ISS Vanguard Review: Inside Awaken Realms' Sci-Fi Production Flex

ISS Vanguard is a 1–4 player cooperative legacy-lite campaign game by Awaken Realms, designed by Andrzej Betkiewicz, Krzysztof Piskorski, Paweł Samborski, and Marcin Świerkot. You are not a single hero; you are the command crew of humanity's first faster-than-light exploration vessel, the ISS Vanguard, dispatched to chart a galaxy and trace the legacy of a vanished precursor civilization the fiction calls the Builders.

The campaign alternates between two distinct modes. In the ship phase, you sit at the home base: managing the vessel through the Ship Book, recruiting and resting crew, researching technology, and deciding which world to investigate next. Then you commit an away team — drawn from four shipboard sections (Security, Recon, Science, and Engineering) — and drop onto a planet rendered as a book of branching locations. There, the dice-building exploration engine takes over.

Tonally, it sits beside Star Trek's away-mission optimism and Battlestar Galactica's lonely-ship dread. Mechanically, it is closer to a sprawling, app-supported choose-your-path adventure with a sophisticated dice economy bolted underneath. BoardGameGeek lists it at a complexity weight of 3.66 / 5 — meaty, but not a brain-burner — with a recommended sweet spot of 1–2 players despite the 4-player ceiling. A free companion app adds voice acting, music, and automated flag-tracking to smooth the narrative bookkeeping.

Short answer: yes, and the lavishness is unusually functional. The retail box tips the scale at over five kilograms, and almost none of that weight is filler.

The drawer insert. The headline component is the fitted tray system — a drawer-style insert (with linen-finish, dual-layer card trays) that organizes the entire game so setup and teardown stay sane for a box this size. Reviewers single it out as one of the best factory inserts in the hobby; the broader fan verdict is that "every detail in the box feels well thought out." This is the difference between a 60-hour campaign you keep on the table and one you abandon in a closet.

The dashboards. Each away-team section gets a dual-layer player board — recessed cutouts that hold dice and tokens in place so a bumped table doesn't erase your state. They are the tactile heart of the away-team turn.

The books. Three hardbound volumes carry the experience: the Ship Book (a binder with dividers and card-storage pages that is your home base), the Planetopedia (the map-as-book you explore, with up to eight locations per planet), and the Log Book, which threads the branching campaign narrative.

The minis and standees. The core box ships eight crew miniatures — the four sections in male/female pairs — a deliberately restrained count for an Awaken Realms game. In a notable design choice, the studio used standees for threats and equipment rather than flooding the box with plastic, putting the budget into art and structure instead. (A separate Close Encounters add-on exists for those who want 30+ sculpted threat minis.)

The dice. Custom engraved dice in three color groups, each with its own symbol set, plus the universal Vanguard wildcard symbol. The dice are not a theme skin — they are the engine, which the next section unpacks.

This is the mechanism that earns ISS Vanguard its keep, so let me catalogue it precisely.

Before an away mission, you build your dice pool — choosing which section dice to bring based on the crew you commit. Crucially, dice of the same color are not identical: each individual die carries a different distribution of symbols, so committing 'a Science die' is a real decision, not a formality. You are assembling a probability toolkit tuned to the mission you expect.

On the planet — explored through the Planetopedia's branching locations — you resolve checks by rolling committed dice and matching their symbols to a requirement. The Vanguard wildcard can stand in for any symbol, and cards plus character abilities let you manipulate results. The tension is pure push-your-luck: commit more dice to raise your odds, but every die you roll lands in a spent pool and is unavailable until you recover it. You refresh dice by resting — or you can exert, squeezing out an extra result now at the cost of removing that die for the rest of the session. An injury die seeds risk into the bag, so every push carries a bite.

The result, when it sings, is what one reviewer called "a great sense of exploration... paired with decision making in dice, cards, and special abilities" and "a big sense of 'pushing your luck.'" You feel the dwindling resource of your team's energy as a planet's mysteries unfold one locked-then-unlocked door at a time.

The ship phase between drops is the quieter counterweight — recruiting, researching, choosing the next heading. It is thematically right but, by common account, the weaker half: the Ship Book "doesn't have that much decision making" despite its marketing prominence, and Awaken Realms has since revised it (a later Ship Book update trimmed resource types that were adding more bookkeeping than fun).

Here is the ledger, balanced honestly. The base game has sold at US retail anywhere from about $148 to $185 depending on the shop (GameNerdz has listed it at $147.99; other retailers sit near $169–$185). At any point in that band, this is a premium purchase, and the community genuinely splits on whether it's justified.

The case for. You are buying a complete, gorgeous, deeply replayable campaign with a best-in-class insert and a dice engine that few games replicate. The praise runs high: fans have called it "a Rolls Royce both in design and components" and "just a gorgeous looking game." Published reviews land warmly — Zatu scored it 93%, Topping the Table 4.5/5 — and per-hour, a 40–60-hour campaign at ~$160 is cheaper entertainment than most hobbies.

The case against. The most pointed criticism is that the lavishness inflates the price: one frank BGG reviewer argued the story and art are worth it, but the money probably isn't, noting many components 'weren't necessary' and the experience could have shipped in a smaller, cheaper box. Pacing is the other knock — Shelfside, who scored it 7/10, estimate the early-to-mid campaign at an 8/10 but warn the late game drags into 'tedious' multi-hour dice-rolling, and advise some players not to finish the campaign if the rolling exhausts them. Combat is rare, so tactics-hungry players may bounce.

The verdict on value: worth it if you weight production, atmosphere, and exploration highly and play at 1–2 players. Not worth it if you primarily want efficient tactical engine-building or a tidy, climactic ending.

ISS Vanguard is built to teach itself, which is mercy for a box this size. A few archivist's notes for a clean launch:

Install the companion app first. The free ISS Vanguard app adds voice acting and music and, more practically, automates Log Book flag-tracking and reads narrative passages aloud. The single most common new-player stumble is mis-following the Log Book — getting 'lost more than once' is a documented hazard, and the app is the fix.

Read to the bottom. A recurring tripwire: missions hide instructions at the end of a log entry. Always scroll/read all the way down before resolving, or you'll miss a setup beat.

Pick your player count deliberately. This is the biggest first-session lever. Solo with all four crew members imposes heavy memory load; many solo players prefer running two crew to keep the cognitive weight manageable. Two human players is the widely-cited sweet spot — 'two heads are better than one' for the dice decisions. Four players spreads the bookkeeping but dilutes each person's agency. Start at 1–2.

Don't over-commit your dice early. The instinct is to throw everything at the first check. Resist it. Learn the rest/exert rhythm on low-stakes rolls so you understand your recovery economy before a planet punishes you for an empty pool. Treat the injury die with respect from mission one.

Embrace the slow burn. The opening hours are deliberately unhurried — they are establishing tone and teaching systems. If you arrive expecting immediate fireworks you'll misjudge it. Arrive expecting a logbook of discovery and it delivers.

The catalogue extends well past the core box. Here is what's real, in priority order.

The Lost Fleet (≈$56). The flagship expansion and the clear first add-on. It continues the saga with a fresh, more intricate campaign and ships a full slate of its own content — its own Rulebook, Planetopedia, Operations Book, and Logbook, plus 104 Point-of-Interest cards, 28 mission cards, 36 section cards, standees, and dice. If you finished the base game wanting more galaxy, this is the buy. Get this first.

Galactic Almanac (price varies, ~$35–$64). A large additional campaign — over 700 cards, 12 models, a new galactic map with 30+ systems, an 18+-board Planetopedia, and an 80+-page Log Book. The important caveat: it requires both the base game AND Lost Fleet to play. Tremendous value-per-content, but strictly a third course, not a first.

Deadly Frontier & Close Encounters. Deadly Frontier is a further campaign expansion; Close Encounters swaps the base game's threat standees for 30+ sculpted miniatures. Both are for the committed — reviewers repeatedly flag the extra minis as cosmetic, 'far from necessary' for play.

Organizers. Worth a clarifying note: the base game's factory insert is already excellent, so you do not need an aftermarket organizer for the core box. The well-regarded LaserOx wooden insert and expansion organizer exist for those consolidating all the expansions into fewer boxes, but — per LaserOx's MAP policy — they are sold direct (laserox.net) and through authorized shops, not on Amazon. Budget for them separately only if your collection has outgrown the original trays.

Let me close the ledger with a clear bill of recommendation.

Buy it if you are: a solo or two-player gamer who plays for atmosphere and discovery over optimization; a lover of campaign narratives (Tainted Grail, Sleeping Gods, Gloomhaven) who wants a sci-fi entry; a collector who genuinely values a beautifully produced, superbly organized box and will keep it on the table across many sessions; someone who finds a depleting dice-pool a satisfying puzzle; and someone comfortable spending premium money on a single deep experience.

Pass — or at least demand a test-play — if you are: primarily a tactical combat gamer (encounters here are infrequent by design); a group that needs fast setup and short sessions (90–120 minutes minimum, and a long campaign); allergic to bookkeeping (even post-revision, this is a game of logs, flags, and resource tracking); a player who needs a tightly-plotted, branch-heavy story (the campaign is fairly linear with a handful of endings); or anyone who must finish what they start — because by the designers' own community's account, the finale can grind, and the experience is honestly best in its first two-thirds.

Understood for what it is — a slow, gorgeous, attrition-driven logbook of galactic exploration rather than a tactical skirmish or a tight euro — ISS Vanguard is a singular thing on the shelf, and for the right captain it is unforgettable.