Vast: The Crystal Caverns

All right, whoever came up with this concept must have been drinking the same mushroom soup Robert Smith was brewing when the brass parts of The Top were being written. A knight enters a cave to kill a sleeping dragon, the goblins squatting in that cave want to eat the knight, the dragon is trying to wake up and, plot twist, the cave itself is alive and wants to bury them all. It is every bit as strange as it sounds—and thankfully every bit as cheerful as that description promises.

Everyone has their own role and their own objective: the knight moves through the cave hunting the dragon, the goblins pressure him, the dragon tries to awaken, while the cave acts as another player threatening to swallow everyone whole. This asymmetry does not merely feel like a different board or a few special powers; the sides genuinely have different relationships with the same chaos.

The good part is that, from what I saw, the mechanisms fit together very smoothly and their balance is delicate. The game is not especially difficult to play in terms of its basic rules, but it is difficult to understand how to apply the right pressure to your opponents. In our introductory game, the goblins squeezed the knight so hard that he barely bothered the dragon at all—and the dragon is probably the easiest side to win with while everyone is still learning the game.

I will not draw a final conclusion from a single play, because Vast: The Crystal Caverns seems to require familiarity not with “how it plays,” but with how all these different games coexist at the same table. Still, the first encounter was thoroughly enjoyable, its replayability looks substantial, and its variants offer even more reason to come back. I will return—perhaps then I will also learn what on earth the thief does.