ISS Vanguard in 2026: Buy One Box and Stop — and the Expansion That Cannot Be Played

It is not missing anything you can act on, and the publisher settles this themselves.

Awaken Realms' own support documentation states that the stretch goals for ISS Vanguard were divided between the Core Box and Lost Fleet — the second-wave box is literally labelled "Lost Fleet" for that reason — and, crucially, that "All models needed for the SG content are inside the Core Box and Close Encounters expansion."

The community reached the same conclusion from the other direction. On the BoardGameGeek thread that new buyers keep finding, a player put it plainly back in 2023: the retail version "is the same core box we received in Wave 1," with the differences being price and the Wave 2 stretch goals — Lost Fleet plus a handful of standalone missions. And then the sentence that matters most for anyone reading this: those Wave 2 stretch goals are "separate experiences to the core campaign."

Separate experiences. Not missing pieces. You are not buying an amputated game.

The nine Gamefound pledge tiers — Core at $99, Commander's at $179, the Dreadnaught "gameplay all-in" at $249, the Ultimate all-in at $535, and the rest — are all closed. There is no late pledge and no open pledge manager. Chasing an all-in tier in 2026 means the secondary market, at secondary-market prices, for content the publisher describes as supplementary.

This is the single most useful thing in this guide, and nobody on the first page of Google says it.

Deadly Frontier is the game's substantial campaign expansion — over 700 cards, twelve models, a new galactic map with thirty-plus systems, a new Planetopedia, and an eighty-page Log Book. It is real, it is large, and copies are still on shelves: one US retailer had two in stock at $109.99 when we checked.

Its own product listing carries this requirement, verbatim: "Requires ISS Vanguard base game and the Lost Fleet expansion to play."

And Lost Fleet is sold out at every source we checked. Its Asmodee page is one of the five that now 404s. The UK retailer ranking for expansion searches lists it sold out. A US shop lists it out of stock. It exists, in Polish, on the publisher's own store at 289 zł — and that is the only place we found it purchasable at all.

So the sequence that catches people is this: they cannot find Lost Fleet, they find Deadly Frontier, they reasonably assume the second is the newer and better one, and they buy a hundred-dollar box of cards they cannot legally shuffle into anything.

There is one further wrinkle worth knowing before you go hunting. Lost Fleet and "Stretch Goals" are the same box. A US retailer lists it as "ISS Vanguard: Lost Fleet - Stretch Goals", which confirms the two names refer to one product. If you have been searching for one and not the other, that is why you kept finding nothing.

Let me lay the whole shelf out, because no single retailer page does.

The complete product family, at publisher level, is: the Core Box (retail and pledge versions, plus a Sundrop variant), Close Encounters (miniatures only), Lost Fleet (the stretch-goals box), Deadly Frontier (campaign expansion), Personnel Files, and the Galactic Almanac, plus accessories — a dice tower, upgraded dice, playmats.

Of those, only two ever reached Awaken Realms' US distribution channel at all: the core box at $184.99 (SKU AWIV01, in stock) and Personnel Files at $23.99 (SKU AWIV04, sold out). The SKU gap from AWIV01 to AWIV04 quietly tells you that AWIV02 and AWIV03 exist and were simply never carried there.

Everything else is Polish-language, publisher-direct. On Awaken Realms' own Polish store, in stock at the time of writing: the core box at 729 zł, Personel Files at 99 zł, Deadly Frontier (Zabójcze rubieże) at 419 zł, Lost Fleet (Zaginiona Flota) at 289 zł, the Galactic Almanac at 79 zł, Close Encounters Sundrop at 579 zł, and a dice tower at 99 zł. That is a genuine route if you read Polish or are willing to play a heavily text-driven narrative campaign in a language you do not. For most readers it is not a route at all.

Two useful tells for judging the expansions you find in the wild: Deadly Frontier and Lost Fleet are the only two with their own rulebooks in the publisher's downloads manifest, localised across English, German, Spanish, French, Italian and Polish. That is why they are the two substantive gameplay expansions and the rest are supplements.

And one product that is not an ISS Vanguard product at all: "Rise of the Ancients" is an expansion for Eclipse, a different sci-fi game entirely. It surfaces in searches. It has nothing to do with this game, and the publisher's own manifest returns zero occurrences of it.

Forget difficulty, forget length, forget component quality. There is a single mechanical question that sorts people into loving this game and abandoning it, and you can answer it about yourself before you spend anything.

Do you enjoy an upkeep phase?

ISS Vanguard alternates between away missions — the exciting part, landing on planets, rolling dice, losing crew — and the Ship Book phase, which is roughly half the total playtime. A player who finished the entire campaign described it with unusual precision: "This phase plays much like a long upkeep, in which there are decisions, sure, which are extremely relevant, yes, but I would be hard-pressed to say it is a FUN phase. It is heavily procedural… it is a phase to put the house in order, after the party has ended: the clean up, per se."

That is not a minority complaint, and it is also not a consensus condemnation. This is the genuinely polarising thing about the game. Solo players and one-or-two-player groups frequently name the ship phase their favourite part — it is a quiet, systemic, optimising puzzle and it rewards attention. Four-player groups, where three people watch one person do bookkeeping, tend to find it the reason their campaign quietly stopped.

The player-count data supports this reading. BoardGameGeek's poll lists the game as best at one to two players and recommended at one to four, from 267 votes. Its community complexity weight is 3.668 out of 5 from 328 votes, and its average rating is 8.335 from 7,141 ratings. That is a well-liked, heavy, small-count game.

So: if you are buying this for a regular four-player group, go in knowing what half the evening looks like. If you are buying it to play alone, you may have just found your favourite part.

Two things recur in finished-campaign reports that you will not find in the scored reviews, and both are worth knowing before you commit eighty hours.

The difficulty curve is inverted. The early campaign is genuinely punishing — planets demand high ship stats your ship does not yet have, landings go badly, Danger Die rolls injure people, and a new group can feel it is doing something wrong. One player opened a thread titled simply "This game is way too difficult", writing that "Planets require such high ship stats that the landing almost kill us." Then, once your crew ranks up and your armoury fills, the pressure drains away. The most consistent late-campaign complaint is the opposite of the early one: too much equipment, too little threat. As one player put it, the game gives you "way too much equipment… you could spend 30+ minutes at the beginning of each away mission trying to figure out who is going to take what."

And then there is Kepler. A mid-campaign mission is the most argued-about single element in this game's history. It has, by multiple accounts, ended campaigns and strained groups. One player's summary of the design decision: "If carrying out your grand vision requires angering half the players in the process, maybe it's not that great of a vision? If people are quitting the game over it, and their groups are breaking up, then maybe. Just maybe, it's not a great decision." Another was blunter: "Kepler is garbage."

I am not going to spoil what happens. I am telling you it exists, that it arrives mid-campaign, and that groups who know something contentious is coming handle it far better than groups ambushed by it at hour forty.

The compensating virtue, and it is a real one: you cannot lose this campaign. A failed mission branches the story rather than ending it, and dead crew are replaced from a roster of around ninety characters. Players who bounced off Tainted Grail — the publisher's other narrative campaign, where character death is campaign-ending — routinely finish this one.

A short list, and an unusually confident one, because the community record on these is close to unanimous.

Close Encounters (the miniatures expansion). Skip it. The recurring observation is that the core box miniatures are already too large for the card-sized map locations they stand on. More of them does not fix that. It is also, as of our check, unavailable in its non-Sundrop form anywhere.

The add-on Section Boxes. This attracts the most specific negative recommendation in the whole record — an owner who received them reported they were an uncomfortably tight fit in the slots the standard boxes occupy. Do not pay extra for a storage downgrade.

The playmats. Sold out at the publisher store, and nobody who finished the campaign lists them among the things that mattered.

Which brings us to the insert, the one component nearly everyone criticises. The trays are flimsy and there is essentially no room for sleeved cards — one owner asked for "a simple 3d printed replacement for the core tray A and tray B," noting "there's barely enough room in them without sleeving cards to pull cards out without damaging the dividers." If you intend to sleeve, plan your storage before your first session rather than after. Our inserts and organisers guide covers the sleeve-versus-capacity arithmetic in detail, and ISS Vanguard is close to a worked example of the problem.

The genuinely reassuring note on components: a player who ran the whole campaign without sleeving reported no card tearing at all. Sleeving here is a preference, not a rescue.

The recommended route is the publisher's own US distributor, where the core box is $184.99 under SKU AWIV01 and the vendor is listed as Awaken Realms Distribution. That is as close to buying direct as an English-language buyer gets.

Amazon does carry it, and unlike some crowdfunded games these appear to be real, brand-consistent listings rather than reseller flotsam. We confirmed three product-to-listing bindings from page metadata: the retail core box, Deadly Frontier, and Personnel Files.

What we could not confirm is price, stock, or who is actually selling. Every automated request to those listings returned a CAPTCHA interstitial, so we have no verified figure to quote and we are not going to invent one. That is why you will not find an Amazon price in this guide.

If you buy there, do two things first. Check the "Sold by / Ships from" block — on a game with a thin retail channel, marketplace resellers at markup are common. And check the price against the $184.99 distributor listing, which is the honest benchmark.

For expansions specifically, independent game shops are your best chance. That is where the remaining Deadly Frontier stock is sitting. Just remember what the box requires before you celebrate finding one.