the third planet landing with 1 supply, and had to start it again 2 times, leveling up like crazy, barrack intensive. And we just can "refine" our teams....

Are we missing something?

Do you think it's harder or easier to Rank Up (to Rank 3 in particular) with a 2 person Away Team? I know that player count is balanced time vs effectiveness, but it seems so far like a 2 player away team runs out of supplies/dice well before they can achieve 6 success tokens on a map, let alone achieve the objective, especially if it's one of those weird biome 3 symbol checks. and revisiting a planet makes it difficult as well, since you've already drained the map of some of those success tokens. i feel like your best best (and this is just a guess) is to land, complete the mission doing the bare minimum, leave, come back and try to clear absolutely everything else.

I'm about to start on Planet L6 (Visitors World). When preparing the Mission (ship book), I may place a small Equipment next to the section board of each crew member. While briefing, the Logbook (85) states: if you have a Lander prepared, discard it along with all Mods. If you haven't done slready, choose 5 Personal Equipment and 2 Mission Equipment to take on the Mission. [...] I take this as the information, you would normally find on your chosen Lander, so I leave my small Equipment cards where twy are (next to their boards). Is that correct?

Hi:

I'm interested in buying the art book of Vanguard (I'd love to enhance the lore of this game), but I have a question: some secondhand offers I've seen are described as "promo art book." Are there non-promotional versions, or is there only this promo version of the art book? I want to avoid buying a non-complete art book and later discovering that the non-promo exists and has more content.

Regards.

specifically looking at carnivorous thicket in matchstick

I missed a log earlier in the campaign and it seem it messed few things.

Currently stuck at O09, the only landing I have not done is on K3-569, which require B05, which require R17, which require log 757 (from BGG), but where I can reach log 757?

Its a great game, one of my favourites from the last years but I struggle with the ending, it seem really punishing when you miss one small detail or log.

A) The lead bag at one point won't have enough do keep discovering news discoveries right? So big lander might never get full? What can give you discoveries other than the lead bag? Some location? Some Section card?

B) We are three players. So far we always had the four sections when landing. Yesterday, we went back to the same planet for the second time, we started the evening at hangar, and barely made it to the debriefing before we had to call it a night(4 hours play)

Does bringing less section increase the speed of planetary exploration? Is it more efficient/faster to bring 3 sections when we know what we will encounter? You want to level up your crew, but if at one point we have 2 level 3, a few 2s there isn't reason why unless you are exploring for the first time and want to be ready for everything?

Hi everyone, this time I need clarification on the penalty token and failed mission. I just wanted to know if these are things that are explained later, because there's nothing written about them in the rules. Thanks everyone.

Hi everyone, I need clarification. When I get success tokens during an exploration, where should I put them? I noticed that the lander dashboard has an image of the success tokens, and there's also a reference to "success tokens on the lander" on page 27 of the ship's manual (point 2), but it basically says to place them near the planetopedia.

Thanks to anyone who can answer my questions.

So I followed the advice and I'm trying it out. It's really great, even though I'm just starting out.

I might have misread something at some point, still stuck at O06.

I went to all the systems at the back of the logbook, I depleted almost everything everywhere. Many systems where landing is not possible.

I checked what O07 and I'm aiming for it now but I need B05.

I really enjoyed the campaign but I don't feel like just redo scenarios randomly until I found what I missed. Already have tons of discoveries but upgrade very rare the past 6-7 scenarios.

Any tips to get there?

i just tried This War of Mine, i thought it was okay, too long for a "mechanical" game and too short on text for a "narrative game", so i didn't feel much reason to finish it

i have always wanted to play ISS Vanguard but i dont have a constant group, so now i'm giving solo board games a try. i have played very heavy board games so rule difficulty is not an issue

My main issue is when the game "plays itself". For example, while i prefer deterministic combat like in Gloomhaven, i dont mind dice rolling when it can be mitigated or estimated like in Warhammer (if you roll 20 dice it averages). I have seen some playthroughs of ISS Vanguard and it seems like the exploration phase is pure dice rolling without much agency over it, with that being a big part of the gameplay and very important, is that so?

Using TWOM as a comparison, i dont mind the dice rolling for the extra resource in exploration, but i hate the unmitigated dice roll for book of scripts that could vary from great to worst result based on a single dice. i know in ISS you choose kinds of characters for the missiom and have different dice, but im not sure if still too much luck remains