Vast: The Crystal Caverns

The premise of Vast: The Crystal Caverns feels like a fairy tale that escaped from a laboratory: a Knight enters a cave for its sleeping Dragon; Goblins would quite like the Knight for dinner; the Dragon wants to wake; and the Cave, alive and deeply inhospitable, intends to bury everybody. It is not merely an odd theme. It is one of those rare cases where asymmetry has a proper reason to exist.

Each side approaches victory through its own action system: the Knight explores and hunts the Dragon, the Goblins put pressure on the Knight, the Dragon works towards waking, and the Cave extends its influence until the adventure closes in on everyone else. These are not four versions of the same player. They are four interdependent roles sharing a map and pulling it towards incompatible priorities.

The interesting decision is working out whom to slow down without accidentally giving a third player the win. In my first exploratory game, the Goblins made life sufficiently miserable for the Knight that he could not trouble the Dragon at all; the Dragon consequently had the cleanest route to victory. The rules themselves are not especially difficult, but the economy of pressure between the roles takes plays to reveal itself — Concordia's hand, wearing different overalls.

That early imbalance is not a flaw so much as part of the learning curve: once a group understands when to assist, obstruct, and let an opponent overextend, Vast finds its balance more clearly. With its variants and the substantial replayability created by its asymmetry, it is an unusual design worth studying rather than judging after one game.