ISS Vanguard
Keegan: Hey man, UPS just delivered a copy of the base game of ISS Vanguard.
Pete: That’s awesome! And what great timing. I just finished watching Passengers.
Keegan: Isn’t that that 2016 film starring Chris Pratt and what’s-her-face from the book and film franchise where they murder all those kids?
Pete: Jennifer Lawrence and The Hunger Games. Yeah, exactly. But Passengers is basically a meet-cute in space. They are on this awesome spaceship called the Avalon traveling to a new planet so humans can continue to build a civilization there.
Keegan: Awesome. Interstellar colonialism. Because screwing up one planet wasn’t enough.
Pete: Well sure, but it’s a love story.
Keegan: So two people fall in love in a spaceship because everyone else is in cryo-sleep? That just seems like lazy writing.
Pete: And that seems like guilty knowledge. Like you’ve also seen Passengers.
Keegan: Whatever. So, ISS Vanguard–
Pete: Passengers is actually really great. The ship in the movie, the Avalon, is shaped like a weathervane, just like the ISS Vanguard.
Keegan: Yeah, all that tells me is that you have no idea what a weathervane is.
Pete: I just mean that both the ISS Vanguard and the Avalon are not like the sleek, cigar spaceships of 1960s pulp science fiction that gave rise to the atompunk aesthetic.
Keegan: You might benefit from a remedial geometry course. Moving on. ISS Vanguard boasts a rich narrative story for one to four players focusing on exploration, cooperation, and overcoming adversity…
Pete: The Avalon in Passengers has an augmented reality basketball court.
Keegan: …over 1,100 cards.
Pete: The Avalon in Passengers hosts a variety of fine dining options, depending on the price of the ticket you paid.
Keegan: Excellent, the perpetuation of class warfare. Anyway ISS Vanguard also has—
Pete: The Avalon has a swimming pool.
Keegan: But what if the artificial gravity goes down? That seems excessively dangerous.
Pete: Dude. We both know that you’ve seen the movie. So we both know that that happens.
Keegan: Um, okay, then. As I was saying, ISS Vanguard has an intricate set of narrative choices—
Pete: The super computer that takes care of everything on the Avalon starts to melt down and start plasma fires when it takes a piece of asteroid shrapnel.
Keegan: See, that’s just brain poison. That’s not how any of that works.
Pete: Perhaps. But the Passengers movie does remind me of a dream I had when I was thirteen.
Keegan: The less we hear about that the better, I guarantee you.
Pete: It’s not like that dude. Calm down. It was a dream where I realized that I could no longer be a spaceship when I grew up.
Keegan: Um, do you mean an “astronaut” or a “cosmonaut?”
Pete: No. I mean a spaceship.
Keegan: And it wasn’t until you were thirteen that you realized you couldn’t be a spaceship? That seems like some sort of atypical developmental delay.
Pete: Dude, we’re almost forty-year-old man children that watch meet-cute space opera romcoms and play with cardboard and plastic toys.
Keegan: Fair point.
Pete: Also: The Avalon has an android bartender named Arthur.
Keegan: So what you’re saying is that after we unbox ISS Vanguard (2022), designed by Andrzej Betkiewicz, Krzysztof Piskorski, Paweł Samborski, & Marcin Świerkot and published by Awaken Realms, we should take our copy to the Avalon and play it in the bar with Arthur.
Pete: Exactly. Augmented reality basketball is for noobs.
