Adventure or an adventure board game! The word comes to your mind unbidden as you look at the table and the game sprawled across it, immaculate components blooming ideas of magic, exploration, luck, and a story written by dice and your decisions.
Publisher Orange Nebula lives in this hallowed air, with two showstopper titles meant to bring you and your friends on a unique tabletop journey. Both are great, both are different, and both deserve your attention.
The question, then, is whether you’ll keep your feet on magical ground, or venture forth into the stars.
A Single-Session Fantasy Board Game . . . with style.
The zero-to-hero game is the antidote to campaign fatigue, and Vindication (Marc Neidlinger) gives you and your friends the chance to carve out your legend within a few hours time in euro style. The game begins with that classic narrative trope: washed up on a mysterious island, you set out to find just where you’ve landed, and who you really are.
Vindication plays out this adventure on a hexagonal board, with tiles flipped as you and your friends explore. You’ll spend several actions every turn to
venture deeper or leverage what you’ve discovered, doing things like training at a fort to gain strength or braving a dangerous hunt to gain treasure. Boosting these attributes and laying claim to swaths of the map gets you closer to your personal victory condition, a race to meet destiny against the other players.
Helping you is a large batch of cards, rewards given for your courage or your tactical snaring of key resources on the map. These might be allies, items, or abilities that’ll help you change up your strategy, as Vindication is anything but stale. With every player in relentless pursuit of their goals, knowing that your buddy across the way just gained a pivotal upgrade to ease their path might force a radical change in plans (or even a makeshift alliance with another player).
There’s more spice here than you might expect, as you can blend multiple attributes to accomplish difficult tasks, eliminating the consternating euro staple of pointless advances. In other words, everything you do has a point, is relevant, and while you’ll want to do things efficiently, you’re not going to find yourself dithering.
At the same time, Vindication’s core area control mechanic guarantees interaction, smashing players together on your island. Turtling or avoiding each other generally won’t work, though this isn’t a take-that festival of negative play. Rather, cunning use of items, actions, and attributes can snare you a surprise payoff, or present an opportunity to reclaim a tile your opponent thought safe.
Vindication loads up an accessible base game with modules, like Anachrony and other heavier euros. After players get their first taste, you can throw in fresh items, map tiles, and all sorts of other shenanigans. It’s a flexible way to keep Vindication in the rotation without throwing a huge rules load at everyone from the first game.
So who’s this adventure board game for?
If you’re a group that prefers their adventures delivered with more balanced randomness—dice won’t get chucked all over the room here—or folks who love their euros but want one invested in its theme, then Vindication is worth a look. It’ll shine on your table, with an incredible production, and won’t require a marathon teach to get playing.
When looking at what to get, though, be aware that Vindication comes with a couple editions. There was a reprint in 2023, and Kickstarter bundles from both printings abound. This is a premium game stuffed with quality components, so you won’t be disappointed getting a full bundle. That said, look closely at the listed components in each package so you know exactly what you’re getting. For folks who want the most complete collection of goodies, the Archive of the Ancients is the best place to start.
What’s more, Orange Nebula is running Vindication’s concept back with a sci-fi blend this year, with the forthcoming Vestige. So if Vindication’s ideas intrigue, but fantasy isn’t your forte, then keep Vestige on your long-term list.
A Sci-Fi Survival Game . . . with laughs?
Space is far from the final frontier when it comes to board games, but Unsettled (Tom Mattson, Marc Neidlinger) chooses to take you on an original journey regardless. You and your friends are explorers, tasked with journeying to and discovering the secrets of wild, hostile, and varied worlds. And, uh, your ship has a habit of frequent failures, with repairs dependent on what you’re able to find out in nature. You’ll either succeed or die trying.
Just read the description of one world expansion: Hunt for clues that could lead you home – while being hunted inside the drifting, planet-sized head of a monstrous ancient being.
Who doesn’t want to dig into that adventure, or any other adventure board game?
But it’s not all ominous threats. Unsettled is suffused with humor. Asides, puns, and a sort of wry bemusement make their way into the stories you’ll tell. You
might find a new plant, only to learn it’s also a psychedelic, turning your astronaut into a dazed goofball. Similar situations abound, taking the edge off of what might otherwise be a harrowing survival experience, which in turn lets you experiment without fear.
Those experiments will come turn by turn, with actions deployed by your explorers through a clever trio of focus dice. Each dice has a particular bent, and using the dice for its affiliated actions grants a bonus. At the same time, every use decreases the die’s value, eventually forcing a rest to restore your explorer’s capacity for chaos. This creates a mini-puzzle inside your broader one: yes, you need that oxygen filter repaired, but Jerry’s already spent so much time wandering around that he doesn’t have energy left to make the fix. Instead, he might use a different die to get a drone to do the work, or a third to call a friend and give them the intel needed to do repairs.
This mix-and-match of stats and actions mirrors Vindication’s pairing, but where that title is a competitive race, Unsettled’s cooperative dynamic brings about a wholly different feel. The shift here isn’t just in tone or setting, but the nature of the gameplay. Guns, bombs, and laser swords are absent. Solutions come by clever play, unique events, and resource management, not by chucking dice and obliterating alien scum in this adventure board game.
Victory, should you achieve it, will be the result of effective play. Unsettled deploys randomness in effective doses, such as in changing board layouts and the survival tasks you’ll have to tackle. Even if you’ve played a mission before, you’ll have to adapt just enough on a second try to keep things fresh, though familiar beats remain. That’s to Unsettled’s benefit, as the game sculpts a fantastic arc from landing to takeoff, one that would be difficult to pull off by pure chance alone. Think of Unsettled like an escape room, where options abound, but things aren’t so wide open as to make winning little more than luck.
Getting into Unsettled, like Vindication, requires weeding through a few options to find the best adventure for your board gaming buck. Every planet in Unsettled comes with four different missions, each of those playable several times over with the random tweaks I noted up above. With that in mind, the core set comes with two worlds, which is more than enough to decide whether Unsettled’s style suits your group (or yourself – this is a game great for solo 
puzzlers). Expansions are modular, containing either new scenarios and planets, or additions that alter every game, like a fascination sideboard for your characters to track their own particular insights. As Unsettled isn’t a campaign—every mission starts fresh—you’re free to pick those parts of this big sci-fi world that match your interests.
All that said, there’s no denying Unsettled is a premium experience. Components are top notch, and while it might seem I say that about every game covered in these articles (perhaps a reflection on the rising quality in tabletop gaming as a whole), Orange Nebula delivers a game that is beautiful on the table, has dual-layer boards or game trays for just about everything, and has some frankly immaculate box art fitting Unsettled’s theme. What you’re getting here is a refined experience, a cooperative survival story that’s unlike anything else.
There’s even a Spotify playlist, should you wish to bless your ears as well as your eyes with Unsettled’s sumptuous settings, for your adventure board game.
Embark on an Epic Board Game Adventure
All told, Unsettled and Vindication offer premium adventure board games on a fantasy island or alien worlds. Cooperative or competitive, both force engagement with other players—though Unsettled, especially, lends itself to solo play—in a friendly form. Even Vindication’s method of area control means you’re not eliminating each other, nor are the setbacks so severe a player will find themselves obliterated in the early going (we all see you, Splotter).
Orange Nebula has created a couple of beautiful, engaging experiences perfect for players looking to level up from the Catans and Concordias, and even if neither of these two catches your interest, the quality here marks them as a publisher worth tracking for adventure board games.
