Ah, the boss fight. Perhaps gaming’s greatest contribution to the artistic canon. No other narrative form has climaxes that can match the sheer moment-to-moment intensity and immersive properties of a properly designed boss fight. Of course I’m mainly talking about video games, but many a tabletop experience has tried their hand at them as well. Sadly, most of them stink; boost a standard enemy type’s stats and a throw in a shallow gimmick or two to avoid accusations of a creative laziness. And the ones that do get ambitious tend to do so by subverting all sorts of established game concepts, adding unwelcome amounts of additional admin and rules to remember. To be fair, it’s hard to fit a proper boss fight into the cadence of your average dungeon crawl, which tend to have combat systems largely predicated around mob management, area control, and equipment load outs. Squeezing satisfying showdowns into the final few minutes of an exhausting tabletop session is a difficult design challenge. Many games have tried and failed (Legends Of Andor) and many other games don’t even bother to try (Mage Knight Board Game). Then there’s Aeon’s End, in which the boss fight is the system — and it’s awesome. Aeon’s End is one of the only recent tabletop experiences that understands that board games aren’t video games but still wants you to enjoy epic boss fights. Kingdom Death: Monster did emerge from the shadows first, but it covers way too much ground to be accurately described as a boss fight simulator.…
Ambitious doesn’t even begin to describe Vast: The Crystal Caverns, a five-player, highly asymmetric take on the well-worn “Knight vs. Dragon vs. Goblins vs. Thief vs. Sentient Cave” theme. The workmanship here is plain as day, as evidenced by an impressive slew of mechanics and ideas that connect through an enticing narrative core that keeps the action centralized and on track. It’s no wonder that upon release the game garnered acclaim for its unorthodox approach to the traditional dungeon crawl and for aggressively pushing the boundaries of asymmetric game design. It is quite unfortunate then that, despite its ambition and creativity, the experience of Vast: The Crystal Caverns amounts to little more than dealing with an unwieldy mess of overly specific rules and player interactions. Even more, Vast‘s problems run so far and deep that it calls into question whether asymmetry on this scale is even desirable in a tabletop game. Leder Games seems to think it is, as they have since doubled down on the concept with the highly praised 2018 title Root. But alas, that is another game for another review, and currently we must get back to the disappointment at hand that is Vast. Let’s start with something (relatively) positive for once: the art. Vast is colorfully illustrated in a charming comic-fantasy style that personally calls to memory the Spaceman Spiff strips from Calvin & Hobbes. Judging by the art alone, you might think the game is a simplified miniature tactics game such as Arcadia Quest. It isn’t. Not at all. So there’s a…