Vast: The Crystal Caverns

Everybody at the table is playing a different game, that’s the pitch, and it’s not marketing exaggeration. The Knight plays like a dungeon crawler, the Cave itself is a semi-automated board that grows and collapses on its own logic, the Goblins swarm, the Thief sneaks, the Dragon just wants to sleep and wake up strong. Five rulebooks, five completely separate win conditions, one shared physical space.

I respect the ambition more than I enjoy every session of it. When it clicks, and it does click, there’s nothing else on my shelf that feels like it, the tension of five different objectives colliding on one board is genuinely something else in the hobby. The Cave role especially is a strange, almost solitaire-feeling experience where you’re managing an evolving structure that everyone else has to react to, and the first time I played it I had no idea what I was doing and still had fun. That’s rare.

But the honest problems are real ones. Balance is wildly uneven role to role, the Thief is by a fair margin the easiest to pick up and win with, and that asymmetry doesn’t feel intentional so much as under-tuned, especially in a design this ambitious. Teaching it is brutal, you’re not explaining one rulebook, you’re explaining up to five simultaneously depending on player count, and a table of first-timers will burn most of an evening just getting oriented before the actual game starts. I’ve had a four-player game where one person misread their own rules and nobody else could catch it because nobody else had read that rulebook, which is a structural problem this design invites almost by definition. The tiles and components could use another pass of polish too, everything else reads clean at the table but the tile art specifically feels like an afterthought next to how considered the rest of it is.

Worth trying once for the sheer novelty, worth owning if your group is willing to actually learn all five roles instead of defaulting to the two or three easiest every time. Mine mostly isn’t, so it stays on the shelf more than it should.