Take a bit of pick-up-and-deliver, a bit of set collection, and a little resource management, and roll it up in a cyberpunk aesthetic with robots and cyborgs straight out of a fantasy biker gang, and you’ve got Vestige. Sandbox games can be frustrating for players who want a little more direction in their gameplay, but for those of us who like a free-wheeling adventure where you forge your own destiny, this kind of thing really hits the spot. Plays fast and packs up small, too!
Repeat after me, class: yellow and blue make Intrigue. Hi! It’s Ryan from Nights Around a Table! Here’s how to play Vestige.
You and your friends play survivors in a science experiment gone wrong, where living creatures are used as energy sources and nobody lives past 35. You’ll travel the dystopian map gaining attributes and spending them to complete pick-up-and-deliver missions, hiring contacts and building chop bots into your network, and exerting your influence over various regions to gain leverage, acquire secret missions, and complete goals that will end the game. When two of these endgame conditions are met, you play one more round to finish. Whoever’s accrued the most leverage wins!
Lexicon
This is one of those games that has its own special word for everything, and knowing how to translate will help you understand everything. So here’s a quick guide to Vestige-ese:
Leverage is victory points, represented by this sparkly white hex. You track points by moving your token along the edge of the map.
The card tableau you build is called your network. It’s made up of non-human chop bots you can construct, and human associates you can hire, who are called “contacts.”
You have a bunch of cubes at your disposal, in three different buckets: potential, influence, and conviction. The game calls them “blocks” instead of cubes. Your “Potential” blocks are generally useless to you – almost all cube placement is done to and from your Influence pool. And your Conviction blocks are fancy: they let you do a bunch of high-powered risk mitigating things like re-rolling a die, and drawing extra cards from the game’s various decks. They’ll also let you build more bots and control different regions. The game’s symbol for these special Conviction blocks looks like this. Any time you encounter this upgrade symbol, you can boost a block into a better pool — so move a Potential block into your Influence pool, or turn Influence into Conviction. Conversely, this downgrade symbol means you have to demote a block, either from here to here, or from here to here.
This separate mat tracks the six different Attributes you can have. The three primary attributes, Might, Ambition, and Cunning, are in the three primary colours you learned about in art class: red, yellow, and blue. If one of your blocks is here, that means you have one cunning. A block here means you have one Ambition. You can get THESE three Attributes — Guile, Ingenuity, and Intrigue — by combining blocks from two neighbouring pools. Yellow and blue make green, so as a free bonus action on your turn, you can move a block from here and a block from here to smash into each other and become a green Intrigue attribute. The leftover block returns to your Influence pool. You can combine Primary attributes to make Secondary attributes as often as you want or can afford to. You’ll be spending these Attributes to accomplish different tasks as you play the game.
You’ll start out with one chop bot in your network, and one covert ops card, which is like a secret goal. You’ve got 8 blocks in the Potential and Influence hoppers, and one special Conviction block You have 1 each of the base Attributes. Your pawn will start somewhere on the map – skip ahead to watch the setup section at the end of the video if you want to know more.
Pick a starting player however you see fit. On your turn, you can take any or all of four different actions: Move, Activate your Network, Visit or Rest, and Pickup or Complete a job. Only the Move action is mandatory every turn — the others are optional. And you can do them in any order.
To take an action, pick one and pull your pants down. Any time a board game has me sliding a token down a channel like this, i call it pulling your pants down, because i’m hilarious. So drop trou, and do the thing. You CAN actually take any of these actions twice by spending a Conviction block – you can either flip the token to remember, or put the Conviction block here temporarily — just remember that it belongs to your Influence pool now, and you can spend it as such.
When you’re finished taking your actions, pull your pants back up. Any blocks you’re using to note that you took a double-action go back to your Influence for certain. Then, cue the player on your left. Any cubes you moved to your network or the Attributes pools or the map stay put at the end of your turn – you don’t reclaim your blocks between turns.
You can play Vestige either cooperatively or competitively. You can play it on teams. You can play it solo. You can play it against non-player nemesis characters. i’m going to teach you how to play the game competitively
Here are the four actions and what they do.
MOVE
Move, the only mandatory action you HAVE to take on every turn, lets you bop your pawn around the map. You travel in the triangle spaces between the region hexes, not ON the hexes. Your speed value governs the number of spaces you get to travel — you begin the game with two movement points, but you can do certain things to boost that cube up the speed track. You have to end up somewhere different than when you started from, so you can’t go bop – bop. You’re allowed to travel THROUGH other players’ pawns, but you can’t stop your movement where they are. You don’t leapfrog other players, treating their spaces like they don’t exist: each space counts as a space you have to move through, whether someone else is there or not.
If you’re really stuck for movement points, you can downgrade a block from either here to here, or here to here, to gain 2 additional movement points. Your speed marker stays where it is — you only IMAGINE these extra movement points for this turn only. You can gain extra movement points like this as much as you want or can afford to: so 2 extra movement points, 4 extra movement points, 6 extra movement points, and so on.
You have to complete all your movements in one go – you can’t move to a space, do something at this region, and then move to another space.c As you pass by any face-down hexes, you flip them over. You don’t have to use up all of your movement points, but you do have to move at least 1 space away from where you started — that rule prevents players from just camping on a space so that no one else can use it. Unused movement points don’t carry over to your next turn: it’s use ‘em or lose ‘em.
VISIT OR REST
When you pull down your Visit or Rest pants, you choose one or the other: you can Visit a map region to do the thing, or Rest. Resting just lets you upgrade one of your blocks, so once again from here to here, or from here to here. VISITING lets you take the action on any one region tile adjacent to your pawn. Each region does something different, but in the base game, there ARE a few duplicate regions. So for example, Visiting the Black Market lets you gain two Cunning. You move two of your Influence blocks out of the pool and onto the blue Cunning hex. Now you have two Cunning. How Cunning.
Visiting the Garage lets you spend three Might blocks to boost your speed. So if you’ve got ‘em, move three Might blocks back to your Influence pool, and bump your speed block to the right. Now you get THREE movement points whenever you take the Move action, and you gain 3 leverage to boot.
Either before or after you Visit a region, you can move a Conviction block to that tile to claim it as your own. Score the number of leverage points you see on the tile. Now, whenever anyone ELSE Visits that region, you score that leverage AGAIN. You don’t score any extra leverage for Visiting a region you yourself control.
If you Visit a region someone else controls and you think “i’ve had enough of this person scoring this tile,” you can take it over yourself, but you need to spend TWO Conviction blocks to do that. One goes on the tile, one goes back into your Influence pool. You knock out the other player’s block, and it goes back to their Influence pool. Score the leverage for taking the place over. You can’t kick someone out of a region and decide not to control it yourself — one of your two Conviction cubes has to end up on the region.
ACTIVATE NETWORK
Pull down THESE pants to activate a character in your network – remember, your network is the tableau of cards you’re building. You can have two types of helpers in the game: chop bots and humans, who are called “contacts.” Activating your network means you get to move an Influence block onto one of your cards. Putting a block on a bot means you get to move another Influence block into one of the primary attributes: either Might, Ambition, or Cunning (red, yellow, or blue). ANY time you use this action to put a block on your bot, you get this perk. And if you don’t have enough influence blocks to spare to take that action, you CAN’T activate your bot.
If you wind up having TWO blocks on any bot, you also unlock the special ability at the bottom of its card for the rest of the game, as long as the bot doesn’t get destroyed, and as long as it still has at least two blocks on it.
If you take the Activate Network action to move an Influence block onto a human CONTACT you’ve hired, you get a perk right away — this one lets you throw two Influence blocks onto the Ambition Attribute. How ambitious. Once again, if you can’t spare the blocks, you can’t activate the card. But let’s say you can, and you do. Now that you’ve got a block on this Contact, you’ve unlocked the Contact’s special ability at the bottom of the card. But the difference between bots and peoples is that peoples is fickle, and you have to keep exerting your Influence over them to convince them to work for you. A block unlocks a Contact’s special ability for this turn only: if you want your Contact’s power to function on a later turn, you need to take the Activate Network action and pay that person another one of your Influence blocks, along with giving up whichever extra blocks the card requires you to.
The contacts you can hire are red Mercenaries, yellow Lawmakers, or blue Smugglers. The Smuggler’s lair region lets you pay 2 cunning to hire a smuggler — just grab the top Smuggler card and add it to your network. Lawmaker Ridge lets you pay two Ambition to grab a Lawmaker from the yellow deck, and the Mercenary Camp is where you can pay 2 Might to hire a Mercenary from the red deck.
By now, you might be guessing that you’re going to start running out of Influence blocks to spend on things. That’s a key part of the puzzle of Vestige: you have to figure out ways to free up blocks from the various areas where you have them committed so you can spend them on other things. But if you strip the blocks off your bots, you lose access to their abilities!
You can build a new chop bot by pulling down your Visiting pants at the Chop Shop region and paying a Conviction block into your Influence pool to grab a bot from this face-up row, or YOLO it and grab the mystery card from the top of the deck. Add the bot to your network tableau. If you took a face-up card, replace it with one from the deck.
Whenever you build a bot or hire a contact, you gain the leverage on the card.
PICKUP OR COMPLETE A JOB
Finally, the most involved part of the game is its this pick up and deliver mechanic.
There are three decks around the board in the secondary colours — orange, green, and purple. These all contain JOBS you can acquire and complete. The orange ones are bounties, which can sweeten your endgame score. The green ones are artifacts, which are powerful multi-use objects, and the purple ones are augmentations that you can use to beef up your human contacts’ abilities, like LASER FEET. That’s not really one of them. But it should be. Each of those decks gets a card flipped out face-up.
All three decks work the same way, but let’s zoom in on Artifacts for a closer look.
This is where you have to go to pick up the job. So your pawn needs to be adjacent to this region when you pull down your Job Pants. That lets you take either this card, or the face-down card next to it. In order to take that job, though, you need someone in your network who knows about such things. If you have a bot or a contact with the matching job symbol, you slide the job under that card. If you don’t have anyone with a matching symbol, or if everyone in your network already has a job, you can’t take this job. Note that contacts can pair with two different types of jobs, whereas bots are more specialized.
If you took the face-up job, replace it from this deck. Doing that changes the region someone needs to be adjacent to to claim that next artifact job.
Ah — here comes the Rules Gremlin to point out something important: pulling down your job pants is a different action than Visiting a region to do the thing on the tile, but it’s easy to confuse the two because they both happen when your pawn is adjacent to a particular map tile. Do this to get one of these if you’re next to the right region, or do this to use the action on any region next to your pawn.
Now that the job is slotted, the card tells you where you need to go to complete it. If you’re adjacent to that tile and you pull your job pants down, either on a successive turn, or on this turn if you use a Conviction block to take a double Job action, you can complete the job. You have to pay this cost — so in this case, 2 intrigue (how intriguing). You also have to roll this die to find out how the job went. If you get a green plus, everything went swimmingly, and you get to upgrade a block from here to here, or from here to here. This symbol means the job was efficient. You have to pay one less Attribute to complete it — so instead of two Intrigue blocks, you only pay one. As usual, paying an attribute means the block comes back to your influence pool. Rolling THIS symbol means things were a little iffy: you have to cough up two influence to your contact or bot just to reassure them that you’ve got everything under control. Putting those blocks on the card doesn’t mean you get extra resources or take the card’s action — it’s strictly a penalty. Rolling a very bad “sever” icon means everything went completely south. Your contact or bot flees your team, never to be seen or heard from again. Shuffle that card back into its deck. You don’t lose the leverage points that you gained from hiring that contact or building that bot.
However the die roll shakes out, take the thing – the augmentation, artifact, or bounty, and add it to your network, even if you rolled a sever symbol. You get a certain amount of leverage for finishing the job.
If you completed a job to get an augmentation, you now need to pair it up with one of your contacts by tucking the card underneath. Now your contact has TWO abilities, and you can use both of them if you pull down your Activate Network pants and put an Influence block on the contact. There’s no limit to the number of Augmentations a contact can have, but you only get to use the power on one of them when you activate a contact. Bots can’t use augmentations. If you want to cut an augmentation off one of your contacts, you downgrade a conviction block while you’re adjacent to the chop shop and rip it off. Fire up the bone saw, Aloysius!
If you gain an augmentation and you have no contact to put it on, it just floats around in your network uselessly until you hire someone later — then you can staple it to that contact’s face as a free action. Trust me: this is part of our standard onboarding process. (Ka-CHUNK! Aiyeee! [Wilhelm scream])
Completed BOUNTIES give you some sort of bonus score multiplier at the end of the game.
Completing an Artifact job gives you the Artifact at the bottom of the card. Put 1 to 3 blocks from your Influence pool on the card to charge it up. Now, once per turn, as a free action, you can return a block from the card back to your Influence pool to use that artifact’s ability. If you use up all the charges on your Artifact card, you can recharge it by visiting the Generator region. There may be other abilities in the game that let you recharge an Artifact.
BONUS ACTIONS
There are a bunch of different free actions you can take on your turn, as much as you want or can afford to. i already mentioned the speed boost, where you gain 2 movement points for every block you downgrade. We also saw the bonus action where you can combine two primary attributes to make a single secondary attribute, kicking the leftover block back to your influence pool. Putting a conviction cube on a region before or after you visit it this turn in order to control it is a bonus action. Spending a cube from an artifact to your influence pool to use its ability is a bonus action. Here are some bonus actions we HAVEN’T seen:
Any time you draw a card from a deck, you draw two additional cards from that deck for each Conviction block you pay — this is called the Surveil bonus action . You can even spend a Conviction, draw 2 extra cards, and LOOK at them, and then decide if you want to spend more Conviction to draw more cards. Regardless of how many extra cards you draw, you still only take one, and shuffle the rest into the stack. Notice that reshuffling a job stack changes the front card on the deck, which changes the location where the job can be picked up, which can screw up your opponents. Depending on which version of the game you own, you may have extra card decks positioned around the map — you’re allowed to spend Conviction blocks to Surveil the pink Covert Ops decks, but you can’t Surveil these other decks.
If you get a bad roll on the outcome die, you can pay a Conviction block to re-roll the die. Still don’t like the result? Pay another conviction Pay as many conviction blocks as you want or can afford to! You can choose any one of the results you achieved across all of your re-roll shenanigans.
Sometimes you’re broker than broke, and you have no influence blocks to spend on anything, and you can’t find any way to upgrade your potential to turn it into spendable Influence. The most depressing and shameful bonus action you can take is to reclaim your blocks from anywhere around the game – from your attribute pools, from the different regions you’re controlling, and from the cards in your network. But if you recover blocks from a card in your network, it’s potentially devastating: you have to take ALL of those blocks back, and then not only do you lose the card, but you lose any cards ATTACHED to the card, shuffling them back into their respective decks… AND you lose the leverage points listed on those cards. So uh.. try not to do that.
If you DO have to recover blocks, you can take them from anywhere you’ve got blocks, except of course from your potential pool… generally the only way to get blocks out of there is to upgrade them.
REGIONS
Let’s take a quick spin through all of the region tiles, just to get a sense of what they all do.
We already saw these three regions, which let you hire a red, yellow, or blue contact into your network. These three tiles let you gain two red, yellow, or blue attributes. The garage lets you pay three red Might to crank up your speed. The Generator lets you put more cubes on your expended artifacts, and the chop shop is where you go to build bots or slice off an augmentation.
An Oasis lets you pay a yellow Ambition to take back two blocks from any cards in your network and return them to your influence pool. Any time you see a colon, it means you can repeat the action: so for every yellow ambition you pay, you can reclaim two more network blocks.
If you see an ARROW, like this one on the Obelisk region, that’s a one-shot deal. Reclaim two attributes of any colour – same colour, different colour, doesn’t matter – into your Influence pool, and then move two Influence into any two attributes of any other colour. Yes, even the secondary attributes are in play. So you can change a red Might into a green Intrigue, and an orange guile into a yellow Ambition, for example. But the arrow means you only get to do that exchange once per visit.
The Observatory lets you pay a blue cunning to upgrade one of your blocks. And since it’s a colon, you can repeat that exchange as much as you want or can afford to on a single visit action.
If you Visit the Underground, you can pay a Conviction to hire a yellow lawmaker, blue smuggler, or red mercenary, instead of having to travel to their respective hiring regions.
Similarly, visiting the Black Dove is how you claim a job without having to travel to the region on the deck. You just downgrade a Conviction block and grab the face-up or face-down job card you want. Yes, you can Surveil to look through more cards, and this colon means the action is repeatable. So if you’re rich enough, you can Visit the Black Dove to occupy everyone in your network.
When you Visit the Jump Point and place a Conviction block on it to control it, you pick any other tile on the board and swap it with the Jump Point.
The Trench doesn’t do anything when you visit it, but it gets you more leverage points than usual when you control it.
COVERT OPS
So what are you supposed to be DOING in this game? What’s the point? Well, you want to move up on that leverage track. You do that essentially by finding broken card combos that let you build little engines or run ridiculous exploits so that your opponents start yelling that you’re not playing the game properly. But of course, you are. Vestige is very sandboxy, and you’re left without a lot of direction. But look: you start with a chop bot, and that chop bot can do a certain type of job, so maybe a good opening salvo is to find that region on the map and give the bot something to do?
You’ll also start with one Covert Ops card, which is a private mission no one else gets to see. Sometimes, it gives you a benefit mid-game. If you satisfy its condition, you can flip it over as a bonus action and claim a prize. Other times, these cards give you endgame points if you do what they want. Any time your leverage marker lands on or passes one of these pink icons, you grab the top Covert Ops card from that stack – or spend Conviction to Surveil it, if you want more of a choice. If you’re the first player to reach one of those pink markers, or one of the two tan markers, you also flip over the associated endgame condition card. The game also starts with one of these already in play. If any two endgame condition cards get fulfilled, you finish out the round, and then play one more full round to end the game. It’s quite possible that you’ll flip over one of these endgame cards and the condition will ALREADY BE FULFILLED, so watch out for that possibility. Generally what you want to do is rack up more points than your opponents, and then try to force the end of the game fast while you’re still on top!
ENDGAME
Once two endgame conditions are fulfilled and you play that final round, you tally up the scores. Look for endgame points on your satisfied covert ops cards, and any orange bounties you collected. Then you get to re-score any of the regions you control. Next, you get mastery points based on how many cards of each colour you’ve got in your network. The player with the most purple augmentation cards takes this chit. Whoever has the most red mercenaries takes this one. The player who has the most bots grabs this one, and so on. If there are any ties, no one gets the chit. If you’re going to fight over it, children, then no one can have it. Incomplete jobs that are still tucked behind characters don’t count when you’re claiming these chits. Each chit you get has a number of points on it — claim those now.
i’m going to quote this next bit from the rulebook, so you send your angry letters to the publisher, not to me: Ahem. The player with the most leverage wins. In the case of a tie, everyone loses. Winning means winning. Anything else is losing.
SETUP
To set up the game, plop out the two main mats. Grab a player board and all the pieces in your colour, as well as a random setup card. All the setup cards are identical, except yours will tell you to put your pawn on a certain spot on the map. You put 8 blocks into Potential, 8 more into Influence, and 1 into Conviction. How convicting. One block starts your speed off at 2.The remaining three blocks go into the primary attributes buckets — red, yellow, and blue. Plunk a pair of pants into each action channel. Now you can get rid of the setup card.
Deal two chop bots out to each player. Everyone chooses one to add to their network, and returns the other to the deck, which gets shuffled in. . Flip out three bots to form the display. You don’t earn the leverage points for this free starting chop bot.
Deal everyone a Covert Ops card, and then put a little deck of them at each of the pink spots around the main mat according to your player count – one card per player in each deck. Deal an endgame card out to those same spots, and two more to these ones. Flip out one endgame card — that becomes the first active condition towards ending the game.
Shuffle and place the red, yellow, and blue contact card decks here, and the orange, green, and purple job decks here. Flip a card out from each of the job decks. Put out all the mastery tiles. Stack everyone’s scoring marker on this “zero leverage spot.” Decide amongst yourselves who goes first.
You’ll need to use the 12 region tiles that have a lock on them, and any other 7 tiles. If you just have the base game with no expansion regions, you’ll have no decisions to make here — just deal the regions face-down to the mat, and then flip over any tiles that are adjacent to the player pawns.
And now, you’re ready to play Vestige!
Addenda
- at 7:28, i say that you can place a block to control a region either before or after you Visit it, as a bonus action. In fact, you can control any region adjacent to your pawn as a bonus action on your turn, whether you’ve Visited that region or not. Thanks to eagle-eyed YouTube viewer @bryanhansen1825 for noticing the error!
- at 14:10, i claim that the Strain and Sever outcomes on the die affect both Contacts and Chop Bots alike. The rulebook clearly says these only affect Contacts (people), but i have it on good authority from the publisher that the rulebook is in error, and these symbols are meant to impact people and robots alike.
Buy your own copy of Vestige
Vestige is a reimplementation/reimagining of an earlier Orange Nebula game called Vindication. It was crowdfunded on GameFound, but the pledge manager is currently closed. Contact the publisher to order your own copy!
