Vanguard Exiles

Edit: May 18, 2026: The devs are amazing and have sacrificed so much for this game. Recent updates have made a lot of really massive improvements to the game. New zones are fantastic, actions are diverse and fun, many mechanics have improved. The devs are extremely involved with their players and take feedback seriously, often discussing things in Discord. Many improvements to the game have come as a result. I love this game and consider myself one of its biggest stans, so understand that my following criticisms come from a place of passion. The game is absolutely beautiful, clever, strategically interesting, and tons of fun. It has tons of potential and the core concept is really something special. I still 100% recommend picking it up and trying it. I sincerely hope that I can come back to this review in a few months and update it after the game's direction improves closer to its version 1 release. That being said... The current state of the game is worrisome. I'm a competitive player, so my review comes from there. Currently, I don't have confidence that this game will offer much to players who want to hone their skills vs. other players in any serious competitive manner. I hope to be proven wrong. Much of my gripes are balance-related but extend to fundamental design issues. The devs, in some ways, seem... resistant to balance tuning. The game features "basic" units, which are the foundation of a squad in a lot of ways. They are the units you start each game with, and the only unit that appears every buy round and costs 0 gold. These basic units are grossly imbalanced. It has been an issue since I started playing and the current iteration is worse than ever. Devs have been very resistant to tuning these despite feedback, even going so far as to drastically change other parts of the game to marginalize the role of these early units. In my opinion, this marked a major turning point towards some really bad design decisions. The economy has been tweaked to accelerate income in the later game, allowing purchase of powerful units. Costed units globally saw their stats increased(which I like). I fear that the goal here was to make basic units less important by making high costed units more important. The result to me is a game that is unbalanced in even more areas than it was before. Card stats are extremely coarse and this has been a recurring barrier to balance because changes that change a stat by only 1 integer can change a card from unplayable to overpowered. Certain combat mechanics have been problematic and make me question decision making. There is a stat called ranged evade that makes ranged attacks miss at up to 50% rate. One faction's basic unit, the Skeleton, has this. Another faction's basic unit is the Ranger, which is a ranged attacker(lol). This basically means if you bring Rangers to a Skeleton fight, you lose before the match begins. There are more examples like this of mechanics that seem like they weren't well thought-out in terms of how they play and impact the game. I know not everyone is a sweaty try-hard like me but this game really does have the potential to offer a very engaging competitive, strategic experience. I've have had the pleasure of meeting, chatting with, and playing against some great players who share a similar competitive passion for the game. If The Tea Division wants to capture and retain this demographic, they will need to greatly improve how the game is balanced. In an ideal world with infinite time and resources, I'd love to see a more serious approach to balance tuning and design. Maybe TTD could hire someone to take on this role. Part of it is data collection(and the ability to analyze it properly). Part of it needs to be heuristics and understanding how the game is played at different skill levels and by different types of players. At one point in early access we had a series of experimental patches on a separate test build of the game with great results. I think the ability to quickly iterate and test balance changes should be a permanent fixture of the development pipeline in *some* capacity. Edit: October 1, 2025 - See my [url=https://steamcommunity.com/app/2745490/eventcomments/599665005654424037/#c599665005654617671]writeup on the current state of the game with the v0.3.3.3348 major update.[/url] Original review: Clever, elegant, and fun game. You draft your army from a deck, after every round like most auto battlers. The deck mechanic is really cool. You get 4 deck slots. Decks are completely randomly generated with no user customization, which might seem like a letdown at first but here's the cool part: every day you can choose one of your decks to completely reroll, so you end up maintaining a "stable" of 3 or 4 of your favorite decks. Because deck composition is more or less out of your control other than which ones you choose to keep, each deck feels really distinct. You end up learning how to play each one. Unlike other strategy games where you might carefully craft your deck, and everyone is running around with manicured meta decks, this game focuses more on the exploration of the cards you are dealt(just like real life! har har). The "meta" in this game, if there even is one, is thus filled with interesting and diverse experiences. I feel like whoever designed this game should make a card game because they would probably be good at it. This is an early access game. So far, that has been a positive aspect of the game for me. The discord channel is filled with discussions about the game, its development, people making suggestions, and sharing excitement about 1v1 matches. The community seems pretty friendly and mature except for this one guy(you know who you are). If you like auto battlers, this one is worth trying out in my opinion. Jump in Discord and hang out. Read my [url=https://www.notion.so/Guide-by-nodnarb21-1e3b6ce09b7080acbf6ec32afc6e5e74?source=copy_link]Vanguard Exiles Guide[/url]

This game is awesome, but it's going to need another year to fully cook (Dec 2026). Hopefully it will be fully playable within 6 months (May 2026) and then the rest will be squashing bugs, perfecting, balancing, QOL and figuring out the first season rewards, online (PvP) play, and game modes. Understand that this is an auto-battler and ALL auto-battlers are RNG heavy. This game is extremely deep strategically despite the RNG factor. If RNG is something that turns you off, you probably shouldn't be looking at auto-battlers.

the game is OK-ish as it is now. The base mechanics are fun. But oh my ... there is so much rng here. Be prepared to quit a run after 5 minutes in a dozen times before you'll see playable game. You are put up against a much stronger opponent that can only be beat by winning a coin toss 5 times in a row. They'll need to address this for sure before release. Some additional feedback: There is cool down timer of a couple of hours when you want to change an army. This makes no sense in the single player mode and should be reconsidered, imho. Animations that introduce new parts to the battlefield take a bit too long. The first time it's cool to see what comes up, but after a couple of times you can just as well skip them. The clarity/readability of the game state (numbers, unit models) is not great either. Some examples: Important information gets lost during unit deployment, the units cover the stats of a tile You can't find back a particular unit in a stack Environmental effects are busy and cover stats, making it hard too read Clearly an early access game, good for a couple of hours of fun, will be back for the full release.

the late game in the is some of the best mind games iv played, i feel like the rooms that give extra gold are almost to good, and Nail on Nail battles need to have an tie brake system or something. but i feel real good about this game! thanks Prof for telling me about it :D

Too much RNG to be fun. More gambling with wasted purpose than any real fun.

Strategically fascinating.

Fantastic premise and a TRUE early access experience. The devs are active in the discord, open about their process, and have made numerous changes already to the game, many based on our experiences as players. The overarching design is from Richard Garfield of RoboRally fame. The developer team trusts his vision and experience, and focuses on making this game something we can all play and enjoy for some time. Personally I love the broad range of units, their distinctly unique styles and names, and most of all, it scratches that competitive strategy itch, with no need to master APM or other twitch mechanics. I spent hours in the demo, but the early access has more than double the units and zones in it. And more are on the way. Now if they would just nerf the pesky Mole units, I would be content...

Lorsque Richard Garfield nous pond un nouveau jeu, mes antennes se mettent en branle. Le mec nous a tout de même créé un des meilleurs jeu au monde, "Magic the Gathering", toute ma jeunesse à faire des parties endiablées chez "chef", en face de "l'œuf cube", Jussieu Paris 5, là où tous les aficionados se donnaient rendez-vous dans les années 90's avec des gros classeurs à la main remplis de cartes. Ce jeu a une alchimie quasi parfaite, le gars a eu une idée de génie. Et donc lorsque le Garfield récidive on ressent un vif intérêt mélé de respect, le mec s'y connait. Alors qu'avons nous là? Tout d'abord certes le jeu est en early Access, il n'est donc pas encore totalement peaufiné, mais voilà, j'en ai parfois un peu marre de l'Early Access qui devient de plus en plus la norme, parce que c'est souvent un peu torchon. Ici pas de règles du jeu ni de tuto, vous aurez une case "Comment jouer" sur la page d'accueil (à 17h00), mais dès que tu cliques dessus tu tombes sur une vidéo en Anglais non sous-titrée et encore moins traduite (vostfr). De plus cette vidéo est vraiment lacunaire, à force de jouer j'ai un peu compris le principe du jeu mais comme dirait l'autre, le diable est dans les détails, et c'est précisément ce qui manque de connaître les détails. Par exemple je prends une zone avec plusieurs unités à moi dedans, cette zone en a 2 autres collées à elle, une disons à droite et une autre à gauche, pourquoi une de mes unités file à gauche et les deux autres à droite? Quelle est la règle? Idem je place mes troupes puis l'adversaire place les siennes après, mais voit il comment j'ai placé mes unités? Si j'ai une unité à distance qui a deux zone avec des ennemis à 1 case de là où je suis, quelle zone va cibler en priorité mon archer? Toutes ces questions n'ont pas trouvé de réponses, du coup mes parties ont moins de saveur. Comme il y a une démo je ne vais pas me lancer dans une présentation du jeu, le jeu pourrait vraiment être intéressant une fois fini, à suivre de près, je repasserai vous en parler.

If you love auto-battlers and deep strategy, this game is for you! There are still a lot of things missing from the game right now since it’s still in an early stage, but the gameplay is simply amazing!!! As someone who has tried every auto-battler on the market, this is definitely my favorite one at the moment! I watched YouTube videos of the game, and they really didn’t do it justice. Those videos were from older versions, before they added the tutorial and the reroll option. The reroll option is limited, though, which actually makes deciding when to use it an important strategic choice! For fans of the genre, I highly recommend it! I really hope they manage to market this game properly, because it could be the next big thing.

Sophisticated is a great word to describe this game. As a big fan of autobattlers, I was stoked to see such a cool spin on the genre. But where as with many of these games I sort of just put my stuff down and part I am put against someone who doesn’t have a busted build, this one is a lot more focused on mind games and building around the strengths of you and your opponent. The PvP is live, so each combat phase could lead you to discover a new path to victory, and with an every changing map, those brief moments of defeat can turn into absolutely overwhelming victory in just a few turns. New units getting added frequently, new modes as well, so there’s always a reason to come back. While I don’t have as much time in this game as some of the die hards, I can confidently recommend this to fans of strategy and skill.